XBOX Reviews

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Game of the Year Edition

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

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Pretty good
This game was fun but its one of those games that I beat got easier gamer score and I don’t really care about playing it ever again, but I might change my mind its still a great game.

5 Stars Excellent bargain!
This is a great bargain for all the expansions. This is also a great game to play.

1 Star SecuROM
Previously Oblivion did not have SecuROM, but they decided to slip it into their Game of the Year versions. The GAME itself is a blast. SecuROM however can make you wish you never saw the installation CDs. Finally after six hours of repairing, this crap is off my computer.

If you want to play the game, I would highly advise finding a local secondhand software store and getting the Pre-GOTY version. Otherwise get bottle of advil first.

5 Stars Great Game for people who…
Great game for people who love to not follow the main quest, love a world to explore with hundreds of things to kill, dungeons to explore, quests to complete, gear to horde and sell, spells to create, gear to enchant, people to MURDER…

If you are interested in truly following a story line, this game offers that as well (I have yet to follow the actual storyline though, so I have no true opinion if it’s good or not).

4 Stars Vast and all encompassing are understatements!
Saying Oblivion is vast and addicting would be an under-statement. I’ve played many rpgs but none quite so in depth as Bethesda’s dream child. That in mind Oblivion is not for everyone. If you prefer quick games or very simple mechanics stepping into the world of elder scrolls is intimidating and a bit daunting. Yet for those that have the patience to stay the course it is an extremely rewarding undertaking.

The first thing you should know is Oblivion is 2 years old. Personally I still think the environments and character models are breath taking however watching your character jump immediately shows you the physics engine is not the best especially when it comes to the movements of your created avatar.

However if you can forgive that short coming and a few other small glitches and frame skips here and there this is still one of the best games for the 360 to date.

Character customization is very detailed. Whether you want your character to look “hawt” or are tired of the beautiful people cliches opting to make your hero rough around the edges you’ll be able to go in any direction you desire.

Furthermore there are many races to choose from. Being new to elder scrolls my terminology is still a bit flawed but I went ahead to create a cute Nord girl. “Nords” grew up in the north lands and are highly resistant to cold. You will find each race has an interesting history and set of racial bonuses. Perhaps the most commendable attribute is whether you are a human, nord, cat-folk, lizard-folk, or high elf you are not penalized by the usual imbalanced character creation flaw in other rpgs in which some races are all powerful while others are loaded with flaws. I ciphered through each species reading their attributes and traits trying to find an unfair advantage but in the end there was no bone to pick.

Much like fall out you have the choice of going first person or 3rd person. Admittedly things are much easier in first person but it is still a nice added feature to be able to zoom out and look at your avatar whenever you choose to. The controls are simple. One trigger attacks, the other trigger blocks, and right shoulder button casts assigned spells. You can hot-key spells to be selected by your d- pad and y makes you jump while x and b handle menus as well as picking up loot.

In the tutorial you are a prisoner that is set free. The Emperor Uriel Septim has come under attack and lucky enough the hidden escape route happens to be through your cell. As you go through the sewers helping the emperor’s elite guards slay assassins the way you do tasks makes those you have conversations with hint at what class you would be best at. You can go with what they suggest or choose something else. Amazingly enough you can even design your own class if you are patient enough to do so. Uriel asks you under what astrological sign you were born which determines additional merits and penalties.

In the end the good emperor dies. He leaves you with a dragon amulet and charges you with finding his illegitimate son to take up the responsibility of a ruler. Apparently you are tied to a prophecy to save the land by closing the foreboding gates of Oblivion. Cliche? Perhaps so, but it is unfolded to you in such awesome flare you will not care. Did I mention Patrick Stewart has the best kingly voice ever?

Epic cheese aside Oblivion still is an open ended world. You can pursue parts of the main story line whenever you want to but the main enjoyment comes from discovering those out of the way little places off the beaten path. You are not given a time limit and days can turn into an eternity as you strive to join different guilds, become a gladiator, collect herbs to make potions through alchemy, quest for your first home, collect oddities, perfect your bartering and speech craft, and learn the nuances of archery and horse back riding. Once again there are so many crafts and social skills to pursue it might seem over whelming but each skill is easy enough to get the hang of right off the bat.

