A few years ago it seems like all my friends were playing a game called “Morrowind” – actually it was The Elder Scrolls III – Morrowind. They’d go on and on about it, how wide open it was, blah blah blah, and my eyes would glaze over and I’d go back to something more interesting (usually the beer in my hand or the thought of beer soon to be in my hand).

Just over a year ago (March 22nd, 2005, I went back and checked just for you, gentle readers of GamersInfo.net), one of my friends started a thread on our message boards about the upcoming sequel to Morrowind – The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion. Again, my eyes glazed over and I thought about beer. It didn’t seem like the kind of game that I’d play a lot of.

Then the screenshots started getting posted.

And I thought, “Wow, that’s a darn pretty game.”

Time passes.

Actually, 364 days pass from that first post. On March 21st, 2006, the game showed up on store shelves. I was out that day with a coworker as he picked it up (and another game) but I managed to avoid it. You see, at the time, I was still running a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 graphics card, and that just wasn’t going to hack it, as far as I could tell.

The same message board thread continued on. They started talking about how skills worked, what races there were, various quests. I got more and more intrigued by the game – it sounded like a huge sandbox and a lot of fun. One of my guildmates even started working on a large castle for us to put into our games.

Then I accidentally bought a Geforce 6600GT. Oops.

It arrived while I was out of town; I installed it that Tuesday night, and the next day, went and bought the Collector’s Edition. Hey, what’s $10 between friends?

Well, in Oblivion’s case, it’s a 100-some page book about the world and an Imperial coin of some sort. The book is decent, with a fake leather cover, and the coin is…uh…something else I’m going to have to move when I move into my new condo this weekend. Huzzah. And stuff. Maybe not the best $10 I’ve ever spent, but hey…uh…I guess I can afford it.

So it’s time to install the game. It comes on DVD, and you need an 8 speed DVD-ROM drive to play it. Crossing my fingers and hoping, I put it in, and viola! It installed just fine. It looked at my system, selected some default settings to the graphics, and away we went.

(I actually haven’t fiddled too much with the graphics settings. That can make me nervous. Fiddling with my World of Warcraft graphics settings just after getting the card apparently got me killed thanks to the lag of zoning I have now – but that may be server related, and will rapidly send me down an irrelevant tangent unless I shut up now.)

So you get into the game. Let’s start play.

First off – let’s make a character.

What? I don’t pick a class!

Nope. You don’t pick what type of character you’re going to be right away. You pick the race of your character first, such as dark elf, Nord, orc, cat-person, or what-have-you. You pick your sex and then do a lot of customization of your look – and, of course, come up with a name.

I made an orc. Orcs like to bash stuff!

The game begins, and you are a prisoner. I got yelled at by the guy across the hall from my cell. It was all very distressing. I didn’t even know why I was in jail!

Fortunately I didn’t need to stay in there for long. None other than the Emperor comes in, on his way to an escape tunnel, and soon you’re on a quest to save the world!

That is, if you want to do that quest. The escape acts as a tutorial, showing you how to play the game, but better yet, it also judges your actions in it and suggests what class your character might want to be – assuming you’re not a custom class. You also pick a birth sign, which can give you an advantage.

In my case, it suggested that I be a scout – a bow using, light armor wearing pansy. Errr…scout. I said, no, but thank you, and selected spellsword – a spell using, heavy armor wearing pansy. I mean, battlemage type. I cast fireballs and healing spells and wearing heavy armor and carry a sword and shield and write run-on sentences. (Hey – I’m an orc. My intelligence isn’t that high.)

I also selected “The Warrior” as my birth sign, which garnered me a bonus to strength and endurance. As I left the sewers, it asked me to confirm my decisions, and then I was out in the world.

And that’s it.

Uh.

A poor, innocent, overly aggressive mud crab got my initial aggressive tendencies straight into its shell, and then it was off to the city.

You see, you’re not just “doing a quest”. You’re living in a world. And while you, personally, don’t have to eat every few hours or sleep every night, the rest of the world does. Try to go to your local merchant at 2 AM and it’ll be closed; go pounding into an old lady’s house at noon and she may be eating lunch, or walking around town. Like in real life, get caught breaking and entering or stealing someone’s stuff – your cursor helpfully turns red when you’re going to do something illegal – and you’ll end up with a bounty on your head and guards on your butt.

Fortunately you can “wait” for X number of hours at a time if there are no enemies around. Many a night my local blacksmith has found me waiting for her as I go to sell off a load of weapons I liberated off some now-dead bandits.

