The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

by Bethesda

Product Features

• Live another life in another world, create and play any character you can imagine
• An all-new combat and magic system brings first person role-playing to a new level of intensity
• Groundbreaking AI system gives characters full 24/7 schedules
• New lands to explore in the Shivering Isles expansion
• Challenging new foes, hideous insects, Flesh Atronachs, skeletal Shambles, amphibeous Grummites and more

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000TVT7U4
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches ; 3.2 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: October 16, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (179 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #545 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

Platform: PLAYSTATION 3 | Edition: Game of the Year

Oblivion Game of the Year Edition presents one fo the best RPG's of all time like never before. Step inside the most richly detailed and vibrant game-world ever created. With a powerful combination of freeform gameplay and unprecedented graphics, you can unravel the main quest at your own pace or explore the vast world and find your own challenges. Also included in the Game of the Year edition are Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles expansion, adding new and unique quests and content to the already massive world of Oblivion.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

185 of 190 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is Too Much Ever Enough?, January 15, 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 

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This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition (Video Game)

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.

__________________________________________________

12/19/10 NOTE:

I am so glad to be proven wrong. 11/11/11 is the announced date for the "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim". All I know so far is that it will use a new and much improved game engine - about time - and that it appears to at least reference Oblivion. Hopefully "Two Worlds 2", expected to be released on Jan. 25 and enjoying great reviews in Europe were it already sold one million copies, will be a large and compelling enough RPG to keep me/us occupied for the next 10-11 months.


7/27/11 NOTE:

I found myself playing Oblivion again and so do our 2 boys. In fact, they kept playing Oblivion on and off ever since we bought the game but now they seem to be almost full time back at it again. When it comes to PS3 games, and we have the latest and greatest in the house but, believe it or not, the game that we first started playing back in 2007 is as playable - in our case re-playable - today as it was then.

76 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific game for old-school role players, December 28, 2009

By 

Scott (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition (Video Game)

First, let me be up front and say I'm not a video game expert. Rather, I'm a paper-and-dice RPG player since the 1970s, and until Oblivion hadn't touched a video game since Wolfenstein. My wife and I bought our PS3 for its Blu-Ray player and DVD upconvert, not for gaming...that is, that's what we thought. Then we bought Oblivion on a lark, and became gaming addicts. Since we're a middle-aged couple with no kids, that in itself says quite a lot about the game.

We started out with me playing and my wife watching and helping with treasure-spotting and puzzle solving. Eventually she was reluctantly persuaded to give the console a try herself. She's now played two characters to high levels and is working on her third new character.

While not a video game expert, I do happen to be a computer engineer by trade, so I can talk a bit about the technical aspects of the game mechanics.

Enough background...Here are the pluses and minuses I've observed, again based on my own point of view:

* Story line

The story lines are relatively rich and detailed. I say "lines" because there are multiple significant quest lines, not just the main quest. You can, in fact, utterly ignore the main quest after the tutorial, because the game operates in "sandbox mode". In other words, you emerge from the tutorial into the world, and you can do as you wish. The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine add-ons are built into the GOTY edition, each adding an additional primary quest. SI adds numerous side-quests as well. The base game also has at least four long-running quest lines (based on guilds) plus many smaller side-quests. I've heard it said that the game offers about 60 hours of playing time, but if you really explore all that the world has to offer it is in my experience much, much more than that.

Most of the quests are well-thought-out and well written. The AIs and their dialogs can be a little simplistic at times, as with many games. There's no way to ask open-ended questions, for example -- you choose from preset lists of things for your character to say. That said, however, there are *choices*, and you can play your character as anything from goody-two-shoes to a little surly to outright nasty and slimy. The main quest is basically good-aligned, but from a roleplay standpoint you can justify it even for a somewhat evil character as "enlightened self-interest." There are two of the four guild quests that are definitely not good-aligned, however (one being more-or-less neutral and the other outright evil). All quests in the game are optional after the tutorial, so your alignment is not arbitrarily constrained.

The Knights of the Nine quest is very much good-aligned, while the Shivering Isles main quest is neither particularly good nor evil.

Most of the quests have dialog that urges you on, suggesting that something Very Bad will happen if you don't finish that quest Right Now -- but in fact, the game will "park" almost all of the quests for you, indefinitely, at any sensible stopping point. You can intermix multiple quests at the same time, jumping from one to another. The dialogs are just to instill a sense of dramatic tension in the game. Most of the time (though there are exceptions) nothing bad happens if you delay the next quest step for game-days or even game-months. This is true even of the main quest.

* Game mechanics, general

Oblivion is a single-player game, though there is enough puzzle solving that two people can play cooperatively in the same room -- just one at the controls, though.

Oblivion works in first-person or third-person mode, and both are well implemented. Third-person does have some limitations with regard to ranged attacks -- it's pretty hard to aim spells or arrows from that mode. Melee combat works well in both modes, however, as do general movement and acrobatics.

