The Emperor Uriel Septim 7 is looking at me with a confidence I haven’t earned in the ten minutes since he busted me out of his own prison.
His uncomfortably fervent eye contact is only amplified by the crash-zoom Bethesda employs to bring us into conversation – pulling my own face from halfway across the city sewer to within a few inches of his. “Close shut the jaws of Oblivion,” he intones in the voice of Patrick Stewart. He’s still staring when, a few moments later, he’s struck down by an assassin.
Uriel’s final words ring in my ears the next time I visit the Imperial City – not for their great portent, but for the irony. After a few days of haphazard adventuring in the surrounding countryside, I’ve been arrested. The night before, I’d spotted a row of wine bottles in a roadside inn and couldn’t resist sweeping them off the shelf and down the stairs. The act was witnessed by the local black market dealer who, presumably grateful for the distraction from his own activities, flagged down a passing soldier. Now I’m waking up back where I started, as the guards close shut the jaws of jail.
We Don’t Need an Oblivion Remake, We Deserve Morrowind Instead Watch on YouTube
This is The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, a chosen-one story that gives you an unusual amount of latitude to choose what happens along the way. A grand and absurd simulatory playground that defined RPGs for a generation.
If you belong to one of the generations that came along in the two decades since, you might wonder why it meant so much to so many. What once was slick now looks clunky. Oblivion’s first-person combat comes without a parry button, and a dodge-roll unlocked so late that many never knew it existed. Nostalgists talk fondly of sneaking into merchants’ stores after dark to rinse their display cabinets, yet Oblivion’s stealth systems are so basic and binary that NPCs don’t even have a searching state – trailing behind the artificial intelligence of Thief: The Dark Project, released almost eight years prior. Then there’s the no-frills dialogue, delivered by a pool of voice actors so small they could scarcely populate a village without doubling up, let alone a country.