I wouldn't describe myself as an Elder Scrolls fan. Most of my experience with the series has been with Skrimm, which I've tried to complete a few times but always seem to lose interest in, typically resulting in me installing a bunch of mods to keep things interesting, installing too much freak shit, then panicking and deleting the game in fear of someone discovering and exposing my sinful nature. Beyond that, my familiarity with the broader Elder Scrolls series has mostly been limited to retrospectives on YouTube channels like LGR, and a roommate I had in college who bogarted my Xbox 360 to play Morrowind and he did this CONSTANTLY when all I wanted to do was play The Orange Box it's MY XBOX, man, just let me play my games!!!

whoa, what just happened

While buying up 360 games to fill out my collection, it felt almost obligatory to pick up Oblivion, which I've been told is a favorite among fans of the series and arguably The Best One. I snagged a copy of the GOTY edition for ten bucks on Ebay and it was promptly delivered to someone else's mailbox. I live among dishonest people and so it was never returned to me, which meant I had to spend another ten dollars to get another copy, and by this point I had Oblivion on the brain, so I decided to make it the first game I played out of my 360 backlog.

Oblivion may be a dated game in a lot of ways, but I also found it compelling enough that I was able to see the whole thing through, which I honestly was not expecting to be the case. The world of Oblivion feels so alive that I often meandered around watching people go about their daily routines. Yeah ok, sometimes I did that because it was fun to watch those routines break in really stupid ways, but I still had fun with it, and it's rare for open world games to suck me in so much that I deviate from the main quest to just, like, exist in those worlds. I was also impressed by how varied main and side quests are. When I think of these types of games, I think of a million worthless icons dotting a map. Countless points of "interest" marking side content that is copy and pasted over and over and over again, utterly pointless and not worth my time. Oblivion, however, manages to pack so much personality into each quest that l actually feel like a genuine participant in people's problems, even if the solution to that problem is to dive into a dungeon composed of the same pre-fab parts I've already seen dozens of times.

That said, I did find myself hitting the Skrimm-point a few times during my playthrough, and this usually set in whenever I was going through a stretch of the game that was combat heavy. Battles take place in first person, all swinging your sword around and casting magic, but that's just facade, the lens through which you view combat. In reality, fights essentially play out through a series of dice rolls. It's your character sheet smacking against another, which results in a bit of a disassociation between what is actually happening and what you're witnessing on screen. It's... not great. The difficulty balancing also feels off right out of the gate. Bonking basic goblins in the head with a sword 18 times before they keel over is really tedious, and when I looked up to see what I was doing wrong, all the advice I was able to find told me to turn the difficulty down a few notches. While this helped a lot, Oblivion's enemies scale with you, which means those basic goblins became about as much trouble as fully armored warriors from beyond the boundaries of space and time, and that results in this feeling of stagnation, like you're never really getting stronger, which in turn exacerbates the disconnected feeling I had with combat.

I'm thankful that I persevered, however, because the pendulum always swung back in Oblivion's favor. Soaking in the world, speaking to the people that inhabit it, learning about their histories, following them home, robbing them, murdering them, getting caught and freaking out and murdering their immediate family to leave no witnesses... That is Oblivion's true strength, and it's what I had the most fun doing. Thankfully there's enough of that I never teetered over the edge and quit. I wanted to make sure I saw as much of the game as I reasonably could, so I committed to doing a few of the longer quest lines. Unfortunately, I didn't finish all of them, but here's my thoughts on a few:

The Dark Brotherhood - I knew I had to complete this quest since it's pretty much the thing people talk about when they talk about Oblivion. I'm happy to say it lived up to my expectations. All the cloak and daggers bullshit at the heart of the Brotherhood initially seems sinister and almost cultish, but that veneer quickly melts away, exposing the Brotherhood as a bureaucracy which is as easily manipulated as it is inept. You eventually ascend to the highest position within the Brotherhood, bestowed the title of Listener after climbing over countless corpses, but what does that even earn you? You're no longer an assassin, you're no malevolent leader of this dark order, you're just a middle-man. A gofer picking up kill orders for a bit of coin. It's perfect.

Theives Guild - Tried to take the initiation test, which involved stealing a sword from someone's home before your competitors do. Unfortunately, someone else got there first, then blinked out of existence, preventing me from stealing it back from them. I reattempted the initiation test and passed it the second time, but disliked the fencing requirements to progress through the guild's main story missions. I got far enough that one of my points of contact was wrongly arrested, which I found out about hours later after returning from killing Mankar Camoran in his pocket dimension. Stuck in the air, mid-animation, basked in the red glow of arcane magic, a member of the thieves' guild ran up to let me know Armand had been detained. Uh, that's cool lady, kinda dealing with some shit at the moment, though! Never came back to it.

Knights of the Nine - Bad quest. Opens with a long, tedious pilgrimage to pray at a bunch of shrines before you can take on the Nine's request to recover their ancient armor. One piece of armor can only be attained by walking over a chasm using boots you pick up earlier in the quest, only you can't wear those boots if you have any points in infamy, of which I had two. How do you get rid of infamy? You go on a pilgrimage to all the shrines. Again. I attempted to do this and almost immediately got stuck in a rock outside one of the shrines (it happens.) Gave up.

The Shivering Isles - I'm the Duke of Dementia, A-Number-One. This expansion gives you a new island to explore with it's own questline that rivals Oblivion's in size and scope. You have to help the Mad God, Sheogorath, prevent the culling of his kingdom by the god of Order. Everyone in the Shivering Isles is broken, driven to insanity for Sheogorath's amusement. The atmosphere is eerie, yet darkly playful, and some of the quest givers you encounter are my favorite in the entire game. In particular, I really like Kithlan. Sure he thinks I'm a shitty escort and uh, he might have died in the last dungeon - I'm not really sure, I never saw him again - but he's a great guy, he thinks it's AWESOME that I'm out here torturing people for information, he knows and respects that get shit done. Anyway, the last "boss fight" in the Shivering Isles is unfortunately underwhelming, so it does kind of fall apart right near the end, but if you get the GOTY edition of the game, then this is definitely the piece of DLC you should check out.

I feel like I have finally developed an appreciation for what people like about The Elder Scrolls thanks to Oblivion. It's not perfect, of course. It's pretty buggy and its combat is atrocious, and I generally think it's not a good sign that people tell you to turn the difficulty down as soon as you start the game... But I am genuinely impressed by how much content and variety there is here. Oblivion feels richer in character and life than modern day open world games, and I think it's given me more motivation to go back to Skrimm and see how it compares. Plus, I heard they made some new... they made some new mods that make the girls prettier... yeeeeah.... these mods are just for daddy.............