PC Preview - 'The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion'
by Rainier on Jan. 1, 2006 @ 1:30 a.m. PST | Filed under E3 - Post - E3 2005
Genre: Role-Playing
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: Christmas 2005
The Elder Scrolls series is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Considering the fact that this latest installment took over three years to make, that's not all that surprising. Bethesda's design philosophy is to build each game from the ground up, and for this ten-year edition, they're pulling out all the stops.
The first thing everyone is going to notice is just how flat-out gorgeous this game looks. Seriously, this is some near virtual-reality stuff. The game starts you off in a prison, where everything looks amazingly solid; the solidity
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It's tough being a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, particularly an older one. You've had to see a series you love slide into craziness. Broken cameras, unoptimized code, unnecessary characters, loss of vision and principle, angst and motorcycles … the list of missteps goes on and on.
One of the interesting things about the MMORPG genre is that it is, technically, a niche market. Not everyone wants to play one of them, and those who do, don't tend to play much of anything else. As World of Warcraft has recently proven, though, it is an extremely big niche, with room for hundreds of variations on the theme.
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