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The Future of CRPG (computer role-playing game)

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 30 / 31
Date: October 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

What can I possibly say about this revolutionary computer RPG that hasn't been said?
To me this is arguably the best computer game in the history of video game, period.

'Oblivion' is a non-linear, free-form, 1st-person RPG, colored with beautiful next generation graphic that enhances the immersive gameplay set in the gigantic gameworld, where you can do anything anywhere anytime you feel like it.

There are over 20 cities and settlements, 300 quests, 300 dungeons, caves, ruins, tunnels, and whatnots available in the game (combining 'Knights of the Nine', official DLCs, and 'Shivering Isles').
Then there is TES Construction Set. Using this amazing toolset used by Bethesda to create TES IV Oblivion, there are literally over 2000 mods made by gamers like you and I, available for free and still coming out on a daily basis.

I spent close to 200 hours with over 50 mods installed and I only covered less than 70 quests. I was too busy crawling underground, fighting monsters, retrieving loots, selling them for better equipments and houses, decorating.
To hell with saving the world. I only finished half of the main quest, and I have no intention to finish it in the foreseeable future.

The production value is simply stratospheric. From character design, character model, environment, grass, tree, flower, water, animal, item, monster, building, right down to single pebble and stone, Bethesda paid so much attention to details that it is breathtakingly marvelous.

Music by Jeremy Soule and sound effects are another praise-worthy achievements.

No other RPG in the history of video game gives the gamer so much freedom in gameplay as it is so evident from the very beginning in character creation.
If you spend enough time, you can virtually create any actual person's face both living or dead in uncanny resemblance.

Whether you like it or not, I think 'Oblivion' has set the standard by which all future CRPG, and even other genres to some extent, will be measured for a long time.

To Bethesda's credit, 'Oblivion' successfully streamlined the CRPG mechanics from its beloved franchise into more accessible mainstream game that became a runaway success; or dumbing down for console kiddies as many describe, depends on how you look at it. I know many of people were turned off by the changes made from older TES series, and 'Oblivion vs Morrowind: Which is better?' is still one of the most fiercely-debated topic in the official forum. Since I have fond memories of all previous TES series, I won't get into the flaming war. I just don't see any constructive point of insisting one game over another. They all have pros and cons, and no game is perfect.

I couldn't read single review of new CRPG called 'Two Worlds' without comparing it to 'Oblivion'. What a burden and curse it is for 'Two Worlds', which has been brutally trashed by critics and users alike. I really love that game, too. Although I really enjoyed that game, it was ultimately not enough to erase the memory of 'Oblivion'. If 'Fallout 3' becomes anything close to the success of 'Oblivion', Bethesda Softwork will become the next formidable RPG Giant like 'Blizzard' / 'Black Isle' / 'Bioware' trinity once achieved back in the days. You can be sure Bethesda will come out with TES V, and its success is pretty much guaranteed no matter which direction it will take.

Now I think far too many game mechanics from the past CRPGs such as 'Ultima', 'Baldur's Gate', 'Wizardry' or 'Diablo' series stemmed from the limitation of technology at the time rather than game design choice. I still have the original copies of 'Baldur's Gate' and 'Diablo' series along with 'Ultima' series, 'Wizardry 8', 'Planescape: Torment', 'Fallout 1, 2', and of course 'Daggerfall' and 'Morrowind'.
Except for 'Morrowind', I don't see myself playing and enjoying those game as I once used to anymore.
I tried them recently and was pleasantly surprised how pathetically they are outdated now. The vidio gaming asthetics have grown exponentially since those days.

Even 'Morrowind' took some adjusting time to re-immerse myself. When I say technology, I am not just talking about graphic but the scope and possibilities that was just not feasible in the past. The improved technology doesn't always result in better game but it immensely helps to create immersive gaming world, and the technology lifted all the barriers for game developers to realize their vision into games. This will result in new convergent games that crossover the genres. Upcoming games such as 'Mass Effect' and 'Fallout 3' are the evidence of new gaming asthetics being formed right now.

What would you like to see in the future Bethesda RPGs in terms of game mechanics?

For me, one thing I really like to see is the interaction with NPCs improved. Radiant A.I. is the right direction for the NPC interaction, but I like to see more detailed implementation. In 'Gothic' series, NPCs actually perform various activities, which player character can also performs. NPCs react when weapons drawn upon or intruded by. I know these reactions in 'Gothic' are scripted events but the presentation makes them as if the NPCs were alive. NPCs in 'Oblivion', while acting on dynamic schedule, sometimes look like pantomiming. Many times I've witnessed the awesome NPCs interaction only possible with 'Radiant A.I', but many times NPCs walks around aimlessly in circle, too. The character deposition drops when weapon is drawn during conversation, but it would be nice to hear more distinctive reaction from NPCs about the fact. Daily routine could be more detailed in animation. Fishing, chopping woods, forging metals, making weapons, eating and drinking, the lists go on. I like to have more dialogue choices and right to refuse any quest. Many times you are given just one choice in 'Oblivion'.

