Imagine yourself
locked in a prison cell when, totally inexplicably, the emperor of your world
appears before you looking for an escape route through your cell. Naturally you
follow him with the hope of getting out only to see that he meets a nasty end at
the hands of some assassins. Before he dies, he tells you to take a message out
into the world. Okay you say, I could do that. After arriving outside in this
world however, all of a sudden you get a desire to become a thief and forget
all about the emperor and his lousy last wish.
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| Image credit: Gamefaqs |
That is Oblivion.
Or at least it’s one of many different ways that you could start it. Like
GTA:San Andreas (which I looked at a few weeks back), Oblivion is a game that
really showed off what gaming could be.
As one of the first
games to be released on the 360/PS3 generation of consoles, Oblivion set the bar
for graphics, voice acting and gameplay extremely high. It also took the RPG
genre to a new level, encompassing a huge free roaming world, with more
customisable traits than I have time to mention. TES IV blew everything before
it away.
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| Image credit: Wikipedia |
The most
impressive aspect of this game however is a point that I mentioned before: the
amount of choice you were given not just in customising your character, but
also in how the game played out was truly impressive. If you wanted to do the
main quest before touching the rest of the game, that was fine. Equally though,
if you never wanted to do the main quest, you didn’t have to, and your
experience of the game would have been at least as good.
Oblivion made the
technical jump everyone was expecting for a new generation game, but what made
it so special was the enormity of the world it put before you. And if that
wasn’t enough, it made way for a pretty special follow up as well – a certain
Skyrim, or something?
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