Oblivion's main story revolves around the player character's efforts to thwart a fanatical cult known as the "Mythic Dawn" that plans to open the gates to a realm called "Oblivion". The game continues the open-world tradition of its predecessors by allowing the player to travel anywhere in the game world at any time and to ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely. A perpetual objective for players is to improve their character's skills, which are numerical representations of certain abilities. Seven skills are selected early in the game as major skills, with the remainder termed minor. Developers opted for tighter pacing in gameplay and greater plot focus than in past titles.
Development for Oblivion began in 2002, directly after the release of Morrowind. To achieve its goals of designing "cutting-edge graphics", Bethesda used an improved Havok physics engine, high dynamic range lighting, procedural content generation tools that allowed developers to quickly create detailed terrains, and the Radiant A.I. system, which enabled non-player characters (NPCs) to make choices and engage in behaviors more complex than in past titles. The game was developed with fully voiced characters—a first for the series—and features the music of BAFTA-award-winning composer Jeremy Soule. Oblivion was well received and has won a number of industry and publication awards. It was praised for its impressive graphics, expansive game world and schedule-driven NPCs. The game had shipped 1.7 million copies by April 2006, and sold over 3 million copies by January 2007.
Read more about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Gameplay, Synopsis, Development, Audio, Reception, Rating Change
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