Let's have a look at The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A fantasy role-playing game from 2006, two years into Howard Dean's presidency. It was a huge hit, but a few years later it was overshadowed by its sequel, Skyrim, and then it became a joke, the butt of a thousand internet videos that poked fun at its simplistic AI, and nowadays it's a fondly-remembered classic and also a joke. Meet Rena Bruiant:
I remember the first time I bumped into Rena Bruiant. It was like meeting an old friend. I wanted to ask if her husband was okay, but the game didn't have that dialogue option. Does she know that she's famous? Here, in the real world, eighteen years later? Imagine if we could tell the people of Oblivion that they're internet celebrities. They could do personal appearances at conventions, or lease themselves out to other games developers, assuming Bethesda recognised their right to self-determination.
I'm not a fan of role-playing games. I hate them! But I'm broad-minded, and Oblivion was on sale, so I decided to see what the fuss was about. As of 2024 most of the bugs have been patched out, and a popular unofficial patch removes many more. In addition the modern version of the game includes all of the downloadable content and expansion packs.
Oblivion was a pioneer of downloadable content. The "horse armour" DLC was particularly infamous. For the low, low price of 200 Microsoft Points - $2.50, but you had to buy points in blocks of 400 - the player could download a 6mb texture pack that made some of the horses look as if they were wearing armour. It didn't make the horses tougher. It just added some health points and changed their appearance.
Bear in mind that Oblivion is a single-player game. The only person who saw the horse armour was you. The armour isn't even particularly good-looking:
In the publishers' defence the horse armour was an oddity. The other addons were more substantial. There was also a pair of large-scale mission packs, Knights of the Nine (for around $10) and the much more extensive Shivering Isles (for around $30), which got good reviews.
No doubt there was online gnashing of teeth back in 2006 at the thought of paying $69.99 for a game and the same again for the expansions, but as of 2024 the Game of the Year Deluxe version is around £12, and I only paid £3.24, because it was on sale. Such are the benefits of being patient.
What were Microsoft points? They were a virtual currency for the Xbox 360. I mention Microsoft because Oblivion was originally an Xbox-360-and-PC exclusive. It didn't reach the PlayStation 3 until 2007, and even then the PlayStation didn't get the horse armour DLC, only Knights and Shivering Isles.
I have dim memories that Oblivion was controversial with long-term Elder Scrolls fans, because it's a lot more prosaic than its predecessor, Morrowind. The fantasy world of Morrowind was truly alien. The architecture was organic and the player could hitch rides on the back of giant bugs. It only had a little bit of voice acting, but in exchange the dialogue trees were lengthy and detailed.
In comparison Oblivion takes place in a generic medieval fantasy Europe, and the conversations - although fully-voiced - are just a few lines long. It looks a lot more impressive than Morrowind, but it's less imaginative. My natural instinct is to not care at all about this, but with the benefit of hindsight I think the fans of Morrowind actually had a point, because Oblivion's major failing is its blandness.
Original copies of the Xbox 360 version will run on modern Xboxes with backwards compatibility, while PlayStation owners have to make do with a streaming copy of game via Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, because it was only ever released for the PlayStation 3. To date it hasn't been remastered for later generations of the PlayStation.
The PC version is widely available on Steam and other marketplaces, and in theory boxed copies of the PC original can be made to work under Windows 10 and 11. The PC version supports modding and has a development console, so it's the best version to play nowadays.
There was also a mobile phone spin-off, but this being 2006 the mobile phone port was an isometric 3D affair written in Java that nobody remembers.
Is Oblivion any good? Was it any good in 2006? Has it aged well? The answers are "it's engaging although a lot depends on how you approach it", "yes, it deserved the awards", and "imagine a mixture of cheese and wine" in that order. Oblivion has aged like fine cheese, and also fine wine. It has aged like a vintage MRE - the crackers and cigarettes have got better with time, not so much the canned meat.
What is The Elder Scrolls? It's a fantasy role-playing universe dating from the 1990s. An unusually vague universe. It's not a spoof, it's not super-serious, it doesn't aspire to being high art, it's not as gritty as The Witcher, it doesn't have the depth of Baldur's Gate or Diablo, it isn't a deconstruction of role-playing games. It's generic, deliberately so. The series has a tonne of backstory, but it rarely intrudes into the actual games.
A few years ago I had a look at Fallout 3. It uses the same engine as Oblivion and was published by the same company, but two years later. Fallout 3 is sci-fi, Oblivion is fantasy. Back then I described Fallout 3 as the role-playing equivalent of junk food, and Oblivion is much the same. Oblivion really perfected the "ambient wash of wandering and quests" model, and it's surprising how much the game accomplishes for something that came out in 2006. That's a long time ago. In 2006 Call of Duty was still set in the Second World War and Half-Life 2 was a going concern.
The Elder Scrolls games are made by Bethesda Softworks. The pillars of its empire are Fallout and The Elder Scrolls and latterly Starfield. The games are popular but there's a perception they're all the same, and that the company has given up on innovation in favour of pumping out product. Bethesda also publishes the modern Doom games, but that's the publishing part of Bethesda. The developing part, Bethesda Softworks, is separate. They are all owned by a company that is owned by Microsoft. Enough of Bethesda.