Unlike fall out 3 enemy placement is more reasonable. You will not find the most powerful demons, vampires, or werewolves lurking around just anywhere. These more powerful foes tend to lurk in specialized places unlike Death Claws that rove about anywhere they feel like it. Of course you can still accidentally stumble into one of these dangerous obscure ruins but that is part of the thrill! (Speaking of vampires and werewolves you can be infected with both vampirism and lycanthropy so tread with caution when dealing with those denizens of the damned.)

The locations and npcs all have their flavorful charm and eccentric quirks which makes socializing interesting. Honestly I did not think Bethesda nailed the subtle humor of the Fall Out universe but they handle Elder scrolls flawlessly.

The quests are diverse with their own tongue in cheek ribaldry. One quest centers around stopping sultry feminist bandits that prey on drunk unsuspecting married men while another quest has you running off to meet an enigmatic fellow at exactly midnight.

Along the way occasional thieves try to rob you and everyone from assassins to town’s guard beseech you for aid.

While you can go about being good or evil Oblivion seems less like an experiment in morality and more of a foray into choice and consequence. I actually applaud of this approach as it seems better thought out and more realistic.

The shivering Isles and Knights of 9 expansions add more to do so be sure to download the extra content by inserting the second disk.

In conclusion suffice it to say Oblivion is a solid rpg. If you love exploration and perfecting a myriad number of crafts, spells, and socializing attributes you will feel right at home. For gamers that lean more on the casual side or prefer colorful overly flamboyant J-rpgs however they may want to rent it to test the waters first. Oblivion is “great” but it is built on a formula we have seen many times before.

Pros

+Open ended beautifully detailed interactive world.

+ Main story line though a bit generic is carried out very well. It’s kind of like reading a fantasy novel of high caliber.

+ Good music and voice acting

+ Myriad ways of doing quests

+ Impressive pendulum swung between choice and consequence

+ Many ways to customize during character creation. Shortly after the tutorial you are even given a chance to change things again if you are not happy with previous decisions.

+ Town Guards out on the road will actually go after bandits. The way people carry on their lives even when not in your immediate Presence makes everything more realistic.

+ You have mounts to make traveling quicker and less of a hassle

+Gorgeous visuals.

Cons

-Occasional frame skips

-Generic enemy types found in many fantasy settings

-A few awkward movement animations.

- Oblivion has so many secrets to find and offers so much to do it may come off as overly complex to more casual players. It’s not an experience you can easily jump into and just as effortlessly jump out of like Fable 2 is.

Buy/More Info

The Elder Scrolls IV Shivering Isles

With the Elder Scrolls IV: The Shivering Isles for the Xbox 360, you’ll open up new areas in the world of Oblivion so you can continue playing with your existing save game/character, or create an all new character just to explore the new content. Within the Realm of Sheogorath, players can explore the two extreme sides of the god’s madness — the sublimely creative and the completely psychotic. Something is happening to the Shivering Isles and Sheogorath himself looks to you to be his champion and defend his realm and its inhabitants from destruction. Do you have the strength to survive his trials, tame a realm fraught with paranoia and despair, and wear the mantle of a God? ESRB Rated M for Mature

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars An occasionally annoying distraction from the main game
I got this expansion as part of the Game of the Year edition of Oblivion. I was highly skeptical of what I saw as basically a completely different reality world opposite of Cyrodill, and as such I put it off for maybe a year before deciding to enter with my new character.

Please note that I am an obsessive-compulsive person, with a sick need for organization, decisiveness, and something else I forgot.

As such, imagine how horribly I’d be set off upon discovering that you can apparently enter NOT two different worlds, but two different versions of the SAME world; Mania and Dementia. This set me off big-time because you can pretty much only enter it once, unless you want to fast-travel back to the gate just to re-enter. What makes it worse is that I see absolutely no difference between the two upon entering, making me wonder what the hell is the purpose of lying to us by making it seem like two separate worlds, when really the northern part is all Mania, and the southern part is all Dementia.

While it was a novel idea to have everyone be either arrogant or insane, but this idea’s brilliance never left the paper it was written on as everyone, as in the base game, is STILL only voiced by the same three or four voice actors, all doing as spectacularly lazy a job as they did in the base game. So instead of hearing something that brings memories of Heath Ledger’s Joker or Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, you get a decidedly lazy-sounding voice actor reading gibbering nonsense off a script with only a slight hint of understanding that they are supposed to be playing a crazy person, and not just recording Line 4,056 out of 11,100.

