Spit and polish

Oblivion is much, much more polished than Morrowind. Morrowind barely disguised the fact that you were a spreadsheet modifying a database. It felt absolutely generic at every conversation, and in many quests. What has changed between Morrowind and Oblivion is presentation.

Morrowind had tons of text and almost all of it was repetitive, with key words being replaced here and there. Oblivion has tons of speech, and yes, much of it is repetitive but it feels much better. Characters move around the game world with a purpose – perhaps not any significant purpose but they do so anyway. They wake up, get something to eat, sit around the inn, chat meaninglessly with people, get lunch and dinner and then go to sleep. Shopkeepers go to work, farmers farm, and so on.

The interface we’re less keen on. It’s clearly designed for the 360 and has big, giant icons and text that don’t work too great on high-resolution monitors right in front of your face. Fortunately, there are mods to shrink those images and the text to show more lines of inventory. Mods will also take care of annoying “loading area…” and other routine messages that really don’t add much to the game. In fact, we wonder why it bothers mentioning it’s loading an area since we’ve never actually witnessed these load times in the outdoors when they’re announced. Crossing between the outdoors and the city, or any other gated entrance, is a different story however.

Combat works well on the PC, whether melee, archery or spellcasting. The graphics are better on the Xbox 360 version, or at least will be for most users, but the mods on the PC make us lean towards the PC as the preferred platform. The numerous fixes and customizability available to computer gamers are definitely worth the eye candy and performance trade-offs.


Oblivion isn’t completely bug-free but it’s generally very stable and performs reasonably well on a modern PC. We’d recommend a X800/6800 or better card as minimum; the 6600 series probably won’t push enough texels and Oblivion definitely puts the final nail in the coffin of the 9700 Pro/9800 Pro days. We’re not saying it won’t run, just that we’d rather not be there to witness the grand old card struggling so. We’d also recommend 2GB of memory and a processor in the 3GHz range or better – the game definitely wants a modern computer in all meanings of the word.