Alright, I admit, I have gone back to playing Oblivion. Even with the last updates that I added in the last post talking about how I would have finally wanted to stop playing Oblivion, I’ve come to end up playing it yet again. After MikeOn314, along with a few other people that I know that have played Oblivion when it came out along with the subsequent DLCs, I’ve come to understand now that it’s all about constantly questing while peppering your quests wayside travels. This involves getting lost in some areas to end up finding shrines of some deities of questionable morals and ethics, making potions out of herbs that you find at random around your environment, raising your acrobatics, athletics, and what have you while getting into fights all the time and looting.

There is so much more to add to that list but it’s definitely constantly about going around and meeting objectives that allows you to really feel that the pacing of the game is accelerating to a particular direction and manner where you don’t feel like you’re just mining through a game needlessly or mindlessly. The sense of purpose is the drive of the game along with exploration. So what then of the main quest of the game? Well it turns out from what many tell me is that the main quest is….not very interesting. And given the descriptions of how many have played the game before me, the best way to play oblivion – and Skyrim if you happen to be playing that game as well – is to allow detours to “happen” along the way. It’s sort of like doing what happenes in Lord of the Rings, where you have your starting party and you think that the story is going to continue in the particular pace and direction when suddenly something happens or a decision is made where your character ends up following a great detour or a set or two of detours. And all of this may seem, when observed in detail, as isolated obstructions, but then allow you to witness the building of the character(s). Which then all comes together once you come back to the “main course”, if you will, and you then realize that all the trails and detours really helped put a zest to the main quest overall – from start to finish.
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