The Real World: Tamriel
One the most remarkable aspects of Oblivion is how real the world feels. There's an extraordinary rush that comes from walking out of the prison sewers at the beginning of the game, taking in the beautiful vista, and realizing that everything the player can see is "real." The world of Tamriel is simply enormous, and there's not an inch of it that's not filled with interesting things to see and do. Oblivion has non-quest dungeons that are as large, well-designed, and interesting as another RPG's main storyline content. Merely playing through the main story quest (which can take 60+ hours to complete) means missing 90% of the game's content. It's no exaggeration to say that fully exploring Oblivion will take players months, not days.
The enormity of the game world never becomes overwhelming, however, thanks to well-designed world, quest, and gameplay elements. First, the game offers a "fast travel" option. This allows the players to instantly travel to any point of interest once it's been visited and put on the world map. There's also a compass that displays local landmarks as the player travels. These more overt orientation devices, however, pale in comparison to the more subtle ways in which the world hangs together.
The beauty of Tamriel is the way that none of the quests in the game feel "unnatural." They all arise from the politics, circumstances, and relationships of the world's citizens. All the game's NPCs follow their own agendas and schedules and they all have relationships to one another that play out even while the player isn't around. All of this is tied together with the main story arc, side quests, and even the random dungeons. My favorite example is a random dungeon that I found that had an old statue inside that I looted and sold. Once I sold it to a shopkeeper, I was approached by a messenger who commissioned me to find eleven more of these rare statues. He had no idea where they were hidden, only that they were somewhere in the world. This was an epic quest that covered most of the world, and when it was over and I got paid, another character in the Imperial City asked me to steal them back!
These kinds of interconnected quests are all over the place. Sometimes players will overhear rumors about them from snatches of conversations in towns, other times they'll stumble on one while entering a farmhouse to get out of the rain and suddenly find that the owner has mysteriously vanished. The same characters keep popping up in various quest lines that are completely in keeping with their personality and position in the world. As players complete quests, they also change the world. Shopkeepers die and their shops close down, rumors about the player's adventures become snatches of conversation between NPCs, cities are attacked and rescued, and entire quest lines open up or shut down because of a player's actions. The result is that Oblivion begins to feel like a single-player MMO -- all the expansiveness, but because it's built around the single-player experience, the player can grow and change and truly have an impact on the world.
Tamriel Technology
One of the game's biggest attractions is the breathtaking technology used in building it. Oblivion's graphics are amazing from both a technical and graphic design perspective. The dynamic lighting and realistic terrain make it easily the most beautiful RPG world I've ever had the privilege of running around in, from the hazy golden glow that comes over the world as the Tamriel's sun sets to how creepy it is to crawl through a vampire lair, watching the shadows dance in the light of a solitary torch.