As I said, you’re on a quest to save the world. But not just that one. As you go through the various cities, you’ll learn of all kinds of side quests. A woman’s husband disappeared from a closed room. A new guard captain has raised the fines to the point of destituting the citizens of a city. You find a mace with a person’s name inscribed on it.

You’ll also need support. The Imperial City has an Arena. There’s a Fighter’s Guild and Mage’s Guild, both of whom will give you support in exchange for helping them with quests. Rumors abound of a Thieves’ Guild and the Dark Brotherhood.

The gameplay on the PC is actually fairly simple – probably to help support the fact that the game is fundamentally exactly the same on the Xbox 360. You use the standard “WASD” controls to move and strafe; your mouse looks and turns. The “E” key will make you jump, something you’ll want to do often to level your acrobatics. The “T” key will let you “wait”, and is something I use a lot to see if enemies are around, since you cannot wait if there are any around. The “control” key puts you into stealth mode, which makes you quieter but slower and grants the possibility (depending on your skill) of doing extra damage from a sneak attack. The “shift” key makes you run (and both that and sneaking level as you move around).

You have 8 hot keys to bring up spells or weapons or whatever, but I found I don’t use them often. You can always hit “TAB” to bring up your inventory and which will pause the game. One screen will show your physical inventory – another your statistics – another your magic spells – and the last a map, plus your quests.

To get between towns you can either walk, or later in the game, take a horse. You can also “fast travel” – it will instantaneously put you in the next town, but time will progress in-game as if you traveled it manually (you just avoid the real life time it would take, plus the possibility of bandits, animal attacks, herbs to pick, etc.). As you wander through the countryside you find camps, ruins, caves, herbs to pick, bandits, mountain lions, and the such. The cities have guards, beggars, merchants, and others, all of whom will have different dispositions towards you. You can improve how they see you by playing the “persuasion” mini-game, or by bribery.

Speaking of min-games, that’s how lockpicking works, too. You can have it automatically try to pick a lock, or do it manually. If you do it manually, it will show you up to 5 tumblers – you maneuver a pick up and down, and when it “sets” a tumbler, you quickly left-click, and that will “set it”. If you fail, you break the pick, and up to 2 other tumblers will fall. This isn’t very well explained in the tutorial – you only run into “very easy” locks there with 1 tumbler.

Alchemy becomes pretty straight forward – you use your mortar and pestle or other alchemical device, add ingredients, and it’ll tell you what you can make.

Combat is actually surprisingly twitch based for a game like this. Each click of the mouse is an attack, and where you aim matters. You right click to block, if you have a shield. You cast spells using “c”. To shoot a bow, you equip it, hold down the left button to pull back the string, then release the shot.

As you do activities, you level in them. Each class has a set number of “major skills”. Leveling in those skills will eventually cause your character to level, too. You’ll also have minor skills that don’t affect your leveling speed. For example, as a spellsword, if I level my blade skill it’ll help me level – but not if I level mercantile or acrobatics. (However, those are still useful.) In addition, five times per level NPCs will be able to train you in a specific skill for gold.

Speaking of NPCs – the AI for the NPCs is interesting, to say the least. A lot of times they feel life-like. They go about their business, they eat meals, they sleep, they stop each other in the street and have conversations. However, it soon wears thin – you’ll hear the conversations make less and less sense. Your “allies” get in your way regularly in combat – then get mad at you if you hit them. You hit a bad guy with an arrow and stealth, to which he responds “Must’ve been the wind.”

Still, for the most part, it’s pretty immersive – as is the sound. Lockpicking demands very good sound so you can hear the quiet “click” of a set tumbler, and sneaking through caverns rewards those who stop to listen to the direction that someone is speaking from, or where they hear noises, etc.

Back to leveling, though. An interesting aspect to the game is that the world levels with you. For example, the bandit you fight at level 3 will be just as hard at level 5. So you can’t get around tough quests by out-leveling them. However, there is a difficulty slider you can adjust. I have one quest I plan on adjusting to easy when I play next – and several caverns and forts that I’ve gone into I’ve wished I turned up the difficulty on.

I’m not even going to touch on mods to the game – such as the one I mentioned before of the castle being added to the game, ones that turn off “fast travel” or rename the “Blunt” skill to “hafted” or other such things.

This game is just flat out huge. The world is big and immersive. The graphics are amazing and the sound works well with it. The controls are a bit simplistic on the PC, but once you get used to them they’re fine.

If you’re a fan of fantasy or role-playing games, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t get Oblivion. It’ll suck away all your free time, and you’ll love it for that.