Ballistics Report

Pros

Open
Oblivion is so wide-open that the instances when you can’t do something are much easier to list than those where you can.

Polished
Compared to Morrowind, this is night and day. Speech everywhere, map marker icons to find your objectives, auto-travel across the world, plenty of content in the game world, etc.

Graphics
The most graphically impressive game out now, bar none.

Quests
While not all quests are great, all the guilds have a few excellent ones. The final quest of the Thieves Guild and several in the Assassins Guild are particularly notable.

Cons

So open, it hurts
It’s possible to create a gimp character very easily if you don’t understand how the game mechanics work. Also, the game is very combat-intensive. Pure thief or pure caster classes can have serious issues at the default difficulty setting.

Default interface
While it’s not bad per se, it clearly favors the Xbox 360 and PC users will do well to look for some mods to improve it.