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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The code that has been gnawing at me for the past week is finally in, so now I feel comfortable taking a few moments to discuss Bethesda's at-long-last fulfillment of all of their promise: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I came "late" to the series -- I started with TES2: Daggerfall, and proceeded to play Battlespire, Redguard, and Morrowind. Yeah -- that's right -- I played Battlespire. Probably got about halfway through it, too. Every one of these games showed a hint of a world that these passionate, passionate guys wanted you to dig deep into. They had a vision, and by god, they weren't going to compromise that vision, even if they still weren't quite sure how to make it all work.

Well, my friends, I'm here to tell you that they figured it out.

Now, most people will get in your face about the graphics of this most recent installment, and get me not wrong: the graphics are awe-inspiring. And I'm saying that from the perspective of not even having the latest & greatest video card -- my "creaky" HL2-capable box is still making me swoon with the medium-grade graphics option. And the physics engine? Non-gimmicky. Watching that rat fly backwards after the very first fireball leaves your virginal adventurer's fingertips -- well, that's money, baby. That's money and it doesn't even know it.

But I started playing with Daggerfall, baby. I'm old school. I'm thrilled about the graphics -- but that's not why I'm here to gush at you today.

Remember all the things you liked about the previous games but at the same time were tearing your hair out about? Remember the awkward dialogue system? Remember how, in the end, you just learned some stupid no-mana fireball spell and camped out in the mage's guild, putting your character through a weeks long regimen of fireball until you drop just so you could level up destruction? Remember loving how big the world was, and then quickly feeling like you hit the weird, random, far-too-hard spot?

FIXT, my friends. FIXT.

Let's start with the hallmark of the series: the idea that you level up by doing the things you're good at. In every single game, your class is defined by a set of skills that are core to it. And you level those skills by using them. And you level up by leveling the important skills. It's a great, great idea. And eventually, you wonder why the hell you can't fight the rattly old skeleton and whether you've made a huge mistake, because you're LEVEL EIGHT but can't cast more than two fireballs before you fall over. And then you spend four hours casting a training spell over and over again, because it's easier to do that than trying to train up in the dungeons.

Well, so far at least, I'm actually leveling up my skills by adventuring. I haven't hit the Irritating Bastards of Doom despite several hours of play. My mana actually recharges (!!!) without having to sleep, so playing a fire-slinging spellcaster feels actually viable. The combat system feels more visceral -- targeting that oncoming guy and casting maaaagic miiiiisle makes me feel like a wielder of Dread Powers, not some shmoe. It's hard to quantify -- but it's there, and it's great.

NPC interaction? Well, there's still the reaction score and the keywords you'll remember from previous games. Influencing the reaction score is more of a mini-game now, though, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just enough meat to it to make it interesting to play, and not so much that it feels like it supercedes your actual speechcraft attribute. And, unlike Morrowind, it doesn't feel like you immediately get into a "reactions are so bad I can't possibly ever fix it" state. The keywords are back, too, but you don't immediately get into having 50 keywords to click through for an NPC, and things like rumors seem to only change daily. It's enough restraint to actually make the characters seem more interesting.

What's even better about NPCs, though, is that they actually have schedules. This seems gimmicky, but it turns out not to be. The schedules are well done, and you can get hints about them from talking to other players, so it actually feels like something you can plan around and make educated guesses about. This, in turn, adds to the immersion. They'll even go through doors into other zones, and be there on the other side when you follow them.

Another nice feature is that when NPCs meet in the street -- they'll talk. This is a really slick way of introducing quest leads and world rumors. You just sidle on up to the conversation and make careful note of interesting plot points. If you don't care -- you can move on.

The quest log is also nice. It actually tracks completed vs current quests, and allows you to make a particular quest the "active" one, which means laying out all of the stuff that has transpired in it, and affecting what waypoints show up on your map.

Quests are so far pretty interesting, too. I quickly ran up against a quest where two people wanted me to do two different things. I was interested in satisfying both, so I gave the macguffin to A, let B chew me out about getting it back, waited for A to unlock the macguffin, and then stole it back and gave it to B. Wooo!

Basically, playing this game FEELS like playing what my rose-colored glasses tell me playing Daggerfall was like, and what I wanted playing Morrowind to be like. Hell, throw in the fairly cool if non-accelerated FPS-action of Battlespire. I'm loving it. If you liked the series at all at any point, you'll love it too.

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Comments

Are you playing it on the PC or Xbox 360?

I'm playing on the PC, and I successfully resisted the urge to upgrade. My HL2-capable machine (with an ATI 9800) is running at 1300 x widescreen quite smoothly, thank yew very much. I don't have the HDR porn, or quite the density of vegetation you see on the Interweb screenshots, but the only time I notice it isn't optimally pretty is when I'm actually comparing against Interweb screenshots.

I can see how the control scheme is designed to be reasonable for both PC & console, and I've had no complaints with it on the PC (eg, it doesn't feel too "consoley"). And I suspect it works pretty darn well on the 360.

It gets a thumbs up on the stability front, too -- I've had some crashes on exit, but never a crash during the game itself, in several hours of gameplay yesterday and today.

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