The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

by Bethesda

Product Features

• Live another life in a whole new world -- gamers can create and play any Character they can imagine, from the noble warrior to the sinister assassin to the wizened sorcerer
• First-person melee and magic systems bring first person role-playing to a new level of intensity
• The groundbreaking new Radiant AI system gives Oblivion's characters full 24/7 schedules and the ability to make their own choices based on the world around them
• Features over 1,000 non-player characters who come to life like never before -- facial animations, lip-synching, full speech, even unscripted conversations with each other
• The enormous world of Oblivion is open, giving you short challenges and open-ended gameplay -- everything from fighting bandits to mixing potions

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000GKCI4A
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches ; 7 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: March 20, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (126 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,627 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #34 in Video Games > PlayStation 3 > Action > Fighting

Product Description

Platform: PLAYSTATION 3 | Edition: Greatest Hits

After the mysterious and untimely death of the Emperor the throne of Tamriel lies empty. With the Empire ready to crumble the gates of Oblivion open and demons march upon the land - laying waste to everything in their path. To turn the tide of darkness you must find the lost heir to the throne and unravel the sinister plot that threatens to destroy all of Tamriel.Format: PS3 Genre: NO GENRE Rating: RP UPC: 093155120600 Manufacturer No: 12060

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grand Theft Auto meets Lord of the Rings, August 8, 2007

By 

Brian Forrester "Brian Forrester, Noblesville IN" (Indianapolis, Indiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Video Game)

The title for my review seems to be about the best way to describe this game. It's considered an RPG, but it's more of a sandbox game in my opinion. That being said, it was the first and only RPG I have played and I absolutely loved it. If you haven't played Oblivion and you're thinking about buying it for PS3, wait a month or two. Bethseda is releasing a "Game of the Year" edition that will contain all of the expansion packs for Oblivion (Knights of the Nine, which is included in this reviewed PS3 version, Shivering Isles (not included in current PS3 version), and I believe there's more). Positive and Negative breakdown, shall we?

Positives:
- Fantastic graphics
- large world to roam about, lots to explore and discover
- Story lines are immersive
- No lack of tasks to complete (game guide is some 400 pages)
- character leveling provides incentive to practice skills, you also find better weapons, armor and magical abilities the higher your character levels.
- ability to craft your own magic spells, enchanted weapons and armor, make potions

Negatives:
- Some of the dungeon and cave crawling gets repetitive, especially the Gates of Oblivion
- Enemies level with your character. While it keeps the game challenging, part of the joy of levelling is becoming more powerful. With enemies that level with your character, you never really become "God-like" as the enemies become more powerful as you do.

Really, there isn't a lot not to like. the game is at least 200 hours long, with all of the side quests and such outside the main story line. The Dark brotherhood quests, especially, are very fun quests. I highly recommend this game, but like I said earlier, wait for the Game of the Year edition if you plan to buy.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oblivion vs. GOTY, December 1, 2008

By 

A. Dent "Aragorn" (Minas Anor, GD) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Video Game)

I played the 'Game of the Year' edition on our PS3 and, before ordering the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend the $50+ for the full thing or maybe start with this, less expensive, configuration and then add the Shivering Isles to it. It was a difficult decision to make because there wasn't enough information available at the time or I could not find it and, in the end, I decided to live dangerously :) and went for the GOTY. Now, that the happy Oblivion-playing days are behind me, I believe that it was the right thing to do but I would like to help, if I can, anyone who may not be so sure of what to order, make the right decision.


What you get in this edition:
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This edition has the plain-vanilla 'Oblivion' AND a relatively small expansion called 'Knights of the Nine' which was available separately on other platforms.

Knights of the Nine integrates seamlessly into the Oblivion universe and it's really a set of additional quests, all taking place inside the 'original' Oblivion universe.


The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles:
-------------------------------
Is part of GOTY but it is not included in this package. In the PS3 world, this represents the difference between the plain Oblivion and the GOTY.

