Oblivion game download for pc

Also included in the Game of the Year edition are Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles expansion, adding new and unique quests and content to the already massive world of Oblivion.

See why critics called Oblivion the Best Game of Key features: Live Another Life in Another World Create and play any character you can imagine, from the noble warrior to the sinister assassin to the wizened sorcerer. First Person Melee and Magic An all-new combat and magic system brings first person role-playing to a new level of intensity where you feel every blow. Non-player characters eat, sleep, and complete goals all on their own.

New Lands to Explore In the Shivering Isles expansion, see a world created in Sheogorath's own image, one divided between Mania and Dementia and unlike anything you've experienced in Oblivion. Challenging new foes Battle the denizens of Shivering Isles, a land filled with hideous insects, Flesh Atronachs, skeletal Shambles, amphibious Grummites, and many more.

Reclaim their former glory as you traverse the far reaches of Cyrodill across an epic quest line. You can serve out your time, or try to escape. You can pick the guard's pocket when he walks by," says Howard. You can even attack your cellmate and overpower the guard when he comes to investigate the commotion. In fact, there'll be plenty of room for nastiness in Oblivion, despite the main quest being a 'save the world' type deal.

You can't make spells or magic items until you do that. It's a bit Harry Potter-ish. It really feels like a wizard's journey. Later, character artist Christiane Meister shows off the flexible face builder used in character creation. The ten playable races from Morrowind remain, and each has a basic face that can be aged, stretched and otherwise altered to provide a unique mug for your in-game persona.

Add in the hair editor no, really and the possibilities become endless. You could spend all day on just one face if you wanted," says Christiane. And believe me, Todd has spent all day playing around with faces, she adds with a chuckle. Needless to say, all faces have animations for speaking and displaying emotions.

Combat has also undergone a thorough re-jigging - programmer Steve Meister takes us through the changes to the enemy Al in detail. The biggest change is we have something called a combat style: a collection of settings that dictates how an NPC or a creature fights.

It works in conjunction with their skills and Al settings - things like aggression, confidence, their disposition towards their opponent - to decide how often they attack, how often they block, how much they move, where they're going to stand when they're shooting arrows or ranged spells. The same power attacks and 'perks' available to the player are available to the Al, including such things as the ability to disarm, paralyse and knock down opponents.

Some enemies will yield after taking a beating this can be accepted or rejected , while others head for the hills at the first sign of combat.

If a weapon is lying nearby, they might pick it up and return. We're rapidly running out of space here, and yet we've barely touched upon the amount of cool, scary and downright impressive things we saw during our visit to Bethesda. We haven't mentioned vampires you can become one, and this time you'll be able to continue playing missions as a bloodsucker , the voice actors some big names here, as well as Patrick Stewart , the houses that can be bought in each city and the items that let you resurrect dead foes as mindless personal bodyguards.

To put it simply, there's content and gameplay galore. If any other developer was in charge this would be a cause for concern see Boiling Point - but Bethesda has pulled it off before, and looks like it's ready to do it again.

It won't be long till we find out. In Ye Olden days, role playing games were little more than just text adventures. Type E' to go east, and you might be greeted by the phrase: You are in a beautiful forest. Sunlight streams through the lush canopy, reflecting dappled sunlight on the grass and flowers below. Twenty-five years on, my character is heading east, and now there really is a beautiful forest in front of my eyes, completely rendered in incredible 3D graphics, branches swaying and reacting to the real-time weather system, birds and wildlife frolicking in the idyllic countryside.

Oblivion is set in a different part of the Elder Scrolls universe, Tamriel, where the emperor has been killed and an evil portal has been opened up below the Imperial capital, letting in all kinds of demonic nasties. It's up to you to vanquish the hellish beasts, rescue the emperor's surviving son and save the world from, ahem, oblivion. Of course, this being an Elder Scrolls game, it's up to you how you complete the task and what character you wish to become, be that warrior, mage, thief or anyone in between.

Oblivion begins in jail, where as a nameless prisoner, you must first free yourself to begin the quest -that's if you can stop admiring the gobsmacking next-gen graphics.

And now that Oblivion has a complex physics system, over 9, objects can be interacted with - if your character happens to brush past some manacles on the wall, they'll move and clank realistically. Eventually you escape and can enjoy the rest of the province, approximately 16 square miles, with half of it consisting of forest.

