Oblivion

My copy of Oblivion arrived in work on Friday at an (in)opportune time as I was leaving to go home suffering from flu symptoms. Needless to say I soldiered on for a few hours when I got home, wrapped up warm, got some Beechams in me and installed the game. However, I nearly had angina problems when the install screen hung and I had to reset my PC. Nevertheless it worked beautifully when I ran it on startup and the adventure began!

I chose a dark elf called Drizzt after the R.A. Salvatore books and custom designed the character to be a fighter/mage with theif capabilities. The introduction is amazing and the graphics are better than any game I've seen on the PC. The gameplay is much the same as Morrowind but with most of the annoying quirks removed ensuring a faster and more involved adventure. The NPC's AI has improved and they now move out of your way and talk amongst themselves and get on with their daily lives rather than stand about looking silly.

So far over the weekend I've clocked up 15 hours worth of gametime and I've hardly made a dent in the quest. I've been side-tracked on branch quests set by NPC's and investigating the countryside around the cities, caves and tombs. I've fought wolves, rats, zombies, atronachs and goblins and I'm sure that's scratching the surface too.

I've been checking out the forums on official and non-official sites and a lot of people seem to be having problems with the game as their PC is not up to scratch. I'm running a GF6600GT with an Athlon 3200+ and 1GB of RAM and the game is running smoothly at 800x600. I'm already thinking about upgrading RAM and installing a second 6600 to upgrade the graphics as this is really something that makes the game so realistic.

All in all, I'm very impressed so far and look forward to immersing myself in Cyrodill and closing all the gates of Oblivion. Yes, there are some small bugs I've spotted within the game but I believe these will be fixed with imminent patches. Another success for Bethesda and no doubt when the bugs are fixed they will begin work on a much sought after expansion pack.

I would give this game 4.5 Mage Guilds out of 5.