The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion logo
Studio	Bethesda Game Studios 4J Studios (PS3 port)
Publisher	2K Games (PC, Xbox 360) Ubisoft (PS3) Bethesda Softworks
Senior Developer	Todd Howard (Executive Producer) Ken Rolston (Lead Designer)
composer	Jeremy Soule
Erstveröffent- lichung	Windows, Xbox 360: March 20, 2006 March 23, 2006 March 24, 2006 PlayStation 3: March 20, 2007 April 26, 2007 April 27, 2007
platform	Microsoft Windows , Xbox 360 , PlayStation 3
Game engine	Gamebryo
genre	Action RPG
Subject	Fantasy
Game mode	Single player
control	Mouse , keyboard , gamepad
system advantages preconditions	Pentium 4 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 3D graphics card with 128 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c 4.6 GB free space, Windows XP or newer
medium	DVD-ROM , Blu-ray Disc , download
language	English , French , German , Italian , Spanish
Current version	1.2.0416 (May 10, 2007)
copy protection	SecuROM
Age rating	USK PEGI
PEGI content rating
information	Playable on Xbox One through backward compatibility .

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a computer role-playing game from the American developer Bethesda Game Studios and the fourth regular installment in the The Elder Scrolls series. The release date for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 was March 24, 2006. The Take 2 label 2K Games was the original distributor . The publisher of the PlayStation 3 version, which appeared in spring 2007, was Ubisoft . The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is now available exclusively from Bethesda Softworks in retail stores and on digital distribution platforms such as Steam .

The fantasy role-playing game was characterized at the time of publication by its very detailed graphics, high NPC - and Gegner- AI and physically correct behavior of moving objects from. The game world is open : a linear step-by-step approach is (apart from the main quest) not or only partially necessary. The hero can move freely like in a "real" world. In contrast to its predecessor Morrowind , the world has been significantly enlarged and simplified through various changes such as the restriction of the number of skills and the revision of the travel system.

action

The location of the action is the province "Cyrodiil" on the continent "Tamriel" in the world "Nirn". Emperor Uriel Septim VII has long been too weak to carry out his government business. The Lord Chancellor Ocato has taken on a large part of the tasks and is at the side of the decrepit emperor with advice and action. But Uriel Septim has many enemies who want him dead. An occult group called "The Mythical Dawn" tries to kill the emperor and opens portals to Oblivion all over the country. The Oblivion dimension is a kind of parallel universe that is inhabited by the so-called Daedra. Daedra is a collective term for various species, including gods (the Daedra lords and princes) and demons (e.g. Skamps, Daedroths, and Dremora). After Uriel Septim's three well-known sons were killed by the assassins of the mythical Dawn, the emperor, accompanied by his bodyguards, the blades , flees through the secret passages of the palace. These lead through a prison cell that should actually be empty, but in which the player character wakes up. This joins the emperor, who has already seen him in his dreams. As one blade after the other falls, the emperor is also caught, who shortly beforehand hands the player the amulet of the kings and instructs him to find the illegitimate son and thus the last heir to the throne, who will open the gates to the realm of oblivion (Oblivion gates) can close with the help of the amulet. The amulet is seized by the cult in the course of the game, whereupon the player must try to create a portal to Mankar Camoran's world with the help of the illegitimate emperor's son Martin, with which the amulet can be retrieved and thus defeat the daedra prince Mehrunes Dagon . In addition, the game includes the mages, thieves and fighters guild as well as the dark brotherhood, to whose head the player can rise. You can also achieve titles in the individual principalities ( e.g. Knight of the Order of Thorns ). In addition to the actual storyline, the player also has numerous guild-related additional tasks and a myriad of side quests that he can use to familiarize himself with the game world and to increase his wealth and fame as well as countless dungeons to explore.

Side quests

The arena: In the arena missions you have to take out several opponents one after the other in order to move up ranks and ultimately to become grandmaster. From this point on, you can only fight against wild animals in “monster battles”. It is also possible to watch fights and place a bet on one of the two fighters.

The Thieves Guild: The Thieves Guild is mainly about stealing items. Either you break into houses outside of the missions and sell the items you steal from vendors, or you steal certain prescribed items in the thieves' guild missions.

The Dark Brotherhood: With the Dark Brotherhood, you always get a target to kill in the missions and an optional way of killing the target to get a bonus.

The Fighters 'Guild: In the first part of the Fighters' Guild, you do services for society and smaller groups. After all that you also have to defeat a “private fighters guild”.

The Mages Guild: With the Mages Guild you first have to complete smaller missions for the individual guild houses in the various cities and then defeat the necromancers and their leader.

