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Amazon Maximum Age: 20 years Amazon Minimum Age: 204 months Binding: Video Game Brand: Bethesda EAN: 0710425392849 ESRB Age Rating: Mature Feature: Includes Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine expansions Label: Bethesda Manufacturer: Bethesda Model: 39284 Platform: Xbox 360 Publisher: Bethesda Release Date: September 10, 2007 Sales Rank: 152 Studio: Bethesda
Features:
Includes Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine expansions
Product Description: On the heels of the amazing success of the original game, which has earned countless awards from publications around the world and won numerous Game of the Year and RPG of the Year awards, comes the enriched and expanded Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition. This new product will allow players who have never played the 2006 Game of the Year to experience Oblivion for the first time with additional content. Included with the original game is the official expansion, The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, and the downloadable content, Knights of the Nine. In addition, gamers can continue their existing games of Oblivion and experience the new quests and areas offered by the expansion and downloadable content. ESRB rated RP for Rating Pending
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - The Best Xbox 360 RPG
This is an amazing game. So many different things going on and different paths you can take. I hope they make another one for the Xbox 360 like this.
Rating: - King of the Western RPGs
Oblivion is the perfect change of pace from the traditional turn-based, random encounter role playing game. The developers obviously put a lot of time and care into this game. What my wife and I enjoyed about this game is the considerable depth of non-combat skills like Alchemy (you actually go out and harvest/buy the different ingredients to make your potion) and Enchanting items. When you play through the game for the first time, the leveling system can seem overwhelming and slow, but if you can learn how to customize your character and specifically focus on leveling up certain skills at the right time, it becomes easy (though still time consuming). The additional Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansions make this game an incredible deal. Overall:
Pros:
+The most in-depth character customization of any previous RPG for the 360.
+Great voice acting courtesy of Patrick Stewart, Terence Stamp, Linda Carter, etc. Overall high production quality.
+In-depth skill/leveling system.
+Great real-time combat system with swords, axes, hammers, bows, and magic. Combat relies more on skill than sheer level statistics.
+Very large open world to explore. Many hidden ruins and caves make this believable world a perfect escape from real life.
+Quests offer good variety and are very fun.
Cons:
+Enemies are scaled to level up as you do, minimizing the feeling of ever becoming super-powerful. (This can be fixed by lowering the difficulty later on).
+Enemy difficulty doesn't often make sense (at the highest levels, the Goblin Warlord is the toughest character, whereas the strongest demons from Oblivion itself are weak in comparison).
+The omniscience of the law is very annoying. If you kill someone, they know about it instantly and chase you down no matter where you are.
Rating: - Flawed Gem
After hearing a lot of great things about Oblivion and playing Morrowind in the past, I had high hopes for this next-gen sequel. I have been playing the game for about 20 hours so far and although it has been a lot of fun, there are a ton of flaws that really hinder the enjoyment of this game.
For example, the movement system is the same as Morrowind's. There is no improvement there, which means that you still get stuck on a wall or "float" over the land when your guy should be standing. The latter mostly happens coming out of water, or when walking on a mountainside which honestly should have been refined. When you actually view the third-person view, it looks like your guy is "floating" over the land. There is no realness to your character's movement. In fact, from the start of the game, you can pretty much jump as high as an NPC's head. I'm not against being able to jump high. I'm just saying, the movement system is unrefined and feels very last-last-gen.
The game has crashed for me about 4 times so far during a load scene, and once during the regular game. The music just stops and the system becomes unresponsive. This is a brand new Xbox360 Elite I bought in September and I fear for the damage this game could be causing to the system. I have installed the expansions and the game itself to the hard drive with this GOTY package.
Something particularly annoying is the sneaking system. You can be hidden while sneaking and pickpocket, and magically every single person in town is instantly aware of your actions. A guard walks in and yells at you, and then you run outside and the whole town is after you. A majority of the realism flaws of Oblivion lie in the characters' apparent telepathic abilities. It just doesn't happen this way.
A funny example is a quest for the Dark Brotherhood where you're sent to assassinate the other people in the house. Whenever you kill a person, the other people instantly know that it has been done with their dialogue, but they don't react to you doing it. This is extremely odd. When I was down to the last person, I spoke to him and he was like "Well I know I am no murderer, and there are only the 2 of us left, so that means--" and then I stabbed him with the Sufferthorn causing his corpse to fly into the ceiling and fall upon the corpse of a previous victim. Yeah, he was sleeping in a bed like 3 feet away. This was extremely funny but in all honesty, the game should have been tweaked a bit more to prevent this stuff.
I probably spent the last 10 hours as a Vampire, struggling to regain mortality... It took a couple hours to find all the ingredients and parts so that the woman would make the cure. The Vampire system was well done, quite annoying though. It shows the same story popups after you sleep all the time, and that can get repetitive.
The AI is probably some of the worst I have seen in an RPG in a very long time. The persuasion system is a nice little minigame to help you get into someone's good graces, but if you're a vampire who hasn't fed on a person lately, nobody will like you. That makes no sense, right? If you feed it should turn you into a monster, not the other way around. But yes, you must feed on sleeping folks just to keep yourself looking presentable for your gullible friends.
