Sleepless in Cyrodiil
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has finally arrived on the PS3, and even a year late, it's still one of the biggest sinkholes of time you can buy.
Published: April 14, 2007
This is the kind of freedom that Oblivion affords, and for the majority of non-PC PlayStation gamers, it's going to be something they've never seen before. I probably should reinforce that distinction, of course; if you haven't played the game yet on any platform, this is the one to grab simply because of how much it packed by default, and how well it all runs right out of the CD case. If you have played the game before -- especially if you still own it, it's obviously wiser to drop the cash for the Knights of the Nine and brand new Shivering Isles expansions, the latter of which is still up in the air as far as when it will hit the PS3. Right, but back to all that freedom.
Because the game allows you effectively craft your own path right from the start, it's entirely possible to spend dozens of hours before you ever take the first main story quest, and while that can create some issues if you don't bulk up on strong gear right from the start (completing the Knights of the Nine quests will net you some awesome, gear, however. Because the main storyline's enemies scale along with your level but your AI buddies don't, you can sometimes run into some issues where monsters will wipe the floor with them and leave you to fight alone. Key characters can't actually die (they just pass out), but it can still be annoying.
In fact, the whole leveling system in the game is a little confusing at first. See, once you've picked your character type and their base abilities, doing actions in any of those categories (say, jumping all over the place to raise your Athletics skill or using your shield to block incoming attacks) levels them up individually. When you reach a combined 10 levels, you get the prompt to "meditate on what you've learned" (read: get your ass into a bed), and from there you can pick three skills from the ones you leveled up to get a further boost.
For folks who've played more traditional Japanese RPGs, the absence of a leveling grind might be a little off-putting at first, but it really does allow for more control in how you bulk up your character. Even halfway through the game if you decide to switch roles to something a little more stealthy or a brute force tank, for the most part you still can. It'll take a few more hours of specific skill leveling to do it, but it's possible. It's also possible to level yourself into a corner if you don't know how you're increasing skills, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Fortunately, if you get too stuck, the game has a real-time difficulty slider that can all but instantly knock down a seemingly impossible enemy.
So then what you're left with is a very obviously Western-themed swords and sorcery epic; a bazillion quests (all neatly organized to allow you to call up waypoints by making a quest active at any time after getting them since few have an actual time requirement), tons of people to meet, what seems like hundreds of little hidden caves and farms and Oblivion gates to discover and a big ol' quest to close the gates of Oblivion and get the successor to the King back onto the throne. And it's there, all of it, for you to explore and digest at your own pace, effectively giving you the closest thing you can to an all-solo offline massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Not surprisingly, it's addictive as hell.
I know I keep coming back to this, but it is important: if you've played the game at any point during the year between the original releases and the PS3 one, none of this will surprise you, and to be quite honest, this isn't necessarily the game for you. Yes, Bethesda used the time between releases to improve the game as a whole; load times are markedly improved (especially if you were someone with a lower-end PC), the visuals were given a little nudge to help improve the transition from the high detail textures around the player out to stuff in the distance, and it seemed like the faces in the game lost a little of their pudginess.