Bethesda apparently spent research time with the University of Maryland geology lab studying how soil erodes, rock forms and trees develop. The woods and forests you now see in the game weren't created by an artist, they were literally grown by the game, giving it an intense, organic feel and making it a unique place for unscripted events to happen.

You can shoot wild deer that wander about, and eat the meat to boost your stats, or pick berries and mushrooms and even combine them to create potions - if you have the required alchemy skills. In addition, a compass at the bottom of the screen always points towards the nearest point of interest, such as a dungeon, so that you don't end up wandering about lost for hours. Oblivion has over handcrafted dungeons that the team has spent a lot of time creating, ensuring that there is minute-to-minute action with more quests and interactive items, enemies to defeat and other surprises, such as traps.

Combat is still immensely important, but has been revamped so that you can now easily combine melee, defence and magic. By pressing the attack button you pull off a quick sword attack, whereas holding the attack button will perform a much more powerful swipe at foes. You can add magical spells to any fights you encounter, as well as numerous blocks and combos - all governed by character statistics that affect the kind of moves you can pull off and how successful they are.

We've already seen exciting battles in elven dungeons against skeletal warriors, zombies, goblins and hellish knights, with the combat feeling much more brutal and realistic than Morrowind, metal clashing viciously against metal, anguished screams echoing through dark halls and blood spilling freely.

You also have the use of other weapons, such as arrows, that will stick realistically in wood or flesh, or bounce off stone. However, another weapon you can use in the dungeons is stealth - creep into the shadows and your aiming reticule becomes an eye, indicating that you're hidden from view.

Now you can sneak up behind enemies and give them a well-timed smack on the back of the head with the butt of your bow. If you need to check how your character is progressing, bringing up the journal screen will display everything you need to know. Bethesda has decided not to include experience points as in a traditional RPG however, with your character constantly improving different skills the more you play.

A major criticism of Morrowind was the lack of truly interactive NPCs, but this looks to have been improved drastically with Bethesda's new radiant Al' system. They'll engage in non-. You can have conversations with NPCs. The new 'persuasion area' allows you to give your replies some attitude, so you can bully them, for-example, or tell a joke - the one about the goblin and the farmer's daughter is always a winner.

You can tell by the superb facial animation and tone of their voice if you've managed to win them over - or become the social equivalent of an income tax inspector. With a total of nine main cities, dozens of settlements, gorgeous forests, huge dungeons including the yet-to-be-revealed hellish underground levels and a population of thousands of NPCs to interact with, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is definitely one of the most eagerly awaited role-playing games of the year.

Don't miss next month's when we'll bring you an exclusive in-depth preview, with unmissable info and never-seen-before screenshots. How Do You make the ground-breaking even more innovative, the freeform more focused and the visually impressive into the visually spectacular? These are the three challenges currently being faced by Bethesda Softworks - the team behind the now legendary Elder Scrolls series - as it charges relentlessly towards a Christmas release date for what could just be the most ground-breaking role-player in years, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Up till now, Bethesda has been teasing us with snippets of information about this fourth instalment of their Tamriel-based series, without ever unveiling too much. Until now. This near priceless information, however, cost us dear.

After some extensive bartering that saw us parting with Sefton's life savings almost eight pounds in real money and Porter's food rations for the next six weeks a halfeaten packet of Frazzles , we managed to get hold of some exclusive new Infer and screenshots from Todd Howard - the game's executive producer.

What sets Bethesda apart from the majority of its competitors is its undying dedication to reinventing RPG conventions, and breaking away from the norm is at the very heart of the company's developmental ethos.

For us, Oblivion is the chance to go back and look at everything we've done before and decide what we liked, what we wanted to do differently, and what new things we wanted to do, explains Howard.

We're big on blowing everything up and starting over again for every game. Even though we're essentially doing a sequel, we don't want it to feel derivative.

Morrowind was a work of genuine innovation, its freeform, dynamic -though at times intimidating - gaming world providing a fresh new approach to the fantasy RPG genre. So when we recently heard that Oblivion would be less freeform than its illustrious predecessor, we were naturally a tad nervous.

