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51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A review for the older gamer!, 25 Oct 2008
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I am what might be described as a more 'mature' gamer. I'm also female. Now, I don't want to be accused of being ageist or sexist BUT I wanted to write a review specifically for the older person who might pass over this game because they think that it's all about fighting, war, death, destruction etc.
Well, not the way I play it, it isn't...
This is a brilliant, immersive game that has kept me happily engrossed for eighteen months - and I haven't finished it yet! (Well I never said I was a 'hardened' gamer...!!)
The graphics are absolutely brilliant if you have a PC with a good graphics card: if you have a slower PC, then you'll need to tweak with the in-game settings to ensure it doesn't stutter. Even then, playing with the graphics at its lowest level, the graphics are good.
I recommend you turn off everything that runs in the background of your computer before you start the game (you can do this by pressing CTRL/ALT/DELETE and bringing up Task Manager). Also unplug your printer and turn off your screen saver (this is one greedy game!!)
During the first few minutes of the game (or the first few hours, depending on your ability. Or the first few days, in my case...), you go through a kind of tutorial. This takes you out of prison and through a dungeon full of rats and nasties to be killed - finding out along the way how to use various weapons and spells. But - don't let this put you off. Because once you get out of the dungeon you enter the Province of Cyrodiil - a kind of medieval land where magic is common and the gun hasn't been invented, so you must use swords or fists if you want to fight - and thereafter you can wander around and do just as you please. You also design your character: goody or baddy, male or female, human or non-human - the choices are many. You also choose your skills and attributes, and you can spend as long as you like fine-tweaking your characters physical appearance.
By making your way to different towns, you can pick up various quests (missions) along the way. Some of these are simple, some of them are difficult, most of them are good fun - and most earn you money or goodies if you complete them. You might be asked to find out who stole a painting, or re-unite a couple of estranged brothers, or help clear a farm of horrible trolls... There is some thwacking and killing along the way, but mostly of scamps or trolls or wolves, so it's not too gruesome.
(You can play a wholly different game of course - you can be a murderous warrior if you like...)
Overall, this is a really, really great game and can be anything you want it to be. You can become an expert in magic and cast spells, or you can become a thief and an expert at sneaking around. You can be Mr Good Guy or Girl and go around helping everyone so they all like you, and spend your money on new clothes and houses, furnishings and even your own horse. Yes - you can ride around on a horse if you like - cantering through the woods stopping to collect herbs and flowers along the way, before standing by the water's edge to have a glass of wine and a bite of bread... no finer way to spend your leisure hours.....
There are lots of cheats on the Internet as well, so you can have endless health and endless money, for example, and can play a very easy game if you want!
I have now bought myself a Playstation 3 to play Oblivion, and I actually think that the visual aspect of the game was better on the PC (although I'm told this will not be the case once I've got an HD TV). But the game is awesome everywhere - and I just wanted to write a review for people who might pass this game by, thinking that it was merely another violent war game. Well, it CAN be, but it doesn't have to be.
Try it and you'll be enthralled!
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Morrowind for the Masses!, 25 Sep 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing graphics and incredible depth, coupled with stacks of playability make this the best game in a long while. I've played it for over 110 hours and not finished the main quest. Its the sort of game you can get a lot of satisfaction out of without even chasing the main storyline, there is so much going on. You can even buy houses and furnish them or spend time adding to your library of books or searching out an elusive bottle of wine for your collection!!
A lot of players criticise the levelling system saying the game is either too hard or too easy but the fact is you can control when you level by sleeping (if its too easy then sleep to raise a number of times, if its too hard then gain experience without sleeping.
You do need a pretty quick system to run the game but its playable at a number of detail and resolution levels. I have 1.5Gb ram and run on an old AGP A7N8X board with a GEForce 7800GS and its perfectly smooth without stutter or slow down (the card makes the difference). Note the general consensus is that this is unplayable with any graphics card lower than a GEForce 6800 - i tried with a GE5900 and it was no good.
Overall, an amazing game with unbelievable potential (the add-ons are starting to come out now)!! It doesn't have the depth or 'beardyness' of Morrowind but is easier to pick up and put down. Your 'other half' will hate it . . .unless you get them into it as well!
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52 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nearly perfect, 16 Feb 2007
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
I was very excited when this game was announced. As a big fan of its predecessor, Morrowind, I greatly anticipated Oblivions release and I feel that I was not disappointed. The graphics are incredible, even on my three-year-old computer, (note to others - If you experience jerky graphics just turn of the grass, makes a big difference). The design is amazing, the towns and cities are beautifully textured and each has its own personality, just like places in the real world and forests are highly realistic, the characters are also highly lifelike, especially the lip-sync with the dialogue, and again the textures are excellent, hair shines, faces have wrinkles, facial expressions mirror a characters emotions etc.
The gameplay is very good, the combat system is better than Morrowind, with the ability to block and perform complex attacks which takes practice but that just adds to the realism. Other skills like lockpicking are also much more involving for the player and the `sneak' function is far more useful than in the previous game.
Missions and quest are varied, from the usual hack and slash to stealth to detective work, and the quest system is more versatile than in morrowind.
However:
I said it's nearly perfect, I do have some reservations.
The levelling system is dreadful, as other reviewers have noted, when you start out you are often attacked by rats and bandits, which are difficult to kill with the simple weaponry you start with, you would assume that once you level up it would be easier but no, when you reach a high level the rats disappear and are replaced with deadly tough minotaurs and the bandits suddenly have better weapons and armour than you do, in fact it is often a good idea to put off levelling up until you've completed certain quests as it often negates the usablity of the combat system and you resort to clicking the mouse as fast as you can and hope for the best!
The spoken (audible) dialogue is great but it seems to have placed limitations on how many topics you can discuss with other characters, in morrowind any character you spoke with could have upwards of 15-20 topics to ask about, in oblivion most characters have 3 at the most, and most of them just say the same old thing, and there is no challenge to getting info out of them.
Fewer factions. In morrowind you could join over 15 different factions each with its own type of quests and ranks, in oblivion there are half that number, which means fewer missions and therefore less gameplay time, now I may be wrong about the number of quests but it seems to me that it took a lot longer for me to complete morrowind than it has for me to reach the final part of oblivion.
Lastly, oblivion seems to have been designed for people who are new to RPG's, this is good for newcomers, but for anyone used to this type of game it does seem a bit easy, the quests are very linear, you don't have to work anything out yourself, the map is too good, with waypoints marked clearly and the option to quick travel to them takes all the fun out of exploring, in fact using quick travel exclusively would mean not exploring 90% of the map!
To conclude - overall a very, very good game with some bad points, but these shortcomings can be overcome as the modding community has provided an large number of modifications that you can download, andthat can make the game a whole lot better
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Suitable for 15 years and over. Not for sale to persons under age 15. By placing an order for this product, you declare that you are 15 years of age or over.