Gameplay

In this role-playing game, the player himself determines how he wants to play it. At the beginning he decides which of the 10 fictional races, such as the human imperial people or the elves (including the dark elves, wood elves and high elves) or the anthropomorphic peoples (i.e. the Argonians and Khajiit), he wants to belong to. Neither the breed nor the choice of class (occupation) such as B. Assassins affect the main story or other quests. The player can join several so-called "guilds", fight as a gladiator and explore the game world freely, even on horseback. The card is helpful. It shows the player all mission goals and locations and offers the possibility to travel to a specific location (if he has already visited it before) and to mark specific locations. These markings are also shown on the compass. There are also many items of equipment that can be enchanted, e.g. B. at altars of the Mages Guild or with a seal stone (magic stone that maintains the gates between Tamriel and the world of Oblivion and is located in the keep of the respective Oblivion world).

Development history

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was developed as the fourth part of the Elder Scrolls series by Bethesda Softworks . The music was composed by Jeremy Soule , who already provided musical accompaniment to the predecessor Morrowind .

The game was released on March 24, 2006 for Xbox 360 and Windows by 2K Games . On April 26, 2007, it was also released on the PlayStation 3 by Ubisoft .

German translation

As a result of Bethesda’s decision to have the game translated into German by its own staff in a short period of time, there were some linguistic and grammatical inaccuracies: For example, “Schw.Tr.d.Le.En.W.” refers to the “weak drink the life energy recovery ”or the“ fireball ”spell incorrectly cast a healing spell. Furthermore, some formulations and mission texts were only partially (or not at all) translated from English. Sometimes the translation is missing entirely, such as B. gate to Oblivion . In addition, the synchronization of the spoken texts of the NPCs is partly missing and the subtitles don't always match what was spoken. It often happens that the speech output does not work and you have to read subtitles. In contrast to the main game, the add-ons Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles only contain a few translation errors.

Up until 2007, Bethesda published several patches that attempted to fix the sometimes serious gameplay and translation errors.

Extensions

In the add-on Knights of the Nine , the faction of the same name and the official plug-ins are added via download. In Knights of the Nine, Umaril has to fight the Unfeathered (the child of a Daedra prince and an elf) after the latter causes a massacre in a chapel and a prophet appears who proclaims that Umaril will bring mischief. In the course of the quest series, the player collects artifacts of the Nine Divines, which strengthen him in the fight against the "Unfeathered". The version that was available in stores also contained other smaller DLCs that added smaller quests or made it possible, for example, to buy armor for horses.

In the Shivering Isles add-on , the player is in the realm of the Daedra Prince of Madness, Sheogorath. Sheogorath asks him to help him stop the Gray March, in which the Daedra Prince of Order, Jyggalag, attacks and destroys the Shivering Isles . This happens, as it turns out in the course of the plot, at the end of each era (so three times so far). In truth, Sheogorath was actually Jyggalag, but he was punished by the other Daedra lords because he became too powerful and becomes Jyggalag every 1000 years and destroys the world he established as Sheogorath. Subsequently, the Shivering Isles were built up again and again by Sheogorath. In the end you even become the prince of madness yourself, Sheogorath.

In September 2007, Oblivion finally got its "Game of the Year Edition", which includes the "Mini" add-on Knights of the Nine and the larger expansion Shivering Isles .

Community patches

After support for the main game ended in May 2007 with the 1.2.0416 patch, the game community began to fix remaining bugs and inadequacies in the game itself. The last iteration v3.4.4 of the community patch called Unofficial Oblivion Patch from 2013 fixes over 2500 remaining bugs in the game.

There are also corrections from the fan base for the translation errors that frequently occur in the original version. Since the console versions cannot be expanded with the construction set, this option is missing here.

Fan extensions

Due to the provided modding SDK, there are numerous fan mods for Oblivion which make it possible to add new game objects (weapons, clothing and buildings) as well as entire quest series.

Since July 2010, Oblivion has also had its first free German-language Total Conversion (“complete conversion ”, a modification that changes the entire game and replaces it with new content). "Nehrim - On the Edge of Fate" takes place on the continent of the same name and is larger than the world in Oblivion. In addition to a new setting of the characters recorded especially for the game, Nehrim also offers better texture packages, new sound effects and a new main storyline along with various secondary tasks. The game was developed by the non-commercial game studio "SureAI".

reception

Meta-ratings publication Rating PS3 Windows Xbox 360 Metacritic 93/100 94/100 94/100

Oblivion received mostly positive reviews from the press, received several awards and was also a commercial success. However, the technical implementation was sometimes criticized, as the game was seriously buggy at the time of publication. With later patch releases, Bethesda was able to fix most of the problems, which meant that the game could only be played undisturbed long after the actual release.

Criticism of the German translation

The German version of Oblivion received a lot of criticism in the German-language press due to Bethesda's decision to have the game translated into German by its own staff in a short time. The many linguistic and grammatical inaccuracies and errors resulted in the game being criticized or devalued both by buyers and by game magazines.

