You may want to inform your friends and family before purchasing this game. The reason for this is clearly obvious; you will not be reachable for weeks, if not months, once you start your adventure in this fourth game of the series.
It is unprecedented that a single-player game has as much game play as Oblivion does. The Province of Cyrodil is roughly twice the size of Morrowind, with over 16 square miles to traverse in your journey.
Talking about Morrowind, it is hard to describe the scope and scale of Oblivion without bringing up the last game in the series, which received 2003 Game of the Year honors. This is because single-player open-ended RPGs don't exist on this scale. This is especially true for the PC release of Oblivion.
As if it needed the extra attention, Oblivion is the first RPG to hit the Xbox 360. This is the largest (no pun intended) release yet for the 360, and is the reason many people bought the console. Countless Xbox 360 owners, myself included, justified a purchase all the way back in November of 2005 because of this game, and rightfully so.
For what has become the standard for the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion has an insanely high amount of quests to complete in a number of varied disciplines. You can join factions, many the same as in Morrowind. These include the Fighters, Mages, and Thieves Guilds, plus the Dark Brotherhood - the Assassins Guild in the game.
It is not uncommon to have over 20 quests going at once, and the claim of over 200 hours of game play is not a marketing ploy. If you chose to ignore everything but the main questline, you will be playing Oblivion for about 30 to 40 hours. But that is a waste of your money when it comes down to it.
It seems all wishes were granted in the upgrades department since Morrowind. The map now includes a fast travel system. You can travel to any major city or any place you have already discovered right away. Not only does this do away with the need for Silt Striders from Morrowind, but also the need to walk everywhere (if you do not like to do that).
The journal was a major pain in the rear in Morrowind, even after the Xbox release of the GOTY edition. Now the journal is organized into Active, Current, and Completed quests. This makes keeping track of this epic adventure very easy.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - sal m
to your point that the main quest can be complete in 30-40 hours, i can't see why anyone would want to do that. in order to do that you'd have to ignore the majority of other goings on in the game.
in about 30 hours i've yet to scratch the surface, and thanks to contracting the vampire disease, am way to engrossed by the side quests and the scenery to even touch the main quests.
i've never been one to replay a game that i finished, but i'm already looking forward to changing characters and playing the game from a different perspective...which is an dark elf assassin.
2 - Victor Plenty
Even I've been tempted to buy a 360 for this game. Notably, that would be a much cheaper way to play it than attempting to upgrade my computer. In fact, my existing computer probably can't be upgraded enough to run Oblivion very well, if at all. That would mean spending a good chunk of change to build a new system from the ground up.
The 360 is tremendously overpriced compared to other consoles on the market right now, but it's a lot cheaper than a new computer, even if I build the whole system myself.
So I'm trying to keep myself occupied with Morrowind and other things, until some prices go down somewhere.
3 - Ken Edwards
I agree. Like I said, it would be such a waste of money to do that. Sadly, there are people who will only work on the main quest. The point was that you still get a pretty standard RPG if you only do the main quest. If you do everything else though, well, that is over 200 hours.
I am a vampire now too. I got it less than 10 hours into the game. I have even completed the quest to cure it, though I do not think I will be drinking the potion any time soon.
Morrowind was the same way, I know I will play through it again. I am an Imperial Night at the moment, but will be trying either a pure Mage or Battle Mage next, and likely an Argonian.
4 - sal m
the vampire cure quest is giving me fits...i cannot find the soul gems that are supposed to be in certain dungeons...there are secret doors that are supposed to be in specific areas of these dungeons, but i cannot for the life of me find them...and i don't want to just go and buy them all...that seems too easy.
and victor, i disagree that the 360 is overpriced...if you use it as much as you should, the 360 is a bargain. it's not how much you spend, but the return on your investment that matters...between this game, ghost recon and condemned you'll get your money's worth from this console.
5 - Ken Edwards
Yes indeed. I originally thought that $400 was overpriced. But not after seeing the killer app: Xbox Live Arcade. And no, I am not kidding. Condemned, GRAW, and Oblivion are all pretty good reasons too, of course.
Sal - there are soul gems at the Arcane University first floor. Three of them for your picking. I did find some in dungeons but I ended up buying them. There is a money glitch (that will get patched) once you complete the quest. You get 1000 gp for completing the quests, which does not account for the cost of five soul gems.
But you can sell the cure potion for a pretty penny ;)
6 - Victor Plenty
XBox Live isn't a killer app for people like me who still use dialup to access the Intertron from home. If I buy this hefty-priced box any time soon, it'll be for Oblivion and not much else.
7 - Lenard
Big problem with Oblivion is that the xbox360's hard drive can get scrambled and pretty much doom the box we have all come to love so much... sad sad day---
8 - Victor Plenty
Is Cyrodill really only 16 square miles? I seem to recall reading the game world in Daggerfall was the size of Great Britain. Granted, much of that game world was computer-generated, while everything for Morrowind and Oblivion had to be built by hand. Still, it seems they'd want to make the game world bigger than 16 square miles, and judging by my experiences there so far, Morrowind has a lot more than 8 square miles to explore.
