It’s totally ridiculous that the best time in two decades is over The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion come out. I don’t feel like I’m old enough to form a full memory of things I did a long time ago. But yeah, well, calendars don’t lie, it’s been 17 years, three console generations, and a whole global pandemic since Oblivion first hit our monitor screens.
It’s hard to remember how different the gaming environment was back then. With Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PS3 still months away from launch (the latter stumbling out of the birth canal in a wave of bad PR), the saga of the red ring has yet to hit Microsoft’s pocket, Don Mattrick Still Working While the Xbox brand is relatively unknown in Electronic Arts, it’s a serious contender in the console space. It hit store shelves a full year ahead of its competition, and by March 2006, the stage was ready for Next Gen to really begin.
It does. While Kaz Hirai flippantly insists that Sony, and only Sony, will decide when the next generation begins, what really kicks off is a little game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and it’s not just for Bethesda Softworks is a watershed moment, but for RPGs in general.
A lot depends on timing. You see, while the 360 was introduced in late 2005, there wasn’t a whole lot going on to push it forward. Call of Duty 2 is good, but it will take years for the series to become a real blockbuster. The inconclusive Perfect Dark prequel and the beautiful but haunting Kameo: Elements of Power didn’t really make much of an impression, other than to make people worry that Rare’s best days might be behind them. Frankly, by March, people were getting a little tired of Bankshot Billiards and Geometry Wars.
But then, Oblivion, with a familiar Bethesda-esque plan as the machine’s launch title but ultimately having to hold off on polishing, burst from the sewers of the Empire and provided us all with a truly transformative game for its time. Something “next-gen” experience: a massive do-anything, go-anywhere world, simulated so detailed that you could walk into someone’s house and pick up the cutlery from their dinner table. Bounce an apple off their head. They will tell you. With Havok physics! Real-time shadows! Fully voiced, complete with sparkling wet eyeballs!
Arguably, this is the first valid reason to own an Xbox 360. Can’t fully experience it on PS2. A game that set the bar high for Western role-playing games for years to come, paved the way for its stablemate and made the relatively obscure Fallout series a juggernaut, its sequel Skyrim, unless you count Pokemon , otherwise it’s the most successful role-playing game of all time. The template Oblivion set inherited from Morrowind in shaky form will return this year for Starfield, which could be the biggest game of the year. But beyond its direct descendants, Oblivion’s influence on the genre as a whole, and the market it served, cannot be overstated.
It did for Western RPGs what Final Fantasy VII did for Eastern RPGs a decade earlier: it was so spectacular, so memorable, that it got everyone’s attention. It set a standard by which games of its kind would always be compared and greatly expanded their potential audience as thousands of people discovered a new love for role-playing games in an engaging and accessible format .in a word, let them possible.
It also kicks off the dreaded microtransaction trend of all the horse armor business: you can draw a straight line from there to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, pluck an example from the sky, and on the one hand simulate a vast and beautiful open world full of vigor and intrigue , but on the other hand, every time you start it, it will try to sell you vests on the title screen. ah. vomit.
Its Defense, despite being known for its infamous vest debacle, was also a game that showed the world how to properly craft downloadable content, and most large role-playing games to this day still roughly follow the post-launch model: a series of small downloadable content Optional add-ons that give players things like beautiful houses, new side quests, and fresh dungeons to explore, as well as a set of two large expansion packs with tons of content and new, expanded storylines independent of main mission. With Knights of the Nine Kingdoms and The Trembling Isles, Bethesda showed us that high-quality DLC was worth pouring new time and money into games we’d already flushed. Many years later, The Witcher 3’s best-in-class post-launch support will show us again, largely following the same pattern.
So you could argue that Oblivion taught the industry some bad habits, but you could just as easily argue that it set a high bar for future games to leap over. Like all legacy, Oblivion’s legacy is complicated. But in my opinion, it’s one of the greatest games of all time, and no matter what one thinks about its influence, one thing is indisputable: the game would be completely different without it.