Another thing is consequences of player character's action and its influence to the persistent world such as guilds. In 'Oblivion', your deeds, either good or evil, hardly create impact on the gaming world. Although there are more than one method to solve many individual task, and more than one result in outcome of the quest, it really doesn't change the grand scheme of the game. I heard 'Bethesda' is really working hard on this for the upcoming 'Fallout 3'. Multiple endings and various intricate political stands among different factions would be greatly appreciated.

Next thing is different combat mechanics for 3rd person perspective. 1st person perspective is outstanding in 'Oblivion' but it would be sweet to have the alternative combat mechanics in 'Vanity Mode' also. That way, gamers have choice between realistic 1st-person combat and more arcady 3rd-person combat. Accurate jumping mechanics like the one in 'Metroid Prime' would be awesome compared to the unrealistical moonwalking in the air in 'Oblivion'. More acrobatic combat moves like rolling and dodging would be fantastic additions.

Havoc engine is great, but I hope the object manipulation becomes more useful in the actual gaming world, quests, or combat in the next iteration.

And my pet peeve of the game, it's so difficult to fight the enemies while NPCs are around, especially the essential characters that you must protect.

These are merely the positive suggestions rather than pointing out the game's flaws.

New ideas to improve the immersion for too much open-endedness would be great idea to narrow the gap between linear RPG and non-linear RPG.

Making RPG and simulating more life-like world is the ultimate holy grail Bethesda has been working for since 'Arena', I am sure.
No matter which TES game you like the most, the pathetic reality is that the choice of CRPG is very scarce in the market right now, and we need more refined game like 'Oblivion' to embrace mainstream casual gamers without alienating the hardcore RPG gamers so that market will once be crowded with good CRPGs.

The newly released GOTY (Game of the year) edition of 'TES IV Oblivion' contains the original 'Oblivion' along with 'Knights of the Nine' and 'Shiverilg Isles'. Unfortunately, the rest of the official DLCs (Downloadable Contents) are not available in the package. You can either purchase them to download from the official website(www.elderscrolls.com) or you can purchase the retail version of 'Knights of the Nine' at the store, which also contains all the DLCs except the new 'The Fighter's Stronghold'. I strongly recommend you to purchase the retail version for you can freely install and uninstall anytime you need. The precedure of downloading through the website is such a pain.

This game literally never ends. You'll spends hundreds of hours and one day, you'll simply quit at your own device. 'Oblivion' is the one game truly non-linear, free-form, open-ended to the bitter end, indeed.

Outstanding, well deserved GOTY categorization

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 19 / 19
Date: January 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Oblivion most certainly lives up to its reputation as a Game of the Year for 2006/2007.

The interface is very easy to manipulate. The combat system is intuitive, and I found the regeneration of fatigue and magicka/mana to be quite unique to the RPG environment. I often found myself lugging around potions for regenerating mana and hitpoints in other games. This is not the case with Oblivion! My dark elf character regenerated fatique and magicka, while it was extremely easy to cast spells that restored health.

The game crashed to desktop only a handful of times out of the dozen or so days I spent playing, so I'd say it was above average in terms of reliability. The game runs smoothly at 800x600 with a P4 3.0 GHz CPU and an ATI Radeon X1950 GT 256MB AGP video card.

The most noteworthy aspect of this game is the sheer number of quests and the "sandbox" aspect of exploration and character development. I did not have to stick with the main quest, but I often found myself sidetracked with various quests that lead to additional quests! It is not uncommon to have a dozen or more active quests in your log!

The second most intriguing component of this game is the ability to manufacture potions, spells, and enchantments for your items. This is quite a unique feature! No longer is the player restricted to cookie cutter items and equipment. You can enchant armor to provide chameleon (invisibility), while you can enchant weapons to suck the life out of your opponents with each strike.

One "mini-quest" even allows you to play as a vampire, whom must feed on sleeping victims or else you begin to lose hitpoints under the sun (complete with smoke rising off your skin).

I must say that Oblivion is one of THE most innovative games I have played in the recent years. This special GOTY edition includes Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles expansion, providing months upon months of playability. I have spent over 50 hours and have not even started the main quest.

Pros: Intuitive interface for exploration, enchanting items, and making spells. The combat interface is exceptional for a RPG. I recall the days of text-based RPGs and RPGs like Final Fantasy II for the SNES where you were always forced to take damage during turns. Oblivion is a mix of a first-person shooter and RPG. Godfather fans will probably see quite a resemblance, with the exception that Oblivion is far more fleshed out and involved than Godfather.

