The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Good
The graphics engine is finally good. It actually runs faster than Morrowind while managing to cram in tons more detail and kilometers of viewing distance.

The landscape looks much more realistic than in Morrowind.

Radiant AI is an improvement from NPCs just standing there.

The Bad
My biggest complaint is that the enemies scale with you. This means that at the beginning you'll be fighting bandits with leather armor and weapons and then towards the end you'll fight bandits with glass armor and weapons and higher levels. And it's not just that there's a higher probability of meeting tougher bandits. At each level there's only one set of bandits that you'll meet. You'll never meet bandits with cool equipment at lower levels. And this goes for all enemies. This makes leveling kind of pointless since any enemy you meet will be adjusted to your level. But that's actually a bit broken. See, if you invest in combat skills it'll be easy, but if you invest in magery, or heck, the more social skills, it'll be really hard and even impossible. This is a really dumb and game-breaking feature, and I don't understand what they were thinking at all. There are mods out there that address this but none fix it completely.

Equipment scales as well... that's right, the artifact's power depends on which level you are when you find it.

The graphics engine is good, but the graphics themselves are kind of boring. The Imperial City is truly something to behold, but only when viewed from afar. Inside the city everything looks bland, thick, cartoony, unreal. It just feels... wrong. Morrowind had beautiful, varied architecture, from the familiar Imperial to the breathtaking Telvanni organic strongholds. In Oblivion it's all Imperial. The greatest variety is stone vs. wood buildings. Humans look absolutely awful. Not awful as in low-poly. Rather, they look like they all have Down's syndrome. Seriously.

The physics engine doesn't add anything to the game at all. I don't see why they included it.

The interface is terrible. Big ugly fonts, lots of ugly icons, and worst of all, an omnipresent GPS that shows nearby points of interest and with an arrow to your next objective. You can mod the GPS out, but it's pointless since none of the quest-givers tell you where to go, as they just assume you'll follow the friendly arrow.

Mana now regenerates on the fly, not just when sleeping. This makes mages much less tactical and spells into just another sort of mundane weapon. The levitation spell is gone.

There are only two types of dungeons: Goblin caves and ghost caves. And they all look exactly the same.

Whereas Morrowind felt more like a coherent world where things happen if you are there or not (even though they didn't really), Oblivion felt like I was playing an arcade game, where every single object and feature was there for some carefully thought-out (but sometimes badly implemented) gameplay element.

There's tons more to say of course, but I'll stop here.

The Bottom Line
A dumbed-down cartoony Morrowind. It's not outright bad. Certainly it's better than some of the more recent RPGs, but it could have been so much more.

The Good
Welcome to the best RPG released in the last few years. What makes it so great? The prime factor is the freedom of choice. At the end of the tutorial you are left to a world that you are free to do as you will. You can explore the magnificent and extremely huge world of elder scrolls. You can be a fighter in the dreaded Arena. You can join one of the many guilds for the adventurers and be a part of Tamriel's history. You can delve in to deep dungeons and uncover riches you can hardly imagine. Or maybe you should just climb to the next hill and watch the sun rise. The point is the game lets you do anything and everything that you want, any time you want. And of course it lets you breath the atmosphere of Tamriel, a detailed RPG world, in a graphic quality that will not be matched in years to come. These two traits make this game a real classic and a worth game to play. Actually they make it a star in the night sky.

The Bad
Still there are things, in my opinion, diminishes this game. The game on the surface is detailed and beautiful. But that stays in the surface. One of the most important parts of RPGs, the character system is a serious mistake. While it is usage based (To improve a skill you need to use it, The more you use it, the better you become doing it.), the system and the game world does not leave room for flexibility. The only way to gold is through dungeons. The shops does not allow trade opportunities. They are only places to sell your loot. Also thieving is worthless, simply because you would mostly be finding worthless junk inside other NPCs houses. Some NPCs do have a daily routine. Some don't. It is easy to find tavern keepers who stand on the same spot 7/24. One other point is the difficulty level, that is for lack of a better word. The game world (and I mean world) advances in levels according to your progress. The city watch is always a few levels higher than you, thus your character who can beat the proverbial dragon is beaten down by mere town watch. The same is true for the bandits on the roads. While they start with fur armor, in no time they will be wearing mithril or even elven armor and weapons and skills to match. But this has another down side. The loot, the monsters in the world outside, inside the dungeons. They are all leveled according to you. So a first level character can go to any place on Tamriel, enter any dungeon he wishes, and he could finish it. And when he returns there after, say... 10 levels, he will be facing real monsters, but still he will be able to finish the dungeon. Simply said the difficulty is linear at best. The failure that comes with this linearity is the skill system. In this kind of setting you "must" get the best from each level up. Which forces you to power gaming, keeping papers around to write needless stat changes, or for others simply cheat. Still most of these things are design decisions and not flaws. While I prefer a deep RPG environment, maybe other would like to see more action.

The Bottom Line
To sum up this game is a star that shines brightly through all those games in the shelves. However it is a real classic, it is far from sating the thirst of a hardcore RPG fan.

The Good
This is the best RPG I have ever played, and I am an RPG nut. The expanse covered in Oblivion, while not as big as the world in Morrowind, is still quite sizable, and the game developers used the space assigned to them to the maximum. This means that, while there is less land, there is more to do, and more to have fun with. Also, you can spend hours just trying to customize your character and his house - I spent an hour and a half trying to put my armor on display the right way! I used to be a Morrowind fan, but Oblivion definitely puts it to shame, not only expanding character customization, but allowing for a world that completely immerses the gamer. One could sit down and start a game at nine A.M., and the next time they look up, they will see it's night time. A surefire way to enjoy your PC or 360.

The Bad
...? not... like... oblivion???

The only problem was that it froze a few times, and that is not a problem if you save a lot.

The Bottom Line
This game is possibly THE best game I have ever played. It has consumed my life, and will continue to do so until they make an Elder Scrolls V.