That slight hint immediately gets vanquished if you have the Game of the Year edition, or the other expansion pack, and you ask them about Anvil, in which they suddenly go from insane to sane, to repeat to you the same pre-recorded line about hearing about the butcher of the Anvil priests and the prophet of doom—despite the realm of the Shivering Isles being like a completely different dimension from Cyrodill, where people supposedly never really venture out, and very few Cyrodill people venture in.

Then the Prince of the realm, despite the energy and enthusiasm of his voice actor, was very poorly written. He immediately starts at a level of “I’M CRAZY YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA~!” and never once comes down from that level of such upfront and bluntly beating-over-the-head “weirdness” that he never once comes off as crazy, but just as someone trying much too hard to seem crazy, and utterly failing to elicit more than just a “well, he’s weird” reaction. Subtlty is completely ejected from this role, as clearly whoever wrote the character did absolutely no research on mental illnesses, and never saw movies like “The Shining” or “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest” or “12 Monkeys”. They just went straight for shock value, and as many references to playing with the player’s intestines as possible.

The world itself looks new and original and weird, but the Dementia part, once you get past the giant mushrooms and craggly trees, you realize it looks like a putrid dump. The city of Crucible can best be described as “rotting garbage crafted into shapes”, as everything is a shade of gray and garbage-green as to be more at home in Fallout 3 (also by Bethesda) or a Russian warzone in Call of Duty 4. It’s such an unpleasant appearance that it nearly drove me mad for a few minutes.

The Duchess of Dementia made me do a quest called “Conspiracy” in which I had to torture random denizens of Crucible to find evidence of a fake conspiracy because she’s a paranoid idiot who becomes sane long enough to tell me I should visit Anvil for more information on the Prophet. I spent an entire in-game day hunting down people and torturing them numerous times just to get somethign other than “I don’t know anything!” and I grew so utterly insane I began torturing people endlessly for no reason other than I began to hate all of them with their stiff, poorly-acted voices, and I became immensely angry upon discovering (with the help of an online walkthrough) that the very first person I had tortured (and apparently let off too early) was the only one who could advance the quest by giving me some information.

I lost it, broke into houses, stole stuff, beat people up on the streets, killed several guards, and eventually died and had to re-load to my last save.

On the other spectrum, Bliss is much more pleasant, and Mania has pretty fireflies that drop sprinkly lights from them as they fly, and not all the people are piss-poor caricatures of insanity.

On the whole, the expansion pack is little more than more of the same as you get in the main game’s quests, with the only real “new” things being new enemies, new weapons/armor/items, and a new landscape. Everything else is pretty much exactly the same.

Worth 30 more hours for 30 dollars? No. Though definitely worth picking up free when included with the Game of the Year edition of Oblivion.

5 Stars This is a great add-on to Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion is my favorite game, and The Shivering Isles add-on is a must have to add additional quests and content. I would highly recommend this add-on for game enthusiasts. Another great add-on for this game is Knights of the Nine.

4 Stars A good expansion back
I loved oblivion besides everything bad about it so I had to get the expansion. The world created is beautiful like always. This expansion will add a pleasurable experience that you will remember.

5 Stars Sheogorath is hilarious!
The Shivering Isles creates a new world for you to explore, with new monsters, new ingredients to try out at alchemy, a schizophrenic world to explore, and as part of the storyline you’ll get a cool two-in-one sword, the Dawnfang/Duskfang. Plus the character of Sheogorath, the Prince of the realm, is what was missing in Oblivion proper: a fun and engaging NPC with bucketloads of personality! The only NPC worth mentioning in Oblivion was the emperor (Patrick Stewart); all the other NPCs were flat and boring. Bethesda apparently read my mind and crafted a delightfully deranged character with the accent to match.

And the whole ironic storyline, in which you fight to defend madness against the encroaching forces of order, is wonderfully and hilariously sarcastic. I have to admit, after playing Oblivion for 200 plus hours, the game was starting to feel stagnant, and installing this expansion pack was the perfect swift kick to my rear end that I needed.

