Imperfect Game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Hello and Welcome to Imperfect Game, less a review blog and more of an excuse to write about my game experiences, and today I am covering The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Oblivion is another one of Bethesda's open-world RPG games. For me, Oblivion was my first taste of the Bethesda style of RPGs as a young child just playing games, it was a borrowed copy from my brother Scotty if I recall correctly. I was taken aback at how immersive Oblivion was for me the first time played, I was used to the more linear RPGs like Pokemon so I never expected there to be an open-world RPG out there. While am sure Oblivion was amazing at the time I must confess and say that ever since Skyrim came out I had little reason to continue playing Oblivion outside of research for this review. Yeah, I had to get my Skyrim bias out right away, that's not to say Oblivion is a bad game it’s just in the year 2022 you have more options like any of the Fallout Bethesda games than you have Skyrim. I even think more people talk about Morrowind for committing to being a hardcore RPG while Oblivion was trying to streamline it for players but gave up halfway.

The story is that you’re a prisoner one day in the Imperial city and the Emperor and his secret service known as the Blades need to escape from assassins through your cell and let you follow them while the Emperor is acting strangely saying that he’s seen you before in his dreams and not in the romantic way more in the I have seen the future and I know that you're the chosen one kind of way. Anyway the Emperor and his Blades are being hunted down by cultists who have already killed the Emperor’s sons…expect not really as right before the Emperor is killed he tells of his illegitimate son who is still alive and out there and after escaping the through the sewers your pretty much free-roaming like any other Bethesda game, except there isn’t much out there to do besides doing quests around cities and towns and even those quests are pretty hit or miss. The one where the dark elf lady wants you to kill mountain lions that keep sneaking into her basement and killing her pet rats was pretty funny I will admit. Then theirs a quest that comes from a haunted player home where you awake a dormant lich and kill it to break the curse affecting your 5000 gold house. But sadly the many dotted dungeons outside of the cities are just barebones dungeon crawling in what feels like the same caves and elf ruins. The main quest is okay for a Bethesda game and it actively gets pretty hyped up at times, you track down the cult known as the Mythic Dawn and have to shut down a big oblivion gate while a massive siege engine from hell threatens to destroy a city while a small army of allies fight off wave after wave of demons and then break into basically a big bad's version of heaven to beat him up and then later a giant demon guy called Mehrunes Dagon and a bunch of demons appears in the Imperial city than one NPC transforms into a dragon and beats up Mehrunes Dagon and dies leaving a dragon statue in the aftermath. I have to admit it’s the best main quest I’ve seen from a Bethesda game so far.

When it comes time to make a character here are a few things to think about, in Oblivion leveling works like this, you use a skill and you raise that skill and then after enough skill raises happen the game gives you a level up, but it doesn’t happen instantly. First, you have to find a bed to sleep in either from an Inn or in your player's home. You see this game has attributes that affect your skills, health, Magicka, and even your movement speed and jump height. If you are not sure what you're doing when it comes time to make a character try one of the premade classes but if you want to tailor-make your character you can make a custom class. For example, I made an unarmed build with high speed and acrobatics so I can move very fast and jump around like a tree frog all over the place and punch dinosaurs in hell. That said Oblivion’s combat isn’t really that special, you end up clicking everything to death more often than not. Magic can add an extra layer to combat but it's so basic that it all comes down to whose stats are higher than whose like a typical RPG game.

Sadly in the vanilla game, there are these big yellow things in one of the main quest’s dungeons and I think I found one in one of the minor dungeons, I wasn’t using any mods and was playing the game vanilla to get the real experience and it would seem the game has I think a missing model or object that causes this visual bug to happen and that bug wasn’t fixed before release it seems. I had about 6 different screenshots of this bug happening, while Skyrim was buggy at times Oblivion seems to be even more so. While I haven’t encountered any other bugs it really hurts immersion when you encounter these large error models in the dungeons or overworld another gripe I have is that the UI for the Map feels a bit small and cramped, not sure if this is an issue with console players but I would like to mod this out to see more of the overworld map.

Inclosing Oblivion is a dated but good game even if its siblings have done better than it, I was about to have fun punching out demons, dinosaurs, and the undead so I can’t deny I had some fun in the end and am sure the majority of bugs can be removed with modding. I recommend getting the game on sale because it still holds up despite it’s flaws, this has been an Imperfect Game, and thanks for reading.