I've recently turned 19 and it has been 4 years since the purchase of Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, the game that changed my life. It is the best game I have ever played in my gaming years(1994-Present). What I'd like to talk about was my thoughts on Oblivion before it actually came out for the PS3. You see I am a Playstation fan and I have been since 1998. Well anyway my friend at the time was a huge Xbox fan and me and him used to get into many gaming dicussion about PS2 vs. Xbox and later PS3 vs. Xbox 360. At this time my favorite game was Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and his was Halo 2. We used to argue about which game is better for years to come. Then one day he furthers the arguement by saying Elder Scrolls III Morrowind was better than San Andreas, me being a complete noob asked him what on earth is that? He then goes on to tell me about a huge free roaming RPG with a large game map and he told me hes had it for 3 years and is not even close to finishing it. I was amazed from his description of the game and was even determined to get a Xbox so I can play it. But my really devoted fan pride prevented from doing so, plus I never seen the game anywhere in stores and my friend moved away. Then 360 comes out, and Oblivion. I look at the back of Oblivion's case and thought it looked stupid, the thought of a First Person Sword fighting game looked stupid to me. Anyway months passed and I was constantly telling my friend over MSN that San Andreas is better than Oblivion. He then told me it was the sequal to Morrowind and was a much better game than both Morrowind and San Andreas combined. I was now more interested in the game but I did not want to purchase a 360 because I was saving for a PS3 at the time. Anyway I looked up Oblivion on Wikipedia and I was indeed interested in the game. I looked Oblivion up on Gamespot and read the reviews then I saw something that really excited me. "Oblivion coming to PS3 with improved graphics and more races". I was extremely excited by this, now I can get the game and not give up getting my PS3. I was still disappointed by the fact that it wasn't coming out until April 2007 but I didn't even have a PS3 yet so I was content. Anyway after getting my PS3 for Xmas 2006, on April 2007 I finally bought the game and brought it home. It was the third PS3 game I bought and I was amazed when I started playing it, I soon realized this was a much better game than GTA Vice City, and GTA San Andreas ever was and I felt like a big idiot for never giving it a chance before. Anyway on that day I've realized Xbox does have good games and I should give them a chance before saying they svck. This is just a look back at my past Fan boyishness and how I got into the Elder Scrolls. Please post your stories if you have them.

PS3 didn't get more races than any other version. There's just 10.

I'd also recommend going back and playing Morrowind too if you can find it. It's a fantastic game and some will argue that it is better than Oblivion. I enjoy it more but for purely subjective reasons.

Glad you decided to try the game out though! Let that be a lesson to be more open-minded toward things, and a lesson that console wars are just silly. All gaming platforms have good games. Don't knock it til you try it.

Yes I know PS3 has the same amount of races thats just what gamespot had posted all those years ago. I've played Morrowind and can't get into it mainly because I used to Oblivion and Fallout. I own all platforms now and I like games on all 3 of them, I'm still like Playstation more and I always will.

What a nice story! Thanks for sharing. I've never used any platform except PC for gaming so I wouldn't know from platforms. I tend to get deeply into a game I like and stay there for years. My character and I are very happy in Cyrodiil and the other wonderful provinces that comprise Tamriel. :foodndrink:

I had never played any Elder Scrolls game and one day I was at the airport and there was this PC Gamer magazine with some sort of armored knight on the cover and the words "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion". I needed something to read during the flight, so I thought: "why not?". Upon reading the story and seeing the screenshots, I was amazed and thought: when this game is released, I'm going to buy it.

Time passed and I kinda forgot about the game. Then, one day, I was perusing some games at a local game store and I noticed the Oblivion box among them. "Hmm", I thought", "this must be that game I've read about before". A quick glance on the system requirements discouraged me from buying it though. I had a crappy PC back then and did not have a console.

A few weeks went by and I decided to upgrade my PC. I wasn't doing it just to play Oblivion. At that time (March-April 2007, if my memory serves me) I was really hooked on playing Civilization IV and wanted to get a better machine to try and solve some slowdown problems I was having on huge maps.

My PC was upgraded and, as fate would have it, I once again found an Oblivion copy for sale in another store. "What the hell", I thought, "let's give it a chance and see what the fuss is all about".

The rest is history and here I am now, almost four years later, waiting for Skyrim...

I was a first-person shooter gamer back in 2001. I was browsing through Amazon for a new shooter to play and by chance I stumbled across Morrowind. I had never played pen-and-paper games and actually didn't even know what a roleplaying game was, believe it or not. But the features Amazon listed and the artwork really interested me. I'm a little ashamed to admit this now, but I think a large part of the reason I ordered the game was because it was touted as being the most graphically advanced game that was scheduled to come out in 2001.

I pre-