I really like Oblivion and it feels very much like a GTA Fantasy game or a single player MMORPG. Theres lots of depth to the game and It's the first game I remember where I actually had fun doing side quests. I really love the atmosphere to the game aswel and some people say it's bland fantasy but I see it as more based on real world medieval with a twist. Now that twist is instead of the tales being myth they're actually real. It reminds me of like Camelot and all the myths about Dragons and Witches and cults etc etc. I just really loved the tone of the game and the setting. The only problem with it trying to be abit more real is the world isn't esactly the most interesting thing to explore and alot of it does look very same old. However the expansion tried to address this with abit more of a crazy look and design to it.
Oblivion starts off really well where you're in Prison and you meet the Emperor which is played by Patrick Stewart and you follow him through the dungeons and sewers until you escape and have to go on your quests to save the world. You're thrown out into this giant open ended world after that and it's just breath taking. I spent many hours not even doing the first story quest and I just go into things like the Arena fights and doing side quests like discovering who killed someone and bringing them to justice.
The funny thing about Oblivion is there are many guilds in the game and these quests can often be much better than the main story. I joined a guild called the Theives guild and it's just fun sneaking into homes and stealing items. The great thing about Oblivion is it saves the location of every item, nothing vanishes. Theres just this whole Paranoia, mythological, medieval feeling to the game which I just love. Things like Puzzles which tell you to go to a certain place at noon and discover what happens or meet a guy behind the back of the house at midnight and he'll accept you into the guild.
Theres just so much to do in Oblivion and obviously being so open ended there has to be some downfalls. The graphics are still great and hold up over 3 years later but the animations on the character models can be very stiff. You'll also find that peoples voices change halfway through and thats because different actors played the same lines and that can be weird. The combat is also not one of Oblivions strong points, like Fallout 3 but Oblivion can get away with that seeing as you're only swinging a sword or doing magic. I also found the main storyline to be average and for an RPG you expect it to be much more epic.
I myself really loved how levels scale so you can do all the content in the world without having to level up. It removes the grind and makes the game for accessible and I also loved how you can quick travel everywhere so you don't have to spend 30 mins running to a location. Some people hate these features but you can download a Mod that fixes all that for the more traditional RPGer.
That said though Oblivion is a fantastic game which is so open ended and it'll keep you playing for hundreds of hours just finding everything in the game and doing all the side quests.
Just make sure you don't get Vampirism cause trying to do the quest to get the cure is annoying when you can't go out during the day.
