View All (13)

View All (9)

To simply state that Oblivion unfolds in a first or third person perspective would be an understatement. While I don't think the third person perspective works particularly well for this type of experience, the first person puts you directly into the game. The cleverly designed quests are incredibly engaging and show great variety. Want to become an efficient thief? Feel like joining a Dark Brotherhood of assassins? Want to play detective and solve a mystery? How about ridding a haunted house of its evil spirit? You can do all these things, as well as explore massive underground dungeons, compete in the arena to become champion, learn a plethora of magic spells so you can enchant weapons, and the list goes on and on.

But let's get down to the real issue here. Other gaming sites have spent too much effort on comparing the Xbox 360 and PS3 version. To save time and word count, let me just tell you that the differences in the core game are negligible. At this point, the only real disparity is that the downloadable content available for the Xbox 360 version allows players access to the newly released Shivering Isles. However, the PS3 version does ship with the Knights of the Nine content, whereas the Xbox 360 version did not. The only issues to speak of for the PS3 version are some minor hiccups where an NPC may fall through a solid object, or a dead body may be frozen in mid-air. Fortunately, these are occasional occurrences and rarely affect game play.

The comparison that everyone should be making is between Oblivion and the previous entry in the series, Morrowind. My fear is that gamers who have not yet played Oblivion are standing clear over concerns that the open-ended, confusing quest system which plagued Morrowind exists here also. Believe me when I tell you that Oblivion is nothing like its predecessor. Not only does Oblivion provide various, detailed views of the world map, there is an amazingly handy quest log that can be accessed at any time, which divides quests into the "active," "current" and "completed" categories.

As you scroll through your active quests and make your selection, the world map provides an indicator which shows you exactly where to go, down to the structure or location you need to visit. Had Morrowind incorporated this feature, the enjoyment factor would have improved exponentially. Thankfully, Bethesda recognized this deficiency, and at no time in your journey through Cyrodiil will you have to wonder where you need to go next. I could go on and on singing the praises of this excellent entry into the Elder Scrolls series. I simply close with this statement. Oblivion is the single best console action adventure RPG I have played to date. If you own a PS3 and enjoy an engrossing and challenging experience, there is simply no excuse for you not to purchase Oblivion and play the hell out of it.