Oblivion makes good use of the Sony SixAxis controller, with buttons being allocated in ways that will quickly become intuitive. I've found that the right joystick (camera movement) horizontal is a little "sticky" at the zero point. That is, it's hard to turn the camera just slightly left or right. I've replicated the problem across multiple SixAxis controllers and with different sensitivity settings. It's a "minor annoyance" rather than a serious problem, but it is there. The workaround for ranged attacks is to use the left joystick to step slightly right or left, which has the effect of a very fine-grained aiming control.

The DualShock controllers work fine with Oblivion, but the tactile feedback is not used.

The game options give you control over sensitivity of the joysticks, volume, picture brightness, and game difficulty. Unlike many games, Oblivion does not limit you to just a few preset difficulty levels, but rather provides a fine-grained "slider" control to set the difficulty as you prefer. At the easiest level, even a novice will almost never die. I recently tried the hardest setting briefly, after almost a year of experience in the game, and found that two sewer rats kicked my butt easily in the tutorial. So there appears to be plenty of range in the difficulty levels!

* Game mechanics, graphics and sound

Oblivion's graphics range from "decent but a little cartoonish" (the people) to "absolutely stunning" (some of the landscapes and lighting effects). The designers did an amazing job with sunlight and with vegetation. There are times when you want to climb up a mountain just to watch a sunset or sunrise -- seriously!

Dungeon, fort, and castle rendering are good but not eye-popping, though to be fair this game is several years old. The game supports 720p and not 1080p (though it works just fine on 1080p displays, just not using full capabilities).

There are a few interesting artifacts in the graphics from time to time, but nothing serious. Occasionally you'll see a clipping error in which two solid objects are allowed to intersect, and occasionally the activation pointer (your "mouse cursor" from PC parlance) doesn't quite line up exactly with the object you are going to activate. Very minor issues, barely noticeable in normal game play.

The sound is quite good and voices very comprehensible, especially if you have an optical cable linked to a multi-channel home theatre system. The quality of the actor voices is excellent, but as others have pointed out there are too few actors for too many characters, and the voice tones get repetitive. On rare occasions you can lose the dialog sound from scripted scenes, such as when a leader is addressing his or her troops. The game does a good job of fading out sounds over distance and of making sounds carry further in echoing environments. If you listen carefully, you can often get a hint of nearby enemies. Incidentally, the game allows optional captioned dialogs and would therefore be quite accessible to someone with a hearing impairment.

* Game mechanics, world model

Oblivion provides a geographically small but extremely detailed world model. You are in the province of Cyrodiil, a part of the empire of Tamriel. In physical terms, Cyrodiil is just a few square miles in area, but the game designers make it "feel" much larger by the way they scale time and terrain. Towns that are really just a couple of miles apart seem more distant than that. Each of the towns in the game has its own unique architecture, culture, and layout. The countryside between towns is fully explorable, with every boulder, hill, valley, and stream being defined and modeled. If you like the pretty waterfall, you can climb up on the rocks to get a better look at it. The "edge of the world" is implemented mostly by steep impassable terrain, rather than an arbitrary hard boundary in software, though you *can* get to the boundary if you really work at it.

The world model is very detailed, especially with regard to vegetation. Bethesda licensed a third-party plant rendering database that has very realistic 3D models of plants that in many cases change with the seasons. In addition, many of the plants are harvestable for alchemy ingredients, and your rate of success at this depends on the season for each plant species.

Many aspects of the game are governed by the underlying physics model licensed from Havock. Trajectories of arrows, for example, are very realistic (I do some archery in the real world and was pretty impressed with this game implementation!). There are very few places where the game designers put artificial limits on what you can try. If you have the agility or strength to make your character do a particular climb or jump or throw, the game will let you do it in most cases. This can get you into trouble occasionally -- for example, it's quite possible to jump down a chasm and get wedged between boulders in a way that you can't jump out, just as you could in mountainous country in the real world. Interestingly, the physics model is realistic enough that you can sometimes climb out of such predicaments by dropping carried objects and then standing on them as they fill the space below you.

Throughout the game are many hundreds (thousands?) of container objects such as chests, barrels, crates, sacks, bags, dressers, desks, and cabinets. These are (mostly) fixed in location, and the game lets you store an unlimited amount of objects in them. Bodies of slain creatures also act like containers in terms of game mechanics, though they usually disappear when the game resets the local "cell". In fact, almost all containers reset after approximately 73 hours of elapsed in-game time, when the "cell" resets. Their contents go back to defaults or to a random mix of clutter or food, depending on the situation. Thus, it is *not*... Read more ›

49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The love-hate relationship continues..., June 15, 2008

By 

M. A Jenkins "southerndudeman" (Manhattan, KS) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition (Video Game)

I've always wanted to just dive into the PC RPG experience, but every time I have (usually with the "Ultima" series, but there have been a few others), I've left with a lukewarm feeling. I had hoped that "Oblivion" would finally be the game that got me over the hump. But alas, while "Elder Scrolls IV" is a very fun and engrossing game, it still suffers from many of the pitfalls of its PC predecessors, and also has one more wrinkle to boot. But let's begin with:

The Good:
Story: Non-existent. Now, why is that good? Because the player isn't forced to follow some silly linear quest for the duration of the game. Yes, "Oblivion" has a sort of main focus, but it really can be pushed to the sidelines, sue to the incredible amount of other things to do. I mean, seriously, one can
1) Join a Mage's/Fighter's/Thief's/Assassin's guild
2) Run around as a hero-for-hire
3) Attempt to make money to buy houses and the like
4) Hunt in one of the uncountably infinite number of ruins/forts/caves/mines/dungeons to be found in the game
5) Become a gladiator
etc. etc.

