This Sunday I decided to finally buckle down and finish the main story arc of Oblivion. 8 hours and a rather disappointing ending later, I finally did. Oblivion was a great game that consumed some 75+ hours of my life. However, after it was all said and done, I was left with only one thought. For all its attention to detail, the world of Oblivion still doesn't feel like a living, breathing world.

Oblivion is a massively detailed game. There are hundreds of plants, seeds, and fungi that you can pick to produce every potion you can imagine. There are nearly infinite combinations of enchantments and spells. There are hundreds of caves, dungeons, and ruins that exist for no other purpose than to provide you with something to explore should you feel like it.

The problem is, all of these details are rather insignificant in how they affect the gameplay. How much of a difference does it make to have 100 meaningless dungeons instead of just 50 meaningless dungeons?

f it were only a matter of having more detail, I would have no problem with it. However, all of this attention to detail really serves to highlight the areas that they seem to have missed. The chief culprit here, is something that has plagued RPGs ever since their early days, and that's simple continuity of the game world.

The siege of Kvatch is one of the first events in the game and leaves the entire town of Kvatch in ruins. However, years and years later in the game nobody has so much as tried to even clean up some of the rubble in Kvatch. Even worse, nobody in the city has even moved from the spot you left them at the end of the seige. In a game that places so much emphasis on making the NPC's feel alive, this is a pretty glaring error. Similarly, months after a fire in one of the Mage's guilds, nobody has bothered to put it out (not to mention that there are no signs of damage on the exterior of the building).

Here's another example. NPC's in Oblivion have sophisticated AI that gives them the ability to carry on conversations in the streets regarding current events in order to make it feel like the entire world doesn't just revolve around you. However, even after completing the Mage's guild quests and becoming the Arch mage of the guild, the guard in front of the guild still greats me with "you must be the guild's newest recruit" every time I pass him.

I know it seems like I'm nit-picking here. It's a massive undertaking to make sure every little detail fits in a game like Oblivion. However, something like rebuilding Kvatch, or recognizing the status of the character should take a heck of a lot of priority over building an extra random dungeon or placing another species of herb.