The first Elder Scrolls game, Arena (1994), was released for the PC, and only the PC, because in those days the PC was nerd city. It didn't sell very well. The internet suggests that it shifted less than five thousand units. People only remember it today for the cover art, which was about ten years out of date for 1994:
Were breast implants a thing in the world of The Elder Scrolls: Arena? Perhaps they were. The cover stands out because the modern Elder Scrolls games are surprisingly progressive. The armour is gendered, but sensible-looking, and the series takes place in a world where no-one is fazed by green-skinned orcs or cat people. Male and female characters have the same stats, and indeed the player can play as a man or a woman, or an orc, or a lizard-person, or a cat-person etc. There's a certain amount of racial stereotyping, but it's very mild.
Arena's cover is also jarring on a purely stylistic level, because Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have minimalist artwork. They're packaged as if they were ancient books. The cover art of Oblivion is modelled on an actual book in the game, on the table here, in front of Sean Bean:
Skyrim is an unusually long-lived game. The 2016 Special Edition remains on sale at full price today. Nowadays it's almost the default modern fantasy game, the archetypal fantasy role-playing game that people who aren't interested in the genre might own. Even I have a copy, and I don't even like role-playing games.
Why not? I grew up at a time when Star Wars and Transformers were cool and He-Man was naff. The swords-and-sorcery genre was pretty embarrassing in the 1980s. You know what was cool? The Terminator and RoboCop, not effing Willow. The few decent fantasy films were either too R-rated to develop a big popular following (Conan the Barbarian), or too weird (Excalibur, Time Bandits, Quest for Fire, The Navigator). It wasn't until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings that fantasy became hip, and even that was an outlier.
Dear god I hate role-playing games. The numbers. The numbers! It's a genre where you can hit a man in the face with an axe and it only does two points of damage because he's wearing special magical gloves. A genre in which the power of a weapon is determined not by its sharpness but by the player's experience points. A genre in which the artifice of gaming is front-and-centre.
I can understand why role-playing games have numbers. I get the historical context. They're derived from table-top wargames, which date from a time when players had to roll dice to work out whether their little soldiers were winning. But that kind of thing doesn't make sense any more. Computers can model ballistics in real time. If I wanted numbers I would play Cookie Clicker, which I also do, but with Cookie Clicker the numbers don't mean anything at all, and I can accept that.
Do you know what amuses me? According to the internet Pokemon is a role-playing game. It's the most popular role-playing franchise of all time. Imagine how angry that makes OG fans of Ultima and The Bard's Tale and Wizardry etc. Their genre is dominated by a game with imaginary monsters. Instead of real monsters. Which are imaginary. I'm going to stop talking about role-playing games now.
Who is the hero of The Elder Scrolls? There isn't one, each game has a different main character. Who is the villain? There's a different one in each game. Some kind of wizard. The Elder Scrolls takes place in a world where everybody can cast spells, but there's a bit of science as well. It has elements of Greco-Roman mythology, bits of Tolkien, bits of Dungeons and Dragons, bits of Lewis Carroll, the list goes on.
Early in Oblivion I met a bunch of stereotypical European medieval monks, but they were armed with Japanese samurai katanas. They took me to a Himalayan monastery located just north of a town seemingly modelled on Bavarian Germany. The monastery was full of Roman legionnaires. The whole game is like this. It mixes a bunch of fantasy and historical elements into a thick, slightly bland soup.
Tonally the series has no swearing ("bastard" is about as bad as it gets), very little sex, some sanitised violence. The occasional diversions into darkness are generally played as black comedy. The game does dabble in unpleasantness, mostly in the expansion packs, but you have to actively seek it out.
Having never played it before I was surprised at how close to Doom it was in places. The plot involves an invasion by satanic monsters that emerge from portals to hell, just like in Doom, and there are skinned corpses and piles of gore, but they're too low-poly to be disturbing.
Incidentally the game was launched in the United States with a T-for-Teen ESRB rating, but the rating was increased to M-for-Mature shortly afterwards on account of a mixture of the aforementioned gore plus a default no-clothes skin that had nipples. Oblivion is still M, but it's very hard to take seriously nowadays.
The Elder Scrolls games are notable for their technology. Daggerfall had an enormous open-world map roughly the size of the United Kingdom, with thousands of procedurally-generated dungeons. Morrowind and Oblivion had smaller, but still very large maps dotted with masses of locations, designed so that the player could run from one end of the world to the other with only minimal loading pauses. Unfortunately Oblivion was developed during what is now known as the "shedloads of bloom" era, when everything that was even slightly reflective glowed with the power of a thousand suns:
I have the impression Oblivion was supposed to look like real life in 2006, but now it looks like a cartoon. I was alive back then, and having had a go at the PlayStation 3 version I can see why it felt like a generational leap. Morrowind had the same engine, but the environment was shrouded in fog and everything was brown or green. Oblivion on the other hand has a huge draw distance - the PS3 fades objects in and out, which works well - and it's a riot of colour. 2006 was just slightly before the "real is brown" trend in video games, so in that respect Oblivion has aged backwards, a bit like Mirror's Edge.