There's a lot of framerate issues too, but this is to be expected with such a graphically intense game. If only they would have put more effort into revising their systems, this game could have been a lot better. It's basically just a graphical overhaul of Morrowind.
And on a last note, you can slide the difficulty slider down to nothing... It helps you get through some areas that are particularly hard, and helps you escape some of the plethora of bugs that plague this game, but it really just takes out the challenge. And yes, there is a ridiculous ton of bugs and glitches in this game. I lost about 4 hours just replaying from an earlier save a few time because of glitches. I would recommend doing your research on the glitches for the version you are going to get, and see if they are too serious or not for you to handle. If you WANT to give this game a solid chance, you may have a lot of fun... but prepare for a huge commitment with this one!
Rating: - Unbelievable Game
The luster of this game is still fresh on me as I recently finished, but I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed a gaming experience as much as this one. The depth, scenery, intriguing story, leveling options, weapons/armor, among many other things, make this one of the greatest games ever made.
I'm not just an RPG'er either. I enjoy all types of games across different platforms, but Bethesda's Elder Scrolls: Oblivion might be the best I've seen. I give the highest of recommendations to this one.
Rating: - Top of the line SOLO adventure
Oblivion is EXACTLY how I imagined an RPG should be like back in the 80's, while playing Ultimas on Commodore 64s and Atari STs.
Oblivion has weather. While there is no wind other than a constant, gentle breeze, you do get rain/thunderstorms, fog, snow (no blizzards though, because there's not much wind). You don't slip and fall on ice but the sound of your steps is different whether you walk on the road, on grass, on snow or on ice.
The world of Cyrodill is not exactly continent-size, maybe some 20-30 miles in any direction from downtown Imperial City but... what a world this is. Cities, settlements, camps, estates, roadside inns, ruins, caves, dungeons, mines, shrines. The landscape is made up of plains, hard-to-climb mountains, rivers, swamps, waterfalls, seas. You can travel on foot or you can ride a horse. You can fight your way into fame and fortune while doing good or you can sneak into other people's houses or pickpocket the unsuspecting. The guards will chase you and throw you in jail if you do illegal things but, if they like you enough, maybe they will look the other way sometimes. Powerful gods or humble people will ask you do 'little things' for them and, if you can make them happy, they will reward you according to their abilities. You can raise to the top of your profession, as a fighter, as a mage, as a thief or as an assassin or you can assemble your own little gang of dreamy crusaders so that you can fight evil and recover the relics of a legendary knight. Or you can do them all and become all, in sequence or make progress in all paths more or less simultaneously while moonlighting as a gladiator as well and, if still bored, how about helping a lady take care of the rats in her basement (that's NOT what you think) or some drunk guy at the inn get rid of the Trolls that took over his daddy's country estate? Oh and, I forgot, there's a world to save or... wait... there's TWO worlds, thanks to the Shivering Isles extension.
This game is so huge, I can't see how you could really 'finish' it. After more than 2 months of almost daily playing, I am maybe 75-80% into the main quest, half a way through the Knights of the Nine, only started the Shivering Isles adventures. I did become the realm's Chief Mage (and the titles earns me no respect from the scholar mages) and the grand master at the Fighters league, got myself 350,000 gold coins in my pocket, 2 comfortable houses and 2 nice offices, completed close to 100 quests, slaughtered 2000 creatures and hundreds of humans, murdered 4 or 5 and all but one by mistake (friendly fire), didn't even come close to the Thieves guild and, foolishly, made it impossible for me to ever join the Dark Brotherhood (these are the assassins). Also, I've never been a vampire and didn't yet start my career as a professional gladiator. I did massacre the peaceful dwellers of a small village but I did that under the influence of some drugs that made them look to me like bloody Orcs - that was the price to pay for infiltrating and destroying the source of that scourge. Oh, and while briefly in the land of Dementia - or was it Mania? - I did, willingly, push buttons that caused a few careless adventurers to go insane and I watched as they were becoming so. I humiliated a lovely princess - or was it a duchess? - and I killed so many fearsome monsters, I lost count myself but the game does keep a count so it's easy to know. In fact, the game keeps track of so many things... I could easily find out how many jokes I told, how many potions I made, how many horses I've stolen (one), how many hours I slept or how many books I read.
Well...? What do you think?
On the 'not so good' side, the game does slow down when you are fighting 4-5 monsters at the same time or when there are other things that keep the machine busy while you are fighting the baddies - like a fire burning. Loading/saving times are a bit too long but, while this is happening, you do get to read some randomly selected good advice on the screen.
The other thing that saddens me is that I don't believe the good people at Bethesda are working on the next chapter yet. I do hope that, as soon as they are done with Fallout-3, they are going to get busy with another adventure in Cyrodill or thereabouts.
- The Best Xbox 360 RPG
- Flawed Gem
