Many of the games of theThe Elder Scrolls series, at least the main numbered titled installments of the series and not the spin-off titles (such as Battlespire and Redgarud), have all been about open-world RPG gaming with the emphasis in immersion and believeability – something that is a big deal given how Bethesda, the game developers of The Elder Scrolls game series, go about achieving this with each series installment. And out of all the possible examples to go pick to demonstrate this, I’m going to be talking about the second most recent installment – which I just finished recently – of the series, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Released in 2006 and quickly being the darling of the PC and console gaming world for it’s incredibly large gaming environment, vast story arcs, customizability, and large questlines. The game, at the time during release, was not making promise or offering anything that was starting to become “standard feature” in PC games such as multiplayer or co-op gaming. It was nothing more than your standard, offline, single-player video role paying game but what it did promise was improvements from it’s predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, such as an intuitively designed menu and quest navigation system that allowed the player to be able to manage quests and go through the world of which your character plays in (this time in the Tamerialic province of Cyrodill for Oblivion) without losing direction or hair and/or mind (in that order).
Of course there was the expected graphics improvement and shifting from the old Gamebyro game engine to the new Gamebyro Lightspeed game engine – the latter featuring some milestone technological advances that allowed for even further modularity and extensability for game developers and designers which means that the world of Oblivion was guaranteed to larger, have more depth, and would surely kill hours of your free time.
