Best RPG ever
First of all, Oblivion defines what an open-ended Role Playing Game is. There is an amazing amount of options to customize your character according to your style of playing, in other words, you can pretty much make your character any way you can imagine. You can choose your character's Race (Imperial, Orc, 3 kinds of Elf, among other 5 races), Sex, Class (Archer, Assassin, Warrior, Mage, Bard... and many others), Birthsign (The Thief, The Warrior, The Mage, and some others). But if THAT is not enough, you can make your own custom class, choose our major attributes and skills to suit your style. best thing is, to level up your character, you don't have to kill as many enemies as youc an to gain experience... no, that's boring and repetitive, rather, you level up by using your main skills, taht is, if one of your skills is Marksman (Bow & Arrow), you must use it to level up and gain experience, as well as with your other skills, and each time you level up, you get to upgrade one of your main attributes, sucha s Strength, Willpower, etc.
Now, there's a huge amount of weapons and armor you can choose from, would you go with light armor and use a cuirass of Leather or Mithril? Or would you rather use an armor of Iron or Steel? Use a silver dagger? Or a Daedric Mace? It's awesome, there are dagger, long swords, short swords, claymores, maces, hammers, bows, arrows, staffs... well, you get the idea. AND, armor is divided in boots, greaves, cuirass, gauntlets, helmets, and shields, so can make any combination you want, even with some clothing rather than armor. Also, you can wear two rings and an amulet.
Now let's talk about magic, there are tons of different spells to use, each of which belongs to a certain school of magic, each of which is a different kill to choose from, asides from Alchemy. And if there's no spell which suits your needs, why not create your own spell with the effects you desire? Hell, you can make spells which damage and heal your enemies at the same time, or even make them hurt yourself to increase the skill... which is a very sick way of doing so. Also, I forgot to mention you can enchant your weapons with most of the magic effects, and of course you can create your own potions with the alchemical ingredients you'll find across your many adventures. And if you're not the kind of guy who likes to use magic, but there's an occasion in which you'll need to make use of it, but you can't because your skill isn't high enough, you can always bring an enchanted staff, which won't waste your magicka and won't need you to have a high skill, but you'll need to recharge it later on.
Melee combat is just as good as the magic system, the more you increase your skill in blades or Blunt weapons, the more moves you'll be able to pull off to stun, stagger, or disarm your enemy, same with the Marksman skill.
The province of Cyrodiil is HUGE, not only that which you can see there's tons of dungeons, caves, forts, and mines you can enter, explore, and loot for great treasures, ranging from gold, to weapons and armor, to jewels, to just plain junk. Not to mention all the stuff your enemies drop when killed. There are 9 main cities, including The Imperial City and Kvatch (My House, because you can buy houses, is in Skingrad, but Cheydinhal is my favorite). And there's also many, many little towns, inns, and chapels all over the province. Cyrodiil is a huge, HUGE place to explore, full of quests....
Yeah, Quests can vary from simple delivery errands to more complicated, intricate and laborious quests. Of course there's the main quest, but you'll come across so many other quests along the way that you'll often want to complete them first, adn THEN you'll come across Guild Quests, yeah taht's right, each guild has its own Quests (The Mages Guild has the best Quest line, involving an attack of Necromancers and the very king of Worms, Mannimarco... yes, worms). The Guild involve the Mages Guild, Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood (Assassins), and the Arena, asides from a few honorary titles, like The Blades, Knights of the Thorn, Order of the Virtuous Blood, among others.
Seriously, I only described like half of the game's features and many aspects that make the game the ultimate RPG experience. But WAIT, the best aspect about the PS3 version of the game is that it has The Knights of the Nine plug-in included, so that means another full quest line with plenty of rewards and new items, the most notorious being the armor and weapons of The Divine Crusader, and your own army of Knights, and of course, you being recognized as the one who recovered the Relics of the Crusader and killed Umaril the Unfeathered in both the mortal and the spiritual plains.
I've spent +140 hours on this game, and I've completed every single quest I could come across, just imagine how immersive this game is, and just how freaking awesome it is. And then there's the Shivering Isles expansion pack... however, I'll talk about it in it's own respective review, but I'll just tell you it adds many, many more hours of gameplay.
So finally, Overall, two years ago Oblivion was THE game, the definition of Awesomeness, and it still is nowadays, and if you don't own it yet, what are you waiting for? Go buy it right now, you won't regret it. But of course, there's Fallout 3 now... so just ask yourself this, what do you prefer? Guns or Swords?