Was Bethesda about to sell out on us or were there other, subtler, more refined reasons for making Oblivion less sprawling? I don't know if it's constrained as much as it is focused, Todd assures us. We simply felt a larger obligation to give the player better feedback on what they should be doing, and providing information to let them know they're being successful as they complete things. We're not constraining anything, because it's still a completely freeform, open-ended game.

It's more about the kind of feedback we give and making sure players aren't lost, unless they want to be lost. With that sorted, it was time to get down to the juicy details. Judging by these screenshots, it's clear that the world of Tamriel has taken on an even more lifelike look than in Morrowind, with character faces displaying genuine depth and emotion and the scenery looking lush and alive.

Howard assures us that the visuals will be made all the more impressive by the game's new physics model. We've really ramped up the level of realism and the sense of immersion In the environments we've created.

When you see an arrow bounce off stone or stick in a creature, we don't want you to think twice about it. You can walk up to a dead creature and pluck the arrows out because, well, that's how it's supposed to work. The combat system has also received a complete overhaul. How often in RPGs have you been left feeling like you've had little to do with victory, or had little chance to avert a crushing defeat, due to behind-the-scenes dice deciding your fate rather than personal skill?

It's an age-old RPG problem, but it's one that Howard and his team appear to be tackling with vigour and determination. The fact that two previous iterations of the new combat system are now lining Bethesda'S bins is testament to that fact. It took us a long time to get there, to find something that felt nght and worked within an RPG," explains Howard.

We wanted things to be under the player's control and make sense, such as swinging a sword, seeing it hit an NPC and having it inflict damage. But we also wanted to have the player's stats and abilities to have a very real impact on what's going on.

I think we've found a balance that will make sense to anyone. Bethesda is also attempting to reinvent how you'll level up, by dispensing with experience points and replacing them with a revamped system. So, killing a skeleton with your sword and shield doesn't give you experience points, but it does improve your skill, more specifically, at using a sword and shield.

As those skills improve, your character levels up, and you'll eventually be able to do new things with those skills. So, if you get really good at blocking, there's a chance that when you block an attack your character will knock the enemy back with their shield. It's like an extra attack, and it's based on your skill, not on hitting some combination of keys. Sounds good to us. But of course RPGs - or at least the best RPGs - are never just about hitting undead beings as hard as you can until they run out of hit points, and the Elder Scrolls series has always prided itself on the quality of not only its freeform environments, but of the believability of its inhabitants, too.

If there was one major failing that Morrowind possessed, it was the woodenness of its NPCs. With Oblivion, Bethesda is seeking to rectify that farting. At first, we saw a lot of interesting behaviour from our NPCs," explains Howard. One time we had everyone in town show up in the same tavern at the same time to eat lunch, and one guy didn't have any money, so he went around trying to steal everyone else s food.

We've now got it to the point where we don't see too much wacky stuff anymore, but the process has been a lot of fun - to create this system and then watch NPCs do things you hadn't even considered. Clearly, Bethesda has matured as a developer over the past few years, its realisation that more isn t always better a clear sign of the new directions and priorities that are dnvmg Oblivion forward. It gives us every reason to believe that the fourth instalment of the senes could be its best yet.

And that's without us having even talked about the game's unique dungeons, each one jam-packed with fiendish traps to snare the unwitting adventurer, or the extensive cast of enemies, including skeletons, liches, trolls, goblins and various kinds of Daedra. And let's not forget the spells, which Howard sadly wasn't quite ready to talk to us about just yet. That juicy info is yet to come. Oblivion really is starting to take on a truly gargantuan form, casting an ominous shadow over the RPG genre with its innovative ideas and mammoth ambition.

It's hard to argue with Oblivion's promise, and with Bethesda having already proved itself so conclusively in the past, it's just possible that we could be about to see an RPG evolution that'll send the genre in new and exciting directions - one so consuming, so lifelike, that real life may become just a distant memory.

One of the most potentially exciting devices that Oblivion is set to employ is something called the Persuasion Area. This will allow you to use your character's unique skills to persuade NPCs to do what you want them to. Some people will want to just run up to someone and hack them with a sword before they get two words out, so their idea of persuasion will lie more in the careful application of brute force, says Howard.

But everyone in the world will respond to what you say and do. Many different factors will forge your persuasion methods and their effectiveness, such as what quests you've embarked on, what factions you belong to and how you've treated NPCs in the past.

