Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

How do you evaluate a product that is over 300 hours of potential gameplay?  At what point do you say “Yes, I've seen enough to evaluate this game?”  At what point can you tell your readers that you've done enough to give the game a fair shake?  All of these questions came into play in the combined 140 hours of gameplay that I've put into The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  Honestly, I'll be spending many more hours in the world of Tamriel, but I think I can finally say that I've done enough for an in-depth review. 

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, or just Oblivion for short is the follow-up to the smash hit of 2002, Morrowind.  Work began on Oblivion far before Morrowind hit the shelves, and this was made abundantly clear from the first time I stepped into the sunlight on the continent of Cyrodil.  Given the open-ended, mod-friendly, and incredibly complex subsystems that made up the behemoth that was Morrowind, how would Todd Howard and the gang ever make something that could compare?  I'm here to tell that they have.  Oblivion not only raises the bar, it breaks it. 

As you've undoubtedly seen from the countless other reviews on the net and in magazines, Oblivion is an epic RPG with the most expansive and detailed world ever released on a console or PC, ever.  That isn't something I'd say lightly unless it was entirely true, and it is.  The high-arching storyline starts off in true Elder Scrolls fashion – you find yourself in prison.  That is where the fun beings...

For this review, despite being logged in the PC section, we will cover the 360, an average PC, a higher-end PC, and my brand new Dell XPS M170 gaming laptop.  I feel this will help you make an educated decision as to whether you have enough horses to make the game enjoyable, or whether the console version is for you.

The first system that I played Oblivion on was the Xbox 360.  With system specs that do not change, and a graphics subsystem that can be tweaked without regard to driver incompatibility, you can easily see that this game pushes the Xbox 360 very hard.  In fact, the very first scene of the game – an interior of a jail cell, gives the Xbox 360 a few moments of pause.  If I had to guess, I'd estimate that roughly 95% of the game runs at 30fps.  The 360, when compared to the configurable detail levels of the PC version, looks like it has all of the default configuration options turned up to the maximum.  There is no better example of this than when you first exit the sewers.  Looking around you can see a dock that is rendered to perfection, several varieties of grass and flowers that blow gently in the breeze, and your own weapon shown with incredible detail.  As you gaze across the fantastic semi-transparent lake, your eyes begin to drift over the distant hills.  The textures across the lake are obviously just past the threshold of the draw distance, and as such have been mipmapped to look like something out of a flight sim when your plane is at 10,000 feet.  You can tell it is grass, but you'll have to get a lot closer to get any real detail.  After about 3 hours you'll completely tune these areas out for the most part.  The game is phenomenal to behold and is visually stunning, albeit slightly shaky in some of the outside areas.  One particular area had three open gates, roughly 25 people fighting, and it was raining hard at the time.  Certainly enough to bring most systems to their knees, but the Xbox 360 version didn't dip into anywhere near unplayable levels.

The second system I played through portions of Oblivion with was a P4 2.5Ghz Desktop with 1GB of RAM and a 6600 LE 256mb graphics card.  The graphics card isn't even on the official 'supported' list, and I was just over the recommended horsepower on the processor side.  Given that this is a Dell desktop workstation, I was wondering if the game would run at all.  Surprisingly, despite the low-end sub-100 dollar video card, the game was playable!  There were more portions that the system dipped into the 20 to 25 fps range, or slightly lower than the 360 had, but it was by no means unplayable.  This came as a shock to me as I expected the system to simply melt with the amount of detail that I asked it to render.  I ran everything at Medium detail levels and at a resolution of 1024x768. 

My home desktop served as the high-end test of the game.  My rig is an AMD 64 3600+ with 2GB of PC3200 Corsair RAM and a 7800 GTX video card.  While it is not bleeding edge, it is certainly more powerful than the average machine.  I am happy to report that I could bump up the resolution significantly and max out the available options, both in the menus and in the .ini files, and still had power to spare to install some of the fantastic mods and ini options to push the draw distance past the previously mentioned lake mipmapping.  I ran the debug mode every so often to check my framerate, and it rarely dipped below the 60fps threshold. 

