The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – A Timeless Classic That Defined Open-World RPGs

Before gaming got buried under live-service nonsense and ideological hand-wringing, Bethesda made something that just wanted you to live in it. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion launched in 2006 as a flagship title for the Xbox 360, and twenty years later I came back to it expecting a dated relic. What I found instead surprised me: this is the most peaceful, immersive, downright relaxing game I've sat with in years. I went in as a Nord Barbarian named PohnDip, wandered Cyrodiil for dozens of hours, and came away feeling calmer than when I started. That's not what I expected to write about a 2006 RPG — but it's the truth, and it's the whole review.

Woke: 0.0

Nothing. Not a whisper. Oblivion comes from an era when developers built worlds because the lore demanded it, not because a sensitivity consultant signed off on it. Cyrodiil's races, cultures, and factions exist to serve the fantasy — full stop. The Dark Brotherhood doesn't care about your feelings. The Thieves Guild doesn't preach. You're free to be a hero, a villain, or something ugly in between, and the game bends to you, not to an agenda. A clean zero — a game confident enough to just be a game.

Gameplay: 8.0

Oblivion is both brilliant and quietly broken, and the break is worth naming. The freedom is staggering even now — hundreds of quests, dozens of dungeons, a build system that lets you become almost anything. But combat is floaty. Melee has no weight. For 2006 it was fine; by any modern standard it's the weakest link.

Then there's the leveling system, which I'd call actively hostile to the player. To perform well on higher difficulties, you're forced into a custom class, hand-picking major skills and babysitting minor ones to control your stat growth. Get it wrong and level-scaled enemies simply outpace you. The "correct" way to play means tracking numbers on a notepad — and that shatters the immersion the rest of the game works so hard to build.

So here's what I did, and I'm convinced it's the way Oblivion was meant to be played: I picked the pre-made Barbarian class, played a Nord, and nudged the difficulty slider down whenever combat stopped being fun. No spreadsheet. No min-maxing. Just a character that felt right and a world I could sink into. Played that way, the broken math stops mattering, and what's left is pure, unhurried exploration. The freedom and quest variety pull the score up; the floaty combat and backwards leveling hold it back.

Story: 8.4

The main quest is fine. Serviceable epic fantasy — Oblivion Gates, Mehrunes Dagon, the fate of the empire. Patrick Stewart's Emperor Uriel Septim opens the game with genuine gravity, and it's criminal how quickly he's gone. Martin Septim carries the rest competently. But if you're here for the main storyline alone, you'll walk away thinking it was decent and forgettable.

The side content is where Oblivion becomes something special. The Dark Brotherhood questline is legendary — Lucien Lachance recruiting you in the dead of night, the Whodunit quest where you pick off party guests one by one — genuinely dark, genuinely clever writing that modern RPGs still struggle to match. The Thieves Guild has real personality. The Arena is dumb fun done right. And scattered across the map are a hundred standalone quests with more creative confidence than most studios manage in a full game. Oblivion's storytelling is wide rather than deep — no single thread hits as hard as the best narrative RPGs — but the sheer volume of quality side content earns its score.

Graphics: 7.5

Let's get the obvious out of the way: the potato faces. They were a meme at launch and they haven't improved with age. Some NPCs look passable; others look like someone sculpted a head out of dough and called it a day. There's framerate dip, texture pop-in, and loading screens every time you fast travel. For a launch-window 360 title, the character models were already behind what the console would go on to achieve.

But the world — the world is something else. Cyrodiil is genuinely beautiful. Rolling green hills, autumn forests, ancient ruins half-swallowed by ivy, gothic chapels catching the last light at dusk, and the hellish red-and-black nightmare of the Oblivion planes. The art direction has a distinct, idyllic-fantasy identity that holds up twenty years later. The faces are dated. The world is timeless. That gap is the whole story of Oblivion's visuals.

Audio: 9.3

Jeremy Soule's soundtrack is the soul of this game — remove the music and Oblivion loses half its identity. The sweeping orchestral score is soothing, almost meditative, and it's the single biggest reason the game feels the way it does. The exploration themes are something I'd put on just to decompress after a long day. They give Cyrodiil an atmosphere no amount of graphical fidelity could replicate.

Voice acting is a mixed bag in the way everyone remembers fondly: Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean are excellent in their limited roles, but the same handful of actors voice the entire population of Cyrodiil. You'll hear the same guard, the same shopkeeper, the same beggar in every city. It breaks immersion — but honestly, it's become part of the game's charm at this point. Ambient sound design is superb throughout.

Replayability: 9.0

This is where Oblivion earns its place. Ten races, twenty-one birthsigns, endless class combinations, and a mountain of content you won't see in a single run. The faction questlines naturally pull you toward different playstyles — a sneaky Khajiit Thieves Guild run feels nothing like a heavy-armor Imperial grinding the Arena. The moral flexibility means you can be a different person every time. And now that I know how relaxing the game is when you stop fighting the systems and just live in it, I suspect I'll be back sooner than I think. This is the kind of game that calls you back years after you thought you were done with it.

Oblivion is what happens when a studio pours everything into world-building and player freedom instead of chasing trends. It has rough edges — floaty combat, potato faces, a leveling system that works against its own design philosophy — but the total package is something rarer than a technical showcase: it's a place. A place you can just exist in. The longer my sessions ran, the more immersed, relaxed, and reflective I felt. Peace, discovery, a quiet sense of wonder — that's what Oblivion gave me twenty years on, and that's why it's still worth talking about in 2026.

If you've never played it, drop the difficulty, pick a class that feels right, and just go live in Cyrodiil for a while. You've earned the quiet.

Played it min-maxed with a notepad, or just relaxed into it like I did? Tell me how you wander Cyrodiil in the comments.