If you get really good at Speechcraft, continues Howard encouragingly, you can take an NPC that really doesn't care for you that much, and sweet-talk them to the point where they're sharing intimate secrets with you. Frankly we're not too sure we that we want to know about an elf's deepest darkest fantasy involving an inflatable orc, three tins of Vaseline and a can of condensed milk. Then again As Sefton mentioned last month in his Oblivion preview, Bethesda paid a visit to Maryland University to learn all about nature.

No, not because it wanted to start its own herb garden or nurture geraniums, but because it wanted to make Oblivion's forests of which there'll be plenty and landscapes look as realistic as possible. We're using this system to procedurally generate the game's landscape, and so we wanted the system to create environments that looked right.

Not just how the trees and rocks appear, but how things are shaped, how mountains have eroded over time. We want you to look off into the distance at a group of mountains and swear they're real. As Job Interviews, go it'll be short and relatively painless. It's just you, a disinterested chap named Haskill, a bare room, a desk and a chair. After such an imposing entranceway, surrounded by otherworldly vegetation thats leeched through its tableau of linked screaming faces into the lands of Cyrodiil, you were perhaps expecting something a little more grandiose within.

Then, as the interview concludes, the dull, featureless walls melt away into a cloud of butterflies. And then it happens: you're somewhere slightly mad. The setting is the tom realm of the daedric Prince of Madness, one Sheogorath, if you haven't been keeping tabs on your Elder Scrolls lore. Bethesda's stated aim is to create a new self-contained land where the characters are more tightly defined, where dialogue is richer and where their quest designers can stretch their imaginative powers to the full, under the broad canopy of the insane, the unstable and the downright psychotic.

The Shivering Isles represent madness itself - eternally split both physically and politically between the bickering forces of Mania wild-eyed, unhinged and Dementia paranoid, gloomy, depressed. Sheogorath rules over them all, but his realm is in danger - under threat from the blank conformity of the Knights of Order who have begun to appear on its fringes.

And guess what? Thats where you come in. Art-wise, Mania is a lot more vibrant colourful - almost over-saturated in parts. In the lowlands, in Dementia, it's really more of a creepy atmosphere. A lot of mosses hanging out of dark trees and stuff - it's a very claustrophobic feeling thats meant to evoke more of a hard feel to it. Obviously we don't do survival horror, but its a creepier place in general. This ridge even runs through the capital city of the isles, New Sheoth, splitting it in two in true Berlin Wall-style.

The stunning fountains and impressive waterfalls of Manias half of the city known as Bliss are a sight to behold, yet they drain into the half ruled by Dementia known as The Crucible , and there the water congeals into dank, stagnant piles of sludge in the arse-end of the city. It's a land split between Alice In Wonderlandstye exuberance and the type of ancient and gloomy forests in which hobbits always seemed to be getting lost in the Lord Of The Rings movies.

You get a lot of obsessives, bizarre artists and the like, who are insanely creative but insane nonetheless. Whereas in Dementia you find the psychotics, the paranoid - people who are afraid of things they've created in their own minds. Once the fog of butterflies dissipates, you find yourself in a walled area known as The Fringe, and to escape this there's the small matter of getting past the goliath Gatekeeper that adorns this magazine's cover - a terrifying construction of the body parts of various creatures whose job description provides a fair amount t of the plot later on.

Once you're past him though, youll find yourself searching out the man of the moment: Sheogorath. And once you meet him, alongside his loyal chamberlain Haskill very much a Jeeves to the big man's Bertie Wooster , the plot starts ticking. I need a mortal champion and you're the only one who's made it to talk with me, so you're him. You are my champion'," explains an enthusiastic Nelson.

Sheogorath only gives you bits and pieces - he doles out information slowly. He's the god of madness, and he tends to speak in unintentional riddles and go off on tangents about pudding. Right So anyway, Sheogorath's thought is that if you're going to hold any sway in his court whatsoever, you ought to go out and start meeting people, helping them out, pissing them off and basically having a cracking role-play adventure.