This game is HUGE. And I love it for that.

2) Battle mechanics: I've rarely been a fan of the first person slash game, but "Oblivion" gets it right. Enemies move fast, and while some enemies act remarkably stupidly, others will fight well. You can devise your own style of play as well. Are you one that likes to run into the fray screaming? Do you like to fire off spells or arrows from afar? Do you prefer to stalk your prey and slash in the darkness? Take your pick.

3) Character development: I spent an hour just designing my character's physical appearance. Yet "Oblivion" allows you to also develop their traits, their race, their skills - heck, even their birthsign is a big deal. And the game allows you to expand on their abilities, creating a very personalized character. I myself prefer slinking around in the night, and killing my prey up close. Thus, instead of using one of the many pre-made character classes, I instead created the "skulk". You can do whatever you want. Want to be a reptile that breathes underwater, is an incredibly wizard, and can wield a mace? be my guest. Want to be an elf who fights with a sword? No one's stopping you. Want to be a vampire? You can even do THAT in time.

Sounds great, right? In short, the world of "Oblivion" is huge and varied. You can play for days without ever touching the main quest. Heck, I haven't even bothered with the expansions.

Unfortunately, not all that glitters is gold. Here's the bad:

1) The levelling system: Without a doubt, this has taken the most heat, and it is ALL deserved. Mostly, the reviewers here have complained that whenever you level, so too does the world around you. But really, this doesn't fully explain the trouble here. So, instead, I choose to give an example (apologies: I will expose one small end to a large quest).

While advancing in the mage's guild, I noticed that I hadn't been levelling up. Not a big deal, as my character was an assassin mostly, and so level should matter that much (if a child sneaks up on you and cuts your throat, you're still going to die). However, I was faced with the so-called King of Worms, and lord of all necromancers. He saw me, and there was no way my level 1 character was going to win. Right? Ummm, no - he brandished a dagger, I sported a sword, and the battle lasted a little over 30 seconds. I had vanquished arguably one of the most powerful denizens of the world, and was rewarded greatly.

This in and of itself is really unbelievable, but it gets worse. Afterward, I decided, "What the hey?" and leveled myself to level 10. And as it turns out, I couldn't even beat the guardians of the king, let alone the master himself. That's right - leveling my character actually made me WEAKER in the end.

And that is the rub. "Oblivion" is simply broken. Keep your character at level one, and you will ensure that you clear pretty much any quest in the game. Level your character normally, and expect a real challenge. It's not as bad as some have mentioned, but it certainly makes for a longer and more tedious game, as you must recollect armor, weaponry, etc. This is a MAJOR weakness. It is silly that a level one character can defeat anything thrown at him. It is even sillier that a level 10 character suddenly cannot.

2) Graphics: It's like looking in a funhouse mirror. I despise the creepy figures with which I am accosted in every town. It is obvious that the developers spent a lot of time and effort in designing the most realistic-looking people they could find. It is also apparent that we have a LONG way to go. I would have preferred more canned people to the horrors in the game.

3) Voice acting: Ugh. Painful. There are like 5 voices used for the plethora of characters you will see throughout the game. It is a horror. Moreover, because of one particular skill (speechcraft), you can bet that you'll hear these voices saying the SAME lines, over and over again. How many times I've heard "Blah blah blah - what a bore" from some incredibly lame voice, I can't even count. And the nonsense they blather - you would think that americans would write better conversation. It would seem that they spent their time writing tomes and tomes of useless books rather than spending quality time developing the characterization of the NPCs inhabiting "Oblivion".

4) Glitches: Bad ones. One time, the load screen appeared, and the PS3 simply froze. I actually had to unplug the system to unfreeze it. That's really bad.Clipping issues abound, particularly when swimming in caves, but this is to be expected. Sometimes, weird stuff happens (a soldier walking on air attacked and killed me, because I couldn't guard from his attacks). This is expected somewhat - I've never found a PC game without such glitches, and in the end, mostly nonfatal. However, I don't like anything that freezes up my entire system.

While a couple of the points might be nitpicky, the first is not. The leveling system is an abomination. I can't fault the developers too much for this - they were trying to make a truly non-linear experience, the holy grail of RPGs. But, the leveling system is a complete and total failure. The fact is, there is NO reason that my character should be weaker because he levels. None. And yet, here we are.

Long story short - this is a fine game, and one of the best for the PS3. But it isn't without its major problems. A player might become overwhelmed if he isn't careful with the leveling.

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