DLC review

Bethesda's first downloadable expansion, Horse Armor Pack , which was released on April 3, 2006, met with great criticism . For horse armor, a cosmetic game item, costs of 200 Microsoft points (Xbox) were incurred, the equivalent of 2.00 US dollars or 2.50 euros, which was mostly assessed as excessive. According to Gamestar, it will be remembered as “a memorial for rip-off extensions”, similar to Jim Sterling's rating for Destructoid, the official British Xbox magazine described it as “ perhaps the most infamous example of downloadable content ever coded ” (German: “die possibly the most notorious download extension ever programmed ”), Gamesradar as“ the most useless, overpriced piece of DLC ”. In response to the criticism, Bethesda offered its following download extensions at lower prices. The company said it was still looking for the right price for download extensions. However, the sales figures were better than expected. In an interview in March 2011, Bethesda's Vice-President Pete Hines stated to the official Xbox magazine that the "much maligned" armor was still being bought. Hines described the combination of bad pricing and bad timing as the reasons for the strong negative reactions. The decisive factor was that it was one of the first download extensions ever and that the value was insufficient. On April 1, 2009, Bethesda had already responded to the negative reputation of horse armor with a humorous special sales campaign when the company offered all download extensions at reduced prices with the exception of the Horse Armor Pack , the price of which was instead doubled to 400 Microsoft points.

Web links

• Official website
• Oblivion at MobyGames (English)
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Official website of the publisher Ubisoft

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Skyrim / Oblivion / Morrowind heightmap comparison - Skyrim Mods . In: Bethesda Softworks Forums . ( bethsoft.com [accessed January 27, 2018]).
2. ↑ The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Manual). (PDF) Bethesda Softworks, pp. 16-17 , accessed June 19, 2020 (English). 
3. ↑ pcgames.de: pcgames.de on the translation errors. Retrieved November 12, 2012 . 
4. ↑ Gamestar.de: published review with conclusion and facts about the add-on Knights of the Nine (PC)
5. ↑ Quarn & Kivan: Unofficial Oblivion Patch 3.4.4 ( English ) tesnexus.com. June 30, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2013: “ Unofficial Oblivion Patch by Quarn & Kivan. […] This mod is a joint effort to fix the vast amount of bugs currently existing in Oblivion v1.2.0.416, fixing over 2,500 bugs so far! "
6. ↑ Breton & havok2: Oblivion German 5.1 . pagan-tes-mods.com. January 24, 2012. Accessed on September 22, 2013: “ The Oblivion German project has been an unofficial language fix for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion since the beginning of work in 2006. "
7. ↑ PelzR: (Mod translation) Unofficial Oblivion Patch & Unofficial SI Patch & Unofficial KotN Patch . scharesoft.de. July 21, 2013. Accessed on September 22, 2013: " I recently decided to translate the current version 3.4.2 again "
8. ↑ nehrim.de: homepage of the mod project. Retrieved February 25, 2011 . 
9. ↑ Kevin Stich: Test of Nehrim at Gamers Global. In: gamersglobal.de. Retrieved February 25, 2011 . 
10. ↑ sureai.net: Homepage of SureAI. Retrieved February 25, 2011 . 
11. ^ Meta-rating, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PlayStation 3). In: Metacritic . CBS Corporation , accessed August 16, 2018 . 
12. ^ Meta-rating, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Windows). In: Metacritic . CBS Corporation , accessed August 16, 2018 . 
13. ^ Meta-rating, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Xbox 360). In: Metacritic . CBS Corporation , accessed August 16, 2018 . 
14. ↑ http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108564-Bethesda-Says-People-Are-Still-Buying-Horse-Armor
15. ↑ http://www.gameswelt.de/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/news/pferderuestung-fuer-2-dollar,82859
16. ↑ James Ransom-Wiley: Download Oblivion's horse armor, for a price ( English ) In: Joystiq . AOL . April 3, 2006. Archived from the original on March 31, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 17, 2013. 
17. ↑ http://www.gamestar.de/specials/spiele/3004169/jubilaeum_p11.html
18. ↑ Jim Sterling: Oblivion's Horse Armor DLC still selling! ( English ) Destructoid. March 13, 2011. Retrieved June 18, 2013: " The" Horse Armor "downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has become notorious as the premier example of bad DLC. It's a pointless waste of money that gives something totally useful to a non-character you'll barely use. "
19. ↑ ^{a b} http://www.totalxbox.com/26471/oblivions-horse-armour-still-sells-today/
20. ↑ http://www.gamesradar.com/oblivions-horse-armour-dlc-is-still-selling-bethesda-calls-it-inexplicable-we-call-it-basic-human-degradation/
21. ↑ http://www.golem.de/0604/44581.html
22. ↑ http://www.totalxbox.com/10330/bethesda-explains-horse-armour-fury/
23. ↑ http://kotaku.com/5193675/oblivion-horse-armor-on-sale-for-twice-the-price