As with the various guilds and orders of Cyrodiil, your reputation with the houses of Mania and Dementia will rise and fall according to your actions, but there will come a point at which Sheogorath will ask you to makaa final decision as to which side you will join and, indeed, of which you shall become leader. This in turn will have ramifications in later quests and in whose support you'll have as you battle the forces of the rival daedric prince Jyggalag mentioned once in a book in Daggerfall, and apparently hotly discussed on the Elder Scrolls lore forums , who's moseying into the madness uninvited.

Hes attempting to render a genocide of sensible-ness upon the Shivering Isles known as The Greymarch, an ancient event that occurs every epoch or two that Sheogorath is naturally. As Nelson points out it's all very much created in the spirit of Neil Gaiman author of the Sandman graphic novel series and novels like American Gods , with concepts like sanity and madness being given form and personality, and having them clash against each other while mortals like you and I toil away beneath them, subject to their every whim.

One of the key things Sheogorath wants you to do is help create another guardian for the Gates of Madness. As such, searching out the original guardian's creator and helping him fashion a new one out of body bits is an importantpart of main quest, but the chirpy Mark Nelson is reluctant to reveal much more in terms of storyline - and not just to lessen the risk of spoilerification.

He's equally excited, you see, about the little people - the NPC characters lower down the food chain who may not hold the future of an entire daedric realm in their hands, but are at least entertaining in their own little mentalist ways.

There's the chap you come across who's afraid to sleep in his own house in case the walls fall in and crush him, for example, who asks you to find him a truly safe place to sleep. There's the mad woman in the wilderness who obsessed by having one of everything in the world - from creatures to objects - and whose whims you can only satisfy if you've got a couple of aeons to spare.

A more professional obsessive, meanwhile runs and gives tours around the Museum of Oddities, to which you are asked to become a donor as the amount of bizarre and useless objects in your inventory starts to build up. Speaking of which, more obsessive fans will be delighted to hear that Shivering Isles is due to be the first Elder Scrolls game to find a use for calipers - the heretofore useless household implements that have been found and left inside the barrels and chests of Tamriel for countless ages.

You'll come across a bloke in New Sheoth, for example, who's absolutely desperate to kill himself but cant, since topping yourself is seen as such a crime that theres even a dank, depressing place called the Hill of Suicides for their ghosts to hang out for all eternity as punishment.

So it is then, if you choose to help out that you must figure out an inventive accident to ensure that this poor chap snuffs it without it looking like he's asked you directly.

Seeing as you're climbing up the chain of nobility, meanwhile, you're also expected to grow a healthy disdain for the tiresome adventurers who keep bundling into the realm with the intention of slaying beasts, looting treasure and generally making a nuisance of themselves. As such, one of the main quests is a direct homage to the venerable Bullfrog box of fun that was Dungeon Keeper.

Sheogorath, you see, has a spare dungeon in Xedilian that he uses partly for testing people and partly for keeping unwanted mortal visitors busy. Once you've worked your way through its intricacies yourself, it's up to you and a vast array of booby-traps, pits and heavy swinging objects to deal with one such party of have-a-go adventurers who are dead-set on stealing its fictional treasures.

What's more, what happens in the tom realm of Sheogorath stays in the tom realm of Sheogorath, so you could be chief goody-two-shoes back in Cyrodiil and a filthy murdering bastard here and none will be the wiser. And what role-playing expansion would be complete without a fresh menagerie of monsters - and weapons to repeatedly hit them round the head with? As with the art style and demeanour of the locals, creatures differ according to which subsection of insanity youre adventuring in.

A typical beast found in the over-the-top lands of Mania, for example, is the Elytra - a giant ant-like insect with garish oil-spill rainbow patterning, beady red eyes and furiously jabbing pincers. A similarly feared denizen of Dementia meanwhile would be its representation of Hunger - a ghastly pale figure not unlike the tentacle-mouthed zombies in STALKER, whose emaciated yet muscly figure roains through rural areas picking off livestock and farmers.

Other foes that could be mentioned include the big the Baliwog that seems to be half crocodile, half frog and more than a little Jabba the Hutt , the small this seasons goblin placements are known as Grummites and the ones with sexy chests "Helloooo, Dark Seductresses! As for tools of smitage with which to destroy this evil and sexiness , Nelson doesn't want to go into too much detail for fear of having to talk to me all week.

He does, however, mention a sword known as Bawnfang, that gets powered up the more souls you dispatch - essentially levelling fop alongside you.