As a graduation present to myself, I picked up a powerful Dell M170 laptop.  The laptop has a Centrino 2.16Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a GeForce 7800 GTX with 256mb of onboard RAM.  While the Centrino just meets the minimum specification for the recommended system, the laptop was able to handle the game in widescreen, with the same options as my desktop machine.  There were a few frame hitches here and there, but I'd estimate the game rarely, if ever, dropped into the 30 fps range.  Unlike so many other games, it is possible to visit the world of Tamriel on your portable gaming machine.

So many other reviews have gone into the bells and whistles that power the game.  You've probably been beaten about the face and ears with buzzwords such as Bump Mapping, Normal Mapping, and High Dynamic Range Imaging.  Suffice it to say that the teams at Bethesda have spit polished and added every gloss of buzzword candy coating that is possible without pushing the graphic requirements of the game into the upper ionosphere.  Nothing looks as good as Oblivion – nothing. 

The score for the graphics section assumes that you have an average machine.  You'll get fantastic graphic quality with minimum hitching.  If you have more heat under the hood, you'll get less hitches, but the game will probably look just as good as the mid-range PC if you are using the same settings.  If you are playing the 360 version, you can enjoy the game without thinking about tweaking any of the graphics option.   The game has been optimized to the best of the hardware's ability, and although the background textures can be muddy, and there is more pop-in on the console than the PC versions, it is amazing what they have accomplished.

The incredible production value of Oblivion isn't just limited to the graphic engine.  The folks at Bethesda have collected some A-list star power including Linda Carter, Sean Bean, and Patrick Stewart, as well as some local talent to flesh out every character in the game.  While you will notice some repeats (which are sometimes mismatched) after you hit the 30+ hour mark, the voice work serves to bring an already expansive world even more alive.  There is nothing out there to compare it to – nobody has been this ambitious with their voice work to date. 

The sound effects in Oblivion are excellent.  The sound of  a shield deflection varies depending on the weapon that impacts it.  Similarly, an arrow impact in wood has a resounding impact sound.  Just as there is incredible detail in the overall game world, there is incredible detail in the individual sound aspects.  The only issue I found was that the music often overpowered the voices until I turned it down, and that occasionally the NPCs were strikingly nonchalant in their conversation. As fire and hell rained down around them they might be talking about their latest encounter with a mudcrab.  In fact, I heard the 'filthy mudcrab' line more than any other.  It seemed that the conversation tree system in Radiant AI had slipped a little bit, making everyone obsessed with the sea creatures. 

Morrowind was Bethesda's push on to the original Xbox and attempted to bring a PC interface to the console world.  While the game was ultimately very successful, the control interface was cumbersome at best.  As Bethesda built Oblivion, it was always made as a dual launch for PC and Xbox 360.  This ensured that the interfaces between the two games would be almost exactly the same.  The end result is a control scheme for the Xbox 360 that allows for mouselike-control using the analog sticks, and a surprisingly easy to mod PC system that was simply too console-like. 

The Xbox 360 control system utilizes every button and trigger on the controller.  Movement and camera swing are handled by the analog sticks, and blocking and attacking are mapped to the triggers.  The right bumper allows you to cast a spell, regardless of what is in your hand – a marked improvement over the Morrowind model.  The Y button interacts with the environment, whereas the A, B, and X allow you to jump, sheath and unsheath your weapon, or access the inventory.

As I  mentioned, the PC version of Oblivion is surprisingly easy to mod.  The entirety of the control interface is coded in XML.  Within a week, fans had adjusted the controls to show a vast amount more data at once, as well as adding new functionality such as a health bar to measure weapon fatigue.  Within a few weeks, people had replaced the map with a frayed color one, as well as adding new functions to the quest and inventory system.  It is incredible, the ingenuity of the mod community – they made fantastic adjustments to an already great system to make it even better.  Bravo!

