Oblivion has made me realize that I want more RPGs for the next generation, and the stellar sales the game has had may yet bring us into another golden age of RPGs, like that of the Playstation era.

  One of the reasons I loved the PS1 and abhorred the N64 is because the PS1 was drowning in epic RPGs. I spent much of my later teens playing one after another even though the N64 had a decent selection of games like Goldeneye, and let us not forget Zelda.

   In the end of the last generation I had 20 PS1 games, and 10 N64 games, and 10 Dreamcast games (depending on whether you count that as a N64 era system, or a PS2 era system). The PS1 won the living room wars hands down because of the great RPGs.

  This last round Microsoft won. The PS2 served up one disappointment after another, as many developers strayed from the path of innovation and took a more mainstream approach to developing software. Nintendo house the innovation, albeit not in the quantity, or cheap prices offered by Microsoft, who had better versions of most of the good games the PS2 offered.

  But even though I have 35 PS2 games, 45 GCN,  and 61 Xbox games, very few of them, sadly, were RPGS. The ones that were, however, were simply amazing. Jade Empire, and Tales of Symphonia as well as Final Fantasy X were simply breathtaking, but the majority of the games on my shelf this round were horror, or action/adventure titles. Not that I love RPGs any less, but it seemed like Action/Adventure was the big thing this generation.

  Xbox 360 started with a deluge of First Person Shooters, and while I picked up more than a few myself I have begun to worry that this genre would be all that we would see, or would at least dominate this generation. While that still seems to be the case the success of Oblivion has given rise to a new hope for me. That this sends a message to developers that people still want their story rich, single player RPGs.

   I sincerely hope that we will see a revival of the RPG genre soon. I am getting bored of shooting things.