Almost twenty years later the realism aspect has dated hilariously, but Oblivion is still a good-looking game, albeit in a different way. The neon colours and plastic terrain now look like a deliberate stylistic choice, like The Long Dark or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, rather than a failed attempt at realism. It's a rare example of a game that has gone from looking great, to looking naff, to looking great again but in a different way. If I was remastering it I would improve the scenery pop-in, tart up the dungeons, licence a more realistic terrain generator, but otherwise leave it alone.
The music has also aged well. In fact it's legitimately good. The Elder Scrolls games have orchestral-style soundtracks that make the games seem more expensive than they are. I say orchestral-style because they have a whiff of sampled strings about them, but the orchestration is solid, and Oblivion is particularly lovely:
I played Oblivion on a Windows 10 PC in 2024 and it was generally unproblematic. Unlike Fallout 3 it doesn't have to be patched to get rid of the now-defunct Games for Windows Live. On a subjective level it felt slightly newer than Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas despite being the older game. I'm not sure if it was the denser foliage, the more diverse colour palette, the grass, or the more expensive-sounding music.
It crashed in places, but the game generously auto-saves, so I didn't lose anything. This being 2024 I could run the game at 1920x1080 with all the sliders turned to maximum. I didn't use any mods.
Bethesda's role-playing games all share a formula. It was established with Arena but perfected by Oblivion, and the company hasn't felt the need to change things since. They all take place in a large, open world that has a handful of city hubs that exist as separate sub-worlds, plus several dozen smaller settlements, plus hundreds of little places that might have a small quest or a collectible sword or something.
Early in the game the player is given a main quest, but there's no time limit, and the player is free to explore the world and complete side-quests instead. The idea is that the player has to toughen up a bit before tackling the main villain, although Oblivion is odd in that respect. It's actually better to get Oblivion's main quest over with as quickly as possible and then explore the world later on. I'll explain why in a moment.
The games all use a first-person perspective. They take place in a sped-up version of real time, with a day-night cycle and changing weather, and they're filled with non-player characters who have their own sleep-wake-work-eat-sleep cycles. They feel like a living world, although on a fundamental level the non-player characters are just little robots who have a schedule and a set of stock responses.
I'm old enough to remember The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum, in which the player could ask other characters to pick things up or go north or whatever, which was heady stuff in 1982. The idea of an adventure game with other characters that led independent lives was cutting-edge at the time, although it didn't work very well.
In contrast Oblivion is infamous for its stilted, artificial NPC conversations, but for the most part the NPC scheduling and scripting works. I found that pitched battles involving lots of characters sometimes ended with my allies committing fratricide, because a stray firebolt or arrow had hit a friendly target, but for the most part Oblivion's AI is transparent, in its goofy way. The internet is full of tales of people spending hours living in its world, exploring and collecting furniture and taking screenshots, because it's a nice place to visit. Albeit that the locals are odd.
The game has just over eight hundred voiced characters, but only fifteen voice actors, which includes a small number of celebrities who only voice a little bit of dialogue. Oblivion established a Bethesda trademark whereby the company spent a lot of money on celebrity voice actors - Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Terence Stamp, and Lynda Carter - but then did nothing to publicise this, which raises the question of why they bothered. I was unaware that Patrick Stewart was in the game until after I started playing it.
Bethesda did the same again with Fallout 3, which had Liam Neeson as the hero's dad, and New Vegas, which had Kris Kristofferson and Matthew Perry. I have a theory that the people who make Bethesda's games love hiring actors and being in the studio with them, but are terrified to give them direction because they don't have a clear vision of what the characters should sound like, and they're scared to tell Patrick Stewart et al how to do their jobs.
Stewart voices the doomed Emperor Uriel Septim, but he doesn't have time to make an impression. His performance slips into ham at the very end - "you must shut the gates - OF OBLIVION!" - but there's nothing wrong with it otherwise. His reaction to the death of his sons is effectively underplayed.
Terence Stamp isn't nearly as good, which puzzled me. He sounds as if he's reading the script for the first time. Oblivion comes with a "making-of" documentary that includes footage of Stamp's recording session, where he does indeed appear to be reading directly from the script - amusingly he also voices the WARG! and YAHH! combat noises, acting out sword thrusts and parries - but it was in a professional recording studio, with direction and the opportunity to do multiple takes. And yet Stamp sounds hesitant, as if none of the fantasy words mean anything to him.
Sean Bean on the other hand is terrific. He plays reluctant heir Martin Septim, who resolves to do the best he can despite overwhelming odds. Without wishing to spoil things there's a twist at the end whereby the game reveals he was the hero all along, and the player was just a supporting character, but Bean is so charismatic I didn't mind. He was hired late in the day but delivers by far the best performance in the game. Even many months later I can still hear Sean Bean in my head saying the word "Akatosh".