9 - Ken Edwards
I thought I said more than 16 square miles? That figure does not include all the Oblivion Gates, caves, ruins, etc. That is just the overworld. So yes, it is bigger than 16 square miles. And it is the biggest TES game yet.
Also everything in Oblivion was not built by hand. The forests are all randomly generated. The land mass is always the same size of course, but not the forests.
Lenard - I have yet to hear of any serious hard drive failure because of this game. There is a way to delete the cache (hold A while starting the system) but beyond that there have been no problems reported that are any different from playing any other 360 game.
10 - Victor Plenty
Well, "over 16 square miles" would indicate somewhere between 16 and 17 square miles, by my reading, and usually closer to 16. If it were more than 16-1/2, the usual boast would be "almost 17 square miles!"
But perhaps I've been reading too much marketing copy.
11 - anon
just wanted to make a quick comment concerning the "randomly generated" forests, since this was something that I was especially interested in. Actually, the forests were not randomly generated. Bethesda worked with a team of environmental scientists to develop algorithms for forest growth, and sort of "grew" the forests based on some parameters and the topology of the land. Although not done by hand, it certainly wasn't random. Some might say it's even better than by hand.
12 - Victor Plenty
Sounds extremely cool, Anon. Can you provide any links to more information about their algorithms for generating forest environments?
13 - Ken Edwards
Well, by 'random' I meant 'not modeled by hand.' and by definition, I still call that random. Because if you play the game again (start a new game) then the forests will be generated, or grown, differently. I call that random, but that is just me.
There is no way the forests could have been hand planted. They are just too big. I know they licensed the software, but do not know from who either.
Victor - heh, marketing... anyways. I would say the amount of Oblivion Gates, caves, ruins, and all other stuff that is not part of the overworld has got to constitute another square mile or more. As for the exact number, I have no idea. I don't even think Bethesda has even taken the time to calculate it. I don't think anyone really cares that much.
When I first started playing the game, I did not think it was bigger than Morrowind, but now that I am into the game pretty far, it sure is a lot bigger, with a lot more to explore outside of just walking around the overworld.
I believe High Rock and Hammerfell in Daggerfall look to be the size of Morrowind, but didn't come close. But then it has been a long time since I played that game.
Also, I was referring to the Xbox Live Arcade as being the killer app, not Live itself. Although Live is done very well, it is nothing without the games. Of course you still need broadband to download the XBLA games ;)
You should also consider games like Condemned, GRAW, Dead or Alive 4, even Kameo as reasons other than just Oblivion for the purchase of a 360. But I don't blame ya. I bought it for Oblivion, it just happened to have a bunch of other games on it that I wanted too.
14 - Victor Plenty
According to the Elder Scrolls web site, the game world in Daggerfall is about the size of Great Britain. That's over 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand) square miles. Presumably, the playable area in Arena is even larger, because it "encompassed the entire world of Tamriel." In both of those cases, most of it is computer generated, of course.
Obviously, Morrowind and Oblivion are nowhere near that size. But I definitely got the impression they'd both be much bigger than a mere 16 or so square miles, so I wondered where that figure came from, and why it's showing up in so many online reviews. A little more poking around on the Elder Scrolls site reveals another interesting little factoid: "Morrowind is about 0.0001% the landmass of Daggerfall."
By my calculations, that makes the Morrowind game world a little over 5 square miles. So apparently the figure you've all been quoting is accurate, and the fact Morrowind feels so much bigger to me as I'm exploring its world is simply a testament to how richly it was designed.
15 - Me!
How much do the grand soul gems cost? Ive spent to much time looking, I wanna go out and buy them.
16 - Al
Ken - I don't know that Lenard is totally right. I hope not, but Oblivion most definitely scrambles the order of my saved games. It's driving me crazy. The people at Bethesda don't have a solution, either.
17 - Chad
The vampire cure quest has screwed up the whole game for me now. I got all the ingredients, returned the blood-staind dagger and the Henthral vampire ashes that the old witch, BUT what she doesn't mention in the list of topics when I speak with her is the 2 blades of bloodgrass. This is a defect/glitch..everytime I talk to her now the only options are 'Cure for the Vampire Disease' and 'Rumors'. There's nothing I can do, I keep my saves down to live 3 at a minumum and I cannot go back and try to start the cure quest thing over again. This makes me wanna stop playing now cos it sucks being a vampire.
18 - Ken Edwards
I disagree. I have played the entire game a vamp.
19 - Adam
The same has happened to me Chad and I must say it is a very annoying glitch as I dont want to be a vampire. Apart from that the game has been great so far. If anyone knows of any other way to cure myself please share but I doubt there will be.
20 - Victor Plenty
A bit of a correction is needed to one of my earlier statements. For some reason I misremembered the land area of Great Britain. In reality it's over 80,000 square miles. This means my calculation for the area of the game world in Morrowind should have come out to just over 8 square miles, making Cyrodiil roughly twice its size, just as Ken stated in the main article.