Unfortunately, it resets itself at night when it also changes its name to Duskfang, but it's a great idea nonetheless. If you're a particularly magical character, meanwhile, you'll be interested to hear of the addition of what Bethesda are calling point-blank areaeffect spells', that explode spectacularly around you when they're cast. Personally, I didn't have too many problems with vanilla Oblivion.

I enjoyed every last drop in fact, but I know a fair wodge of people who had one or two reservations. Some of them I have the misfortune of working with on a daily basis. First and foremost, if you didn't like the levelling system, with its insistence that when you got stronger then so did all the bandits hiding behind the trees, then don't expect a magical 'fix' in the expansion.

This add-on is all about the content and not necessarily the belt and braces of the gameplay. Having said that if you were of the opinion that interaction with the residents of CyrodiiI was a touch on the shallow side, then to an extent Bethesda agree with you. Nelson himself regrets that they "couldn't quite get to the meat" of NPCs in the original, but with a smaller cast list of around 60 or 70 excluding monosyllabic guards and the like , the plan is that each will be a fleshed-out and well-rounded individual.

Bar the insanity, obviously. Others are just psychotic. And there you have it the realm of Sheogorath. One card short of a full deck, hot quite in the pink, missing a few screws and most certainly more than slightly mad. Around 30 hours of play on a mad island around a quarter the size of the original game's Cyrodiil. The very best parts of Oblivion were the ones where its designers were clearly given carte blanche to create something crazy - the stolen ship, the painting quest, entering someone's dreams or watching burning Alsatians rain down on a village of cats.

This time, under the expansive banner of madness itself, they're cooking up ingenious and barmy quests as a matter of course.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum, and long may they reign. After Playing Through the ghastly tutorial of Oblivion four times I've finally managed to create a character that works, in that all of my primary skills are used enough that they all improve at a similar rate. This fact, alongside long-exhausted complaints of enemies that level up simultaneously to you, the weak story, and the giant vaginas that constantly inhibit your exploration, are all reasons why Morrowind is superior to Oblivion.

So when I ask myself why I've replayed Oblivion four times, and never replayed Morrowind I've, unsurprisingly, found myself unable to answer. But I believe that I've finally worked it out: It's down to my stubbornness. When I first played Morrowind, it was the best gaming experience of my life.

With Oblivion my enjoyment of the game is hampered by problems, and consequently I've become determined that one day I'll experience a play-through of Oblivion as blissful as my time on the island of Vvardenfell. I simply refuse to accept that Oblivion is an inferior game, and so I'm condemned to fotever wander the absurdly grassy landscape of Cyrodiil, searching for the Morrowind-killer that, deep down, I know I'll never find.

Magisterial That's the word we're looking for. Morrowind can take the plaudits for laying the groundwork and scrubbing out the rules of location linearity in role-playing, but The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion takes that model, streamlines it, seamlessly integrates exhilarating combat smothers it in beautiful graphics and takes both Tamriel and the art of role-playing to an unprecedented new height It's bloody daunting at first Your initial three hours of freedom will contain a distinct level of confusion and blind wandering, but after this period of worry an unconscious nerve will fire off at the back of your head and everything will just click.

This is where the adventure begins, and this is where you begin to melt into your PC. So where do you want to go today? Well, there's a pretty wide choice round these here parts - so I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and we'll build from there.

I began yesterday by lurking outside a jeweller's shop until approximately 2am. I then proceeded to creep upstairs and slaughter the owner of said shop with a combination of arrows and fireballs directed at his head. Having looted the shop for anything that glittered, I then crept out and avoided the law until I reached a nearby hovel where I slept until dawn.

This morning, I scurried to the nearest stable neatly sidestepping a woman asking me if I'd heard of the terrible tragedy in town , rustled a horse and clippety-clopped into the bright new day. This afternoon I will slink around dusty tombs in search of treasure; and to make up for my many crimes I'll give saving the world a whirl come teatime. Oh, and there's a gang of women convincing menfolk that a night of nookie is on the cards when they're actually going to mug them -1 could sort that out Oh, and I've got to kill a pirate.

And I also want to make my horse climb that big mountain. I'm sorry, but if you're not partial to ecstatic liyperbole in game reviews then stop reading.