Let's take a real look at this game.
Oblivion was a massive project for this company. The product they released was as ambitious of a game as Morrowind was. If you've never played either of these titles, then this review is especially for you. Like its predecessor, Oblivion is an open-world Adventure First Person RPG. I'm sure it has a real, simpler classification than that, but that covers it precisely nonetheless. Put into a more elaborated way, Oblivion plays like a lot of other RPG's in the respect that you have a character that you create, and you level up by killing monsters. Attached to this character are several skills and stats.
Unlike most other RPG's, however, these skills and stats are chosen by you, both their importance to your particular character build, and how they progress. Each skill is basically assigned its own "level", with progress from 1-100. You level these skills by either using them to some purpose (Except casting spells, running and jumping, all of which level up their respective skills regardless), or visiting a trainer and paying your way through skill progression.
This progress is met by special bonuses at the 4 key preassigned levels: 25, 50, 75, 100. These bonuses range from mild to incredibly useful. For instance, all the magic schools (Destruction, Restoration, Illusion, Conjuration, and Mysticism) merely unlock tiers of spells at these levels, while Light and Heavy armor gain such bonuses as "Does not break as fast" to "Does not hinder you at all" (I.e. it magically takes up no weight in your inventory as long as you're wearing it).
There are some 20 some odd skills in the game, and as many preset classes to host them. You can also build a custom class, and pick any combination of them you want.
Good:
As you can probably imagine from the overview I gave, class creation freedom is enormous. You can build any type of character you can imagine. Some obviously work better than others. I've probably played through this game a dozen times, and I usually like to build a class that emulates heroes from other games: I.e. Grom Hellscream, Sephiroth, Paladin, etc. And I can usually accommodate this reasonably well.
The world is seductive. A great deal of it, like Morrowind, is bland textures, especially out in the open, but this really doesn't, in my opinion, degrade too much from the overall gameplay. The graphics were really quite good for the game's release date, especially the models for characters and armor/weapons. You can spend hours sneaking around, breaking into shops while people are asleep (The game holds a 24 hour "day" during which all characters react in predictable ways according to time of day), you can search through the hundreds of random dungeons, ruins, etc in the game looking for treasure.
The atmosphere. The lighting, the coloring, the weather effects. I think in these areas they really managed to pull it off. From the dark dank of a wet mine to a sunny day on a grassy hill top, to a blasting rainstorm in abandoned ruins, there is definitely some believable variety to the game's atmospheres.
The quests are really quite entertaining and interesting, with a lot of variety, plot twists etc. There are a great many factions with which to align yourself and work your way up the ranks. The game tries its best to provide a faction for all archetypes: thief, assassin, mage, fighter, etc. The main storyline quests are also quite good.
The game provides a great deal of things to do outside of the usual mainstream of quests and events going on in the game. You could level from 1-50 without touching a single main line quest or faction quest (Though I wouldn't recommend it).
Bad or Missing:
I'll start with the worst of the worst: level scaling. This is only one of two games (Though I'm sure there are others out there) that employs the idea of scaling enemies to your level to keep the game challenging. Replace challenging with stupid and you'll get the idea. What this means on the surface is that, when you level the creatures, enemy NPC's, etc that you encounter will be a stronger version of themselves than they were when you were a lower level. You'll also encounter stronger variants of them. However, this REALLY REALLY REALLY detracts from the gameplay, rather than helping to keep it interesting. It does so in three main ways:
1. It makes the game get insanely stupidly hard as you get past level 20+, and in stupid ways. Let's just say that some enemies receive more hefty level scaling than others, namely mountain lions and Clannfears. These two enemies can almost two shot you in full bad ass gear. It's no happy coincidence that both these enemies also have a stun effect on their attack.
2. If you really stop and think about it, you have no incentive to level at all. You have to go to sleep in a bed to actually level your character up, so if you avoided this altogether the game may well be a much smoother ride.
3. You can never gain an edge. Shouldn't a hero that has quested, become trained and powerful, and acquired legendary arms and armor be more than a match for all but the strongest of enemies? I'm sorry to say that it just isn't so in Morrowind. Even with the best armor and gear, once you get to a certain level, you'll find that enemies can take an incredible beating, and give an even better one.
This was a huge appointment's to me, especially because Morrowind was not this way at all. Some people complained that you could become too Godlike, even by legitimate means, and that may well be true. On the other hand, I feel it's only fair that a character should actually make some tangible progress as they go along, rather than having the same effect on enemies at lvl 30 in full Daedric gear as they did at lvl 1 in rusty armor.
Item variety. It could be a lot worse, but compared to Morrowind's almost unbelievable variety, it IS a lot worse. First of all they took out the Medium armor class altogether, leaving you with Heavy and Light. There are WAAAAAYYY fewer looks, variations, etc of armor as well. There are still lots of different faction armor, etc to be had, some of which are quite cool. However, if you've ever played Morrowind, you'll notice a sharp decline in item choice. There also isn't really any "godly" items to be found in the game. There's pretty much a set cap of armor and weapon damage on each class of weapon, and you're not gonna find a piece of equipment that exceeds it, period. Not in high lvl dungeon loot, not in quest rewards, nothing. It's also depressing to me that some of the cooler looking quest loot, etc. is not viable to wear because even plain dungeon loot is capable of much better stats.
While the game may have the appearance of a living world, and may pass for one under some guidelines (People go to work in the day and go home and sleep at night, guards change shifts, people have routines, etc.) It really is pretty static after examine it. You can acquire some houses in the game etc, but you can't move furniture, or do anything along those lines. You can kill NPC's, but unless they're vital to a quest, once you've paid the fine the impact on the world stops there.
The game does not have any semblance of a crafting system outside of alchemy. This really isn't a huge detraction, but in my opinion they kind of failed to exploit a potential resource. There are plenty of materials that might have been used for different things (Different types of ore, furs, etc), but they just chose to make them trash loot like everything else.
The Final Judgment:
It's a good game. It's not one of the best ever, and in my opinion it doesn't stand up to Morrowind in most ways, graphics update accepted. It's worth a play if you've never given it a try, but don't say I didn't warn you about the level scaling. You WILL find yourself in countless battles of endless arrow firing while kiting an enemy around, or chugging healing/mana potions just to down a simple mob.