The GOTY edition includes the latest patch and I have not run into any problems with the quests that were previously found in earlier versions.

Cons: The voice acting gets repetitious since they keep recycling voice actors for the minor NPC's. This is also a pro because this allows for a bigger budget in developing the game itself. I find myself reading the text more than listening to the NPC's whining that someone stole their ring, or they need some special wine.

I found that not being able to fast travel to marked locations was annoying. Fast travel is useful because you can go from one location to another without being forced to ride a horse or run on foot. Unfortunately, fast travel only works if you have explored the region and found the location. In addition, fast travel only works if there aren't enemies attacking and if you are outside in an open area. You can't fast travel from the inside of a cave or inside of a building. This can be get rather boring at times.

While you can develop your character by improving his or her skills, there isn't much development in character interaction. For example, when you join the Dark Brotherhood, almost everyone is open and receptive. It felt like this was the friendliest faction. Antoinetta Marie seemed to have more than a friendly disposition towards your character, but it never developed any further than typical banter with NPCs. I feel this is a major flaw in many of the games today, but it is most likely a technical limitation more than anything.

Bottom line:
Oblivion Game of the Year Edition gets a 10/10 rating from me based on being an overall excellent game. Very rarely does a game get almost everything right, and still be able to run smoothly on budget PC hardware. There is simply so much to accomplish in this game.

GOTY edtion = SecuROM

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 20
Date: June 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Bethesda has done an unfortunate about-face on their DRM stance and slapped SecuROM into the GOTY edition of Oblivion. I would highly recommend you NOT to buy this version and to buy the individual stand-along versions instead if you really want this game - see also the SecuROM debacle on games like Bioshock and Mass Effect to learn more.

Fun to play, again...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: December 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game to return to Cyrodill. I had played the Original Oblivion and Knights of The Nine expansion for MANY hours, then sold them when I got tired of it. I kept my save games just in case I decided to play again. The game and expansion packs installed as expected and I was able to pick up where I left off.

I'm playing through the last expansion pack now. The graphics are a little better that the first two, and the content is good. Buy it to play for the first time, or to play again. You'll find yourself being "drawn back" time and time again!

Totally worth it

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The long review here is right. This game is awesome. Moreso if you're a moderate computer nerd who doesn't mind getting his or her hands dirty with mods and additional files.

But even without that, you've got three "main" quests here that will take a loooong time and a lot of fun exploration to complete. Hundreds of side quests, plus whatever personal vendattas and goals you set for yourself. You can actually play the game a number of different ways, and specialties in stealth, fighting, and magic are only the start.

I've played a lot of games over the last two years, but this is the one I keep coming back to...

Good but not as good as Morrowind

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 31, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Out of all of the RPG games I've played the Elder Scrolls series has the best elements of this genre. Not overly evil, not overly sweet, but a nice blend of each side vying for control. Even as a plain warrior type you can beat even arch-mages, with but a couple of potions to heal yourself. So such game balance is refreshing.

Oblivion has the heritage of Morrowind, with the storyline and general mechanics being familiar despite the age between the two games -- so if you came off from Morrowind you can jump in and not miss much of a step (same texture/storyline style even). The environment is so immersive it's difficult to get away from for long, and you'll want to play the game for well over 150hrs.

But like all good things there are some issues, issues that potential players (especially diehard Morrowind fans) do need to know about to understand what they may encounter.

1. Only 8 hot keys vs hundreds of spells and potions. You'll be hitting that Tab key right in the middle of combat to scroll a-l-l the way down for a potion/spell (one of the complaints that Oblivion was "dumbed down" for console users).

2. Can't change weapons in combat. Get it knocked out of your hands, and you can't get to it (thanks Havok physics for bouncing everything around unrealistically, not!) you hope your hand-to-hand is pretty high.

3. Merchants are capped at 1700-2200 gold max. Items often can be sold even at 50% over 1200. All that fancy gear will be sold at a price that is crazy (money really isn't an issue in the game, anyway to worry about hoarding coin, the drops are crazy of loot).

4. Game crashes on certain quests and areas on non-modded installs (so much so you may have to reboot the PC to get out of the game) -- SAVE OFTEN!!

5. Saved games are stored within the My Documents folder. If you install the game on a different drive or partition, this can be a headache as you may have 5GB+ of saved games alone.

6. Forget about stacking items for display or necessity (like organizing potion bottles) without spending 30+ minutes painstakingly trying to position ONE item. Yes, ONE item. You want this ability because...

7. Storage bugs. You can lose your inventory in storage chests if you put too many items in it (and you will have a-l-o-t to store!).

Simply, for an "A" list game such outright bugs and placement issues are unacceptable, especially so many patches later.

