The emperor, voiced unmistakably by Patrick Stewart ( Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men), recognizes you from a portentous dream and entrusts you with the search for his illegitimate heir. Somehow, though, you get swept up in a desperate escape attempt by the emperor and his loyal retinue of protectors. Initially you just pick a name, race, and gender for your character, and the game opens with you stuck in a dungeon cell, being taunted by a fellow inmate. You see the world through your character's eyes, but a behind-the-back perspective is also available. Oblivion does a great job of quickly introducing you to all these different aspects of play, successfully engaging you rather than overwhelming you. This may be a role-playing game, but you could play it like a pure action game, or like a stealth game, or like an adventure game, and it'd still be at least as good as, if not better than, games that are specialized in these regards. That's the main difference between this game and Morrowind. So the breadth of content is as remarkable as ever, but the most important thing is this: The many types of gameplay in Oblivion are well-designed and deeply satisfying, even when taken on their own.
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You can root out evil in hidden dungeons, join and climb the ranks in a number of different guilds, visit all the different towns and try to solve everybody's problems, compete in a long series of gladiatorial battles to the death, break into someone's home and rob them in their sleep, get caught and face the consequences, contract a disease that leads to vampirism and then try to find a cure, buy a house, steal a horse, invest in your favorite shop, and, if you can believe it, there's much more. There's a compelling main quest for you to follow, which takes about 40 hours to finish the first time through, but the majority of the game's content is peripheral to that main quest. You get to create your own character-the possibilities for customization seem limitless-and then explore the world as you will.
Oblivion lives up to this pedigree, putting you into a massive, cohesive, highly immersive world. These are games that you could lose yourself in, spending hours exploring a fantasy world, traveling for miles, or just looking for minutiae, such as rare plants or hidden treasure.
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