The Shivering Isles are a different realm. The world's texture is different, the characters behave in a different manner, you encounter different monsters and you travel on the path of a different story line. While you can take you weapons and your skills with you, the Shivering Isles is a world onto itself and you go in and out of it through a gateway so you are either in Cyrodiil or you are in the Shivering Isles.

If you are thinking in terms of 'is it worth it?', you should be aware that the Shivering Isles does not double your universe. It is a relatively small world and it has a smaller number of quests. My estimation is that it's probably 1/5 the size of Cyrodiil proper, possibly smaller. In my view, purchasing the GOTY edition was worth it and I have little doubt that, once I was almost done with the main Oblivion I would have ordered the Shivering Isles, regardless of the price but, for anyone who's more cautious, there seems to be no price penalty for purchasing them as separate packages. However, given the convenience of having everything on one disk and given the likelihood that, if you love Oblivion you would buy the Shivering Isles anyway, I would recommend the GOTY.

See my GOTY review below.
_________________________________________________

Oblivion is EXACTLY how I imagined an RPG should be like back in the 80's, while playing Ultimas on Commodore 64s and Atari STs.

Oblivion has weather. While there is no wind other than a constant, gentle breeze, you do get rain/thunderstorms, fog, snow (no blizzards though, because there's not much wind). You don't slip and fall on ice but the sound of your steps is different whether you walk on the road, on grass, on snow or on ice.

The world of Cyrodill is not exactly continent-size, maybe some 20-30 miles in any direction from downtown Imperial City but... what a world this is. Cities, settlements, camps, estates, roadside inns, ruins, caves, dungeons, mines, shrines. The landscape is made up of plains, hard-to-climb mountains, rivers, swamps, waterfalls, seas. You can travel on foot or you can ride a horse. You can fight your way into fame and fortune while doing good or you can sneak into other people's houses or pickpocket the unsuspecting. The guards will chase you and throw you in jail if you do illegal things but, if they like you enough, maybe they will look the other way sometimes. Powerful gods or humble people will ask you do 'little things' for them and, if you can make them happy, they will reward you according to their abilities. You can raise to the top of your profession, as a fighter, as a mage, as a thief or as an assassin or you can assemble your own little gang of dreamy crusaders so that you can fight evil and recover the relics of a legendary knight. Or you can do them all and become all, in sequence or make progress in all paths more or less simultaneously while moonlighting as a gladiator as well and, if still bored, how about helping a lady take care of the rats in her basement (that's NOT what you think) or some drunk guy at the inn get rid of the Trolls that took over his daddy's country estate? Oh and, I forgot, there's a world to save or... wait... there's TWO worlds, thanks to the Shivering Isles extension.

This game is so huge, I can't see how you could really 'finish' it. After more than 2 months of almost daily playing, I am maybe 75-80% into the main quest, half a way through the Knights of the Nine, only started the Shivering Isles adventures. I did become the realm's Chief Mage (and the titles earns me no respect from the scholar mages) and the grand master at the Fighters league, got myself 350,000 gold coins in my pocket, 2 comfortable houses and 2 nice offices, completed close to 100 quests, slaughtered 2000 creatures and hundreds of humans, murdered 4 or 5 and all but one by mistake (friendly fire), didn't even come close to the Thieves guild and, foolishly, made it impossible for me to ever join the Dark Brotherhood (these are the assassins). Also, I've never been a vampire and didn't yet start my career as a professional gladiator. I did massacre the peaceful dwellers of a small village but I did that under the influence of some drugs that made them look to me like bloody Orcs - that was the price to pay for infiltrating and destroying the source of that scourge. Oh, and while briefly in the land of Dementia - or was it Mania? - I did, willingly, push buttons that caused a few careless adventurers to go insane and I watched as they were becoming so. I humiliated a lovely princess - or was it a duchess? - and I killed so many fearsome monsters, I lost count myself but the game does keep a count so it's easy to know. In fact, the game keeps track of so many things... I could easily find out how many jokes I told, how many potions I made, how many horses I've stolen (one), how many hours I slept or how many books I read.

