Instead I am greeted by a hooded figure, with a gravelly voice that sends a chill up my spine. I go to sleep, expecting to level up and continue my exploration. I just leveled up, after hours of adventuring as the sun began to set both in real life and in-game. I remember once, after diving through a cave slaying hordes of headless zombies and skeletons with the magical power of fire and lightning. One of the best examples of this is a memory burned in my brain to this day. While not all of the storylines were well conceived, a majority o f the quest lines and side quests which to this day are some of the more unique set-ups an RPG can see. One of the best examples of this is the actual content of Oblivion. What’s more, the design of Oblivion, being an open world, allowed for player freedom in ways that were unique to sandbox titles, something Bethesda experimented with. Combined with the waning popularity of turn-based games at the time, Oblivion served, for many, as the entry point for players into a different style of game: the more complex character building, a free-form story and adventuring, and even open-world mechanics which were already gaining popularity at the time, thanks to the likes of Grand Theft Auto III. Much like Halo before it, the relative smoothness of Oblivion on consoles ushered in a newfound popularity for computer RPGs. Computer-RPGs were a rarity for consoles, and the likes of Baldur’s Gate and Might and Magic thrived heavily due to this. Until the mid 2000s, typical RPGs followed a more turn-based style with some deviations for action-RPG here and there. It was a massive game that was playable on console, when the competition at that time couldn’t handle the game’s open nature.

It was also a watershed moment by marking a transitionary period for games as a whole.Ĭonsider, for example, how Oblivion was one of the major releases for the Xbox 360. A big-budgeted, first-person role-playing game, the follow-up from a popular but ostensibly cult hit that is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, became one of the killer apps for the mid-2000s, an anticipated game that many were dying to play. When Oblivion was released in 2006, the relative hype behind the project was massive for the time.

Blazing a Trail The amount of content in Oblivion was massive, even if it wasn't always easy or good.

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