Bethesda has also done a great job designing the look of the environment itself; when you’re in the Mania half of the world, the environment is full of splashy, vibrant colors, like you’re high or something (is it a coincidence there are so many mushrooms around?). And in Dementia, the world is appropriately bleak, with nothing but browns and grays and blacks, with dead, twisted trees and swamps. It reminded me of being in an asylum or something (well, an outdoor asylum).

The Shivering Isles is a great expansion to a great game. Definitely worth your money.

4 Stars Great add on to the game
I recommend this game as an add on to Oblivion. Takes a bit longer to load every game now due to the add on but that is minor compared to the game time it takes to play the complete game.

Buy/More Info

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Game of the Year Edition

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

User Ratings and Reviews

3 Stars not for the faint
this game will tax on your energy, and is virtully impossible to beat due to the longevity of the game. from the start of the game you have choices too many choices of which you don’t know how it will affect the outcome of the game. i gave it three stars because it is still a great game just not my style. if you are not an avid rpg player this games not for you

4 Stars Fun
This game has an excellent environment to explore. The religious references and darkness of the main storyline gets a bit old and disturbing at times. Toward the endgame, nothing really rewarding happens. There is nothing new to apply your wealth or new abilities. Overall the game is a lot of fun for those who like quests.

5 Stars Possibly the best game ever made.
The realism, the open world, the real time effects, the graphics are beautiful. The quests are great and there are so many of them that this game has infinate replay value, I could beat this game with every class and still love it. This is like the amazing Baulders Gate and Icewind games but on a whole new even more realistic level with infinate possabilites. I could just walk threw the woods in this game for hours a look at the lush enviroments because it’s so breathtaking and real looking. Game play is great, the classes, character building and multi-classing as well as naming your own class and created weapons etc is great and adds that much more realism to this great game. I will be playing this game for a long long time, I have haulted playing GOW, Dark Messiah, Quake Wars, Manhunt, WWE, Viking and many other recently bought titles to play and explore this wonderful game. The even better thing is with this version of the game you get the two add ons as well for even more gaming which goes deeper into this magical world. I hope we get more of these amazing games, we need a Forgotten Realms game like this one an Icewind Dale with create your own party. The open world concept is amazing, real time, and real encounters with open enviroments. I never thought the writings of R.A. Salvadore or J.R. Tolkien would ever come to life better than Baulders Gate 1/2 or Icewind Dale 1/2 but Elder Scrolls Obilivion surpasses them all by miles. Best game ever made from an fantasy RPG standpoint. This gets better as you play it, and with each class, multi-class or created class of character there are whole news avenues to explore. I will play this for years to come. Multi-player in this would have been amazing too.

5 Stars Almost rivals World of Warcraft.
This game almost rivals World of Warcraft. It keeps you on the edge of your seat most of the time. I do wish, though that you could play with other players at the same time. I would reccomend that you purchase the guide book to go along with it as it is a great help with it’s maps of the dungeons and gates and the different guides through the quests. Sometimes they can be confusing. Other than that, It’s a great game.

5 Stars Highly recommended traditional fantasy
I’m a huge fan of single-player games. And this is the best. Traditional fantasy setting with castles, dungeons, goblins and etc. With enough strange stuff (daedra, and other creatures) to keep it original.

There are no arbitrary limitations. My main character wears heavy armor and sneaks around. Though he wasn’t very effective at the sneaking until reaching much higher levels. The point is that you can have combinations that aren’t allowed in other RPGs as long as you are willing to accept any penalties until your character develops all his skills.

A lot of great quest lines through the guilds that are mini games in themselves. A lot of surprises in the wilderness and in towns. The alchemy system is easy to follow and use. Even though my character is always decked out in heavy armor and can sneak around adequately, he could also cast spells. But as I said there is a trade-off. The spells I cast are basic, but enough to get me through tough scrapes. If I want more powerful magics, I just need to start training it up.

So character options are practically limitless. But you can also play as a straight-up fighter, mage, or rogue type. This gives even more replay-ability.

Very stable. The game has frozen on me twice with many months of game play behind me. Both times was right after I saved, so nothing lost.

The only thing I wish was the ability to create more characters and have control over them – a la Baldur’s Gate. The game does give limited control over having a few allies, but it is very difficult to outfit them. The game was not designed to have a party of adventrurers, however.

Buy/More Info