In the end, if you have the PC version, you'll feel like the interface is at least two times too big.  It is best to mod it so you can view more of the map and your inventory.  If you are running the Xbox 360 version, odds are that it'll still feel too big, but in that instance, you are stuck with it.

There is simply no way to sum up over 300 hours of potential gameplay in a few short paragraphs.  The game is set in an area that is roughly 16 square miles.  This doesn't sound like a great deal of space, until you have to walk from town to town.  The world is absolutely massive, and there are over 200 hand-crafted dungeons that you don't even have to set foot in if you don't want to.   The primary mission is roughly 25 hours long, but the odds are that you'll be so busy doing other things that you'll end up neglecting that mission until you have, as I did, risen to the top of nearly every guild, and amassed several fully-furnished houses.  The game has a depth to it that will drag you in and hold you captive for longer than any other title you have probably ever played. 

The game is not without issue, however.  There are balance issues in the game.  While it is true that you can play the game as a barbarian with heavy armor, wielding a two-handed axe, or as a shadow-dwelling rogue who snipes his enemies from a distance with a bow, there are balance issues that become evident by the end-game.  Having played both ends of the spectrum, as well as somewhere in the middle, I found that the fighter classes and magic using classes have a far easier time with the end bosses and enemy encounters required by the main quest when they reach the mid 20s levels of the game. Despite wielding a very powerful magic bow, with high skill, and with magic arrows, I still found that latter encounters involved me taking a very long shot with my bow, scoring triple damage, and then running around like the Benny Hill show around tables and cave columns to throw enough arrows into my target to finish them.  My warrior on the other hand could go toe to toe and rarely had any trouble in single or multi combat situations.  It was at roughly level 25 that my last 10 or so levels of suffering with the bow came to an end – I now had the skill to knock an opponent down.  Once I could knock my opponent to the ground, I was able to dispatch of an enemy almost as rapidly as my warrior, but without all the heavy exertion.   My point with this story is that the intervening levels between when I started as an archer, and when I received the knockdown trait, could have used some fine tuning and balance. 

The game rewards repetition.  If you want to get better at blocking, simply block an enemy attack more often – you'll earn points towards mastery.  If you want to become a fantastic healer, simply use restorative magic often and you'll slowly move that direction.  While it does make sense that swinging a sword would make me better at the blade skill, it never made sense to me how taking a hit on my armor made me better at wearing it.  As such, you'll end up probably standing in the face of the enemy and simply taking hits to 'learn' how to better wear your armor.  Overall, effectively 90+% of the skills work as intended.  While there are rumors of the mercantile skill needing a little boost, the improvements to the skill tree and how it functions are very well done. 

There is an almost paralyzing number of choices in this game.  You could almost split this one game world into two or three games with the sheer amount of content.  In addition, Bethesda has already made three pay-to-play mods available at a price less than the cost of a cup of coffee.  This is the type of title where the main quest isn't where all of the fun is – interacting and becoming a part of this world is where the true game unfolds.  If you pick this game up, don't expect to put it down for a great while.

In a day where 8 to 10 hour games are the norm, and epic 40+ hour linear roleplaying games are few and far between, Bethesda has brought a product that would clock in at over 300 hours to complete every quest just once. Playing through the game again as a different class, or trying to buy a house in every town will take even longer. Many games sport some great replay value, but Oblivion operates on a scale all of its own.  The few glitches in the game are easy to overlook when the experience is this fun. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was slated to be a launch title for the Xbox 360, but was delayed from the original November 22nd launch date to the March 20th release date. It was impossible to predict the level of success that this title would have. While the game does have a few flaws, there is simply nothing else out there like Oblivion. This is your early contender for Game of the Year, regardless of platform.

Gaming Trend Score

92

1. Graphics: 93
2. Audio: 92
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 90
5. Value/Replay: 96
6. OVERALL:92