The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Good
Everything about this game is lovable. Bethesda has kicked it up so much. The environments are as beautiful as the character's themselves. They cleared up the fog that was forever looming in Morrowind and now you can plop up on top of a mountain and just see what you can see. The combat system is wonderful. You can hit,block,fireball and hit again. The NPCs are now voiced, so your not just talking to a mute person with paper and pencil writing their conversations. And the new mastery of your skills is incredible. New moves to learn and skills to master make this game a perfect gaming experience. Also, the addition of a compass make traveling easy, so now your not running around in circles look for a cave that's miles away from you. And the ability to ride a horse does make traveling faster.

The Bad
The only things I didn't like about Oblivion are many common problems, I guess. First, all of the characters are voiced by the same people. So you talk to a guard with a really deep voice then you go talk to a midget with the same voice. Second, the story line could have been more plentiful. You play a few very simple missions and you win. These are the only problems I see.

The Bottom Line
A must have for any and every RPG fan boy/girl. Once again Bethesda knocks us dead.

The Good
Technologically, Oblivion is stunning. After escaping the initial dungeon, you emerge onto the sunlit surface of a vast wilderness. The first thing I did was hike up the nearest mountain and try to explore into the deep wilderness. Oops! No deep wilderness, you cannot travel this direction any more. Oh well, wander around and explore the world. Nothing memorable to encounter, just generic enemies and generic dungeons.

The game is fantastic to look at, and it's exciting to see what will be done in future RPGs with the graphical features displayed in Oblivion, but as a game Oblivion is soulless and devoid of anything cool or heartwarming.

The Bad
Well, the fact that it's not really a game, it's an engine with a few half-baked RPG elements thrown in so consumers can rationalize why they just spent $70 on a terrain-modeller.

Oh yes, the SpeedTrees look good from a distance, but a cursory look reveals that each tree looks identical no matter what horizontal angle you look at it from. Trees in Oblivion are little more than glorified sprites -- not that I have anything against sprites and 2D graphics.

The Bottom Line
A waste of time and money. In the next few years we will probably see an engine like Oblivion's put to good use. People need to look back and remember what made classic RPGs great -- Drakkhen, Baldur's Gate, Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima VII -- before anything truly special can be added to this nearly-dead genre.

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.