I do like this game, and would love it much better if the game play was more RPG friendly (key mapping especially); the game crashing and animation issues were fixed; and the "auto-leveling" feature was just an option.

Get the game if the above isn't a bother to you. If it is, stick with Morrowind.

Oblivion, Fun but Dumbed Down To Appeal to More Relative to Series

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: April 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Trying to be as objective as possible so let me explain why I'm giving this a 4/5 star rating even though I liked it a lot.

First, the game has a lot of 'improvements' which seem like they were put in place because they would make the game more appealing to the masses. These include things like the idea of fast travel (I wish I could do this to work every morning), the auto leveling of the enemies, and so on. I'll explain more on those subjects further on. Generally though these 'improvements' break the atmosphere of the game some and, while you can ignore the fast travel, don't seem realistic. Your character just ran into what could be the equivalent of hell for the Elder Scrolls world, he came outside and suddenly every single mercenary is wearing glass armor (really nice stuff) and using top of the line swords? Oblivion gates opening must have really boosted the economy.

The visuals are beautiful though and the voice acting really gets you engaged in the story. I also love how the NPCs all have varying looks to them (even if most have the same vocal track). It's a somewhat realistic environment.

Now my biggest complaint would have to be the auto leveling, as I mentioned above. The reason for this is that the enemy's levels are driven by a few things such as your level and the level of the magic in your inventory. This can noticeably become a problem if you play a mage, buy one really nice spell which drains all your mana in one use, and then notice while you can easily kill one enemy every other enemy in the world now is 10 times your own level to auto balance making it impossible to continue. You have to be careful about buying spells close to the level your mana can support rapid which seems weird being that you'd think you could just do whatever is in your capability. Also for a class like a thief you'll find yourself leveling up quickly using your main skills and find that many of the enemies will be way too strong for you so you have to focus on leveling up secondary skills and not using your main skills quite as often to stay on par which forces how you play the game.

The auto leveling somewhat removes the whole nature of the RPG aspect of leveling from the game if you think about it. What's the point of becoming super strong if the enemies are just as hard when you start as when you finish? Yes, it adds to gameplay and I'm sure with your new skills if you use them correctly you do become stronger than the enemy but it removes the ability to destroy a legion with a powerful spell or the chop through a group of weaklings once you deserve to have that power.

Regardless, it's a fun game though and the environment is interesting to explore. The story also is interesting considering many Action RPGs tend to have trouble tying the main character into the story because of the nature of them but Elder Scrolls has always been strong in this area.

The dungeons can be repetitive (besides the core ones) because often the auto leveling will cause the dungeons to just have the same enemies all around. The dungeons are auto respawning and while they do have treasure chests which also auto respawn they lack a real unique feel (although they are setup differently they generally will give you a similar experience as a whole). There are four types of enemies you'll generally find and they're usually exclusive to their own dungeons: animals, humans, the undead, and daedric beings. I have to give credit to the developers though in this area because unlike Morrowind there are a plethora of creatures to encounter which was one of its pitfalls Oblivion does not have.

I'll leave my review at this, and I'm sure most people have said everything else, but I'd say get this game regardless, it's worth buying and playing through. I'm only giving a somewhat mediocre review because I figured I'd point out where the series went wrong this time around. It's an all around great game and probably the best Action RPG on the market today but still has a lot of room to improve on which hopefully we'll see with the next iteration of the Elder Scrolls series.

GOTY

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I've played Morrowind, and now Oblivion for 4 years and enjoy it every time. Probably since I'm an over-50 gamer, I don't rush through it, but take my time and savor the awesome graphics.

Almost really fun

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: March 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I loved Morrowind so was very excited for this game. While the graphics were excellent and the game play itself was smooth, I was somewhat disappointed. The leveling in the game was a surprise. As you level, your enemies level too. I understand why they did it that way, so as to not make the game too easy too quickly, but for me one of the rewards of putting in the time and effort to level up is to get stranger, faster, better than opponents. I also found the missions somewhat boring, but the addition of the Brotherhood was fun even. The world itself is smaller. And, its not as much fun to be a thief. There is no place to go for training and buying/selling if you are a thief, and merchants won't buy stolen items. There were things I really liked. I love that there are horses in the game and you can get armor for them. The expansion packs that give you hideaways and extras like the horse armor are worth it in my opinion. Overall, the game wasn't bad.

What a wonderful world.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I liked this game a lot. i don't usually play these types of games, as i enjoy more FPS action than collecting items etc. but for a good while about ten hours i had a lot of fun with this game, now i feel largely on a quest to simply raise levels and explore which is fun but i get bored running around after a while. i need things to explode, thats just me. the world is amazing, and it makes you feel like you're really there. the game is monumental, i just like explosions.

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