Wednesday 28 Mar 2007

Oblivion - what can be said about this game? Well, it’s the fourth in the Elder Scrolls series, it was developed by Bethesda Softworks, published by 2K Games and quite frankly, it’s BRILLIANT! In fact, it’s quite possibly one of the best RPG’s to date. True to the genre of Role Playing Game, the player is able to play the role of a character any way he or she wishes. To make things even more appealing, the player does all this in an unbelievably large, beautifully created world. The result is a virtually unrestricted game that is great to look at just as much as it’s great to play.

Places to go, people to see and things to do in Oblivion

Well, you just may be wondering exactly how big this game really is. Take it from me - it’s huge, not only due to the sheer size of the world but also due to the depth of the game play. You view the world through the eyes of your character in a first person perspective with an additional option of a third person view. You live in the province of Cyrodiil, a typical medieval setting. You won’t find any guns, vehicles or other hi-tech gear in this game. That’s not to say some abilities found in a Tom Clancy game won’t be found here. Some of these hi-tech like abilities can be obtained through magic or special abilities rather than gadgets.

Now getting back to the subject at hand - Cyrodiil. During your travels, you’ll come across several major cities, each with its own unique architectural style, NPC’s and side quests. Apart from cities, there are numerous towns, dungeons, caves, forests, mountains and oblivion portals to explore. You use your in-game map to find your way around the world as well as keep track of the places you’ve been. In addition to your map you have a very handy compass, permanently displayed on your HUD, used to pinpoint quest specific locations. With all the traveling you’ll be doing between the major cities, you’ll find yourself discovering new places quite frequently. When and how you discover these new places is mostly circumstantial. It depends on where you are and what you’re doing at the time.

The game gives you the option to “fast travel” between places you’ve already discovered. This means that you can automatically travel to your desired destination in a matter of seconds (in real-time), which is a really awesome feature if you want to keep your game fast paced. As great as the fast travel feature is, manually traveling long distances isn’t unrewarding as this is generally the time you will discover those unexplored dungeons, which are worth crawling through if you enjoy finding treasure. In game-time, when you fast travel, it would be the same as if you had traveled manually without any stops along the way. The game calculates this time using two things, your means of travel (by horseback or by foot) and the shortest path between starting point and destination. Staying with the concept of time - let me explain it in a bit more detail.

Time in the game world is basically the same as it is in reality, except in the game world time is significantly sped up. They’ve gone into so much detail that the game even has its own days of the week and months of the year. There is also a vast, visual difference between morning, noon and night as well as the transition from one to the next. In addition to time, they’ve also incorporated weather into the game - sunshine, rain and snow. The weather is nice, but the fact that it’s random is even better. When traveling long distances, you never quite know for sure what the weather is going to be like on the other side. Needless to say, these features give the game that added sense of realism, which can be greatly appreciated when watching the sun rise or roughing it through a rainstorm.

As far as looks are concerned, the game looks stunning, however, being an Xbox 360 game, you would expect nothing less. You’ll find yourself stopping to appreciate a great deal of the game’s visual aspects - from the lush, green forests to the beautiful sunsets viewed off harbour city docks, notwithstanding the hellish, fiery Planes of Oblivion. All the characters in the game are detailed and believable (for the most part). Their expressions are realistic and the voice acting is spot-on, however, as you speak to more people you will start noticing common voices used for many different characters. The artificial intelligence used in the game is great but it’s definitely not the best. I like the fact that all the NPC’s have their own lives to live. Granted, most of their lives are very simple which involve nothing but sleep, work and the transit from one to the other. Even so, they still go about their day-to-day routines, which is nice because when you see people walking around town, they usually have somewhere to be.

Most of the time, you will be a part of the conversations that happen in the game, but now and again you will be an observer. If NPC’s meet in the street they could very well greet each other and both find out how the other is doing. Sometimes you’ll notice that their conversations are very badly constructed and flow terribly. With that said, it’s still worth eavesdropping on NPC’s talking amongst themselves. This could lead to gossip, which eventually could lead to more quests. There’s more I feel that they could have done to improve the AI but there is one thing in particular that really annoyed me - the NPC’s don’t show any emotion when someone dies. They just go on as if nothing has happened. Here’s an example, I arrived at one of the major cities and as I walked through the main gates I noticed a guy running from the guards. The guards eventually caught up with him and killed him on the spot. Thereafter they continued patrolling, as normal. The guy just lay there in the middle of the street and nobody really seemed to notice. One or two people went to check on his dead body but just walked off as normal afterwards. I think the corpse stayed in the same spot for about two weeks (in game-time) until one day it wasn’t there anymore. Even though it’s possible, something like this shouldn’t happen very often. All in all, they’ve done a good job with the AI but if you go out of your way to test it, you will notice things that they could have done better.