The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition

My Late Arrival to Oblivion is odd, as RPGs are my favourite gaming genre. The genre's opportunities to develop your character yourself and for deep storytelling make RPGs just damn fun. So when Oblivion: Game of the Year edition appeared on Steam, I decided to pay a visit to the lands of Cyrodiil. Oblivion sends you off to recover a mystical gem, stolen from Patrick Stewart's corpse, to save the land from being invaded by the dimension of Oblivion (literally, Hell). Or you go where you like, killing monsters and people, and ignore your destiny driven mission.

Now that sounds just dandy. Explore a world while it slowly turns into Gehenna, as Hell infects your homeland. But that doesn't happen. When you're not following the main quest. Oblivion's incursion is placed on an indefinite hold. So there's actually no threat to Cyrodiil.

Add to this that your character doesn't develop. His (or her) skills improve, but your character remains essentially unchanged (unlike in Mass Effect, Planescape and The Witcher). In short Oblivion lacks a solid story -a major feature of the RPG genre. The greatest RPGs - like Mass Effect, Baldur's Gate II and Planescape - have dramatic storylines that see your hero's actions changing them, their friends and allies, and the world they live in. But in Oblivion you may as well not exist.

Another major failing is the lack of fantasy in this supposedly fantasy world. In Morrowind you could turn round a hillock and bump into a living tentacled zeppelin, or a three-storey tall beetle. In Oblivion there are only the generic fantasy tropes of elves, ogres and skeletons.

I admit this lack of the fantastical would change if I'd entered The Shivering Isles, but I couldn't bring myself to play long enough to earn entry into that realm of insanity. And that's because I found Oblivion wasn't any fun to play. On any level.