I've been playing for a while now (I'm thorough, as always, and have yet to leave the underground section.) With my beast of a computer, I have everything turned up all the way... And it runs perfectly. Amazingly smooth. No lag, no CTD, nothing. And it's such a pretty game. I think I'll marry it :)

After a solid five hours, I have the following mini-review:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU DIDN'T LIKE MORROWIND DON'T BUY OBLIVION. Oblivion is kind of like The Sims 2--it's a major refinement of its predecessor but it isn't a huge step forward. Fans of the previous game will think it's fantastic, and the rest will probably agree that while things were tweaked in the right direction overall Oblivion still suffers from the same problems.

Pros:

The world is lush and beautiful. You've seen the screenshots, you know what I'm talking about.

The intro dungeon bit works well, even if Arx Fatalis already did it better.

Some of the side quests have been great, and every now and then one will bang your door down and sweep you along for the ride, which is actually quite cool.

The game has great atmosphere.

Load times not that big of a deal; I never even noticed them while walking the countryside.


Cons:

First and foremost, this game performs unforgivably bad. Even on my fairly powerful system I have to scale things back to get a reasonable frame rate, and even then the graphics are worse than Half Life 2 while the framerate is half as good. One section of the city drops to around more or less 0 FPS for no discernable reason and I literally have to walk around with my head down to even pull up a menu.

Unless your machine is godlike you will suffer weird draw distance issues which detract from what is supposed to be the stunning beauty of the outdoor environments. Foliage rolls out before you like a red carpet and ruins and trees pop in and out of existence well within your vision. I'm sure these problems go away on a system powerful enough to handle enormous draw distances, but seeing a building spontaneously built wall by wall by roof is distracting.

Remember how empty and soulless Morrowind felt? Yep, it's back. Supposedly bustling cities feel evacuated and I have yet to witness the radiant AI create more than stilted conversations.

So far all the NPCs have lacked any character whatsoever. Everyone comes off as nothing more than a vessel upon which to hang exposition and quests.

The user interface is <i>terrible</I>. Frankly, I can't believe something this unintuitive made it through the development process. Simply put, the interface was designed for a console.

Oddly enough, one surprising complaint I have is for such a major release the game feels rather <I>cheap</I>. Oblivion has a lot of weird elements that are hallmarks of budget development:

* The install had an issue where it sat on a blank screen for five minutes at the end; I thought the install had crashed until I called a friend who had experienced identical behavior.
* You have to restart the game every time you want to make any change in the video settings.
* The audio settings don't have an option for speaker setup. Is it too much to ask for a two speaker versus four speaker configuration?
* The menus don't have tooltips and it's extremely difficult to figure out some of the most simple of actions, like how to drop an item.
* The mouse cursor speed is painfully slow, and the mouse sensitivity slider only affects mlook.


In summary: I am most definitely not saying that the game sucks but it certainly seems to be a different one than was promised in the countless previews. I've had enough cool moments to be fairly enthused about diving back in for small one-hour chunks in the future, but I am currently feeling a bit disappointed that I bought into the hype.

Time will tell.

Also: Developers, if you are making a text heavy game with lots of tomes sitting around that we are encouraged to read, for god's sake give us a reading screen that allows us to manipulate the font and page color for maximum legibility. I love to read but my god YE OLDE TEXT FONT on brownish pixilated pages grows old quickly. Why isn't this a standard yet?