Well...? What do you think?

On the 'not so good' side, the game does slow down when you are fighting 4-5 monsters at the same time or when there are other things that keep the PS3 busy while you are fighting the baddies - like a fire burning. Loading/saving times are a bit too long but, while this is happening, you do get to read some randomly selected good advice on the screen.

The other thing that saddens me is that I don't believe the good people at Bethesda are working on the next chapter yet. I do hope that, as soon as they are done with Fallout-3, they are going to get busy with another adventure in Cyrodill or thereabouts.

My other problem is that I am now fighting with my kids over time on the PS3. We have a bunch of other games but, since Oblivion came into our house, I would say that 95%+ of our PS3 time was on Oblivion.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Really fun game, laid low by bugs, July 22, 2007

By 

Justin A. Drew - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Video Game)

First of all, I really enjoyed this game. It was a lot of fun to play, and it took me about a week to play through to the point where I felt comfortable completing the main quest. In that amount of time, you can do a lot of the side quests that the game provides. I didn't have a huge problem with the bugs, really. At first, it was a little confusing when an NPC standing near me would die for no reason. Then I started getting annoyed when the game would put a bounty on me when I knew I hadn't committed any crime. Or when my bounty was 0, and yet the gods refused to heal me because I was a criminal. Also, in some of the most important scenes in the game, characters' audio would cut off for no reason. This was really only an inconvenience, because I could get the information they were going to give me from my journal afterwards, but the voice-acting in the game is good enough that I wanted to hear it. After one particular session of reloading a save multiple times to hear the audio work, I got fed up enough to turn the console off and wait until the next day to try again.
Frame rate wasn't a huge problem in the game. Generally it stayed high enough that even if it slowed a bit, it wasn't that big a deal. However, toward the end of the main quest, the game got so bogged down in the number of enemies on screen that it went down to a point where it took nearly half a minute to turn my character about 90 degrees in any direction. At the same time that this was occurring, the game would also simply stop responding to me hitting the attack button, so I was standing there getting beaten to death by a horde of enemies that I could have easily killed while I could see the end of the game from where I was standing. Luckily, the in-game menu popped up quickly enough that I could still heal myself with potions.
With all of that said, however, I still loved playing this game when it was working right. I haven't played a game that was this expansive in a very long time. There were a few times I disagreed with judgments the game made, like a time when I was clearly targeting an open door to close it and the game had me pickpocketing a character standing next to the door (which was really frustrating, because it got me kicked out of the Fighter's Guild). Or that killing the grand champion of the arena counted as my first murder, which sent the Dark Brotherhood after me. But even these were only minor setbacks in an otherwise beautiful and incredibly huge game.
If it weren't for the fact that the bugs in the game so ruined the ending for me, then I would have been able to give it a higher score. However, I don't think that what passed for this game's "final boss" should have consisted of me pointlessly pressing the attack button while I was being killed by about 10 daedra.
Even with all of this, if you can overlook the bugs in the game (which do end up being a very small number if you spread it out over the course of what could easily be turned into a 100+ hour campaign), I would recommend that you get it, because it is a really fun game. The storytelling is very well done, the graphics are incredible, the voice acting is also very well done (although hearing the same voice saying the exact same words for 6 characters in a group of 10 or 12 is a little odd, but also understandable when you consider the number of characters you need to make the world actually feel populated), and the AI works pretty well... most of the time. I only had one major problem with the AI, and that was at the very end of the game, where I had to lead one of the characters into an area for the ending, and he simply would not follow me. It took about 20 minutes before he would follow me.
In closing, if a few more of the bugs had been ironed out of this game, I would say that you should have absolutely no qualms about buying it. But if you would be bothered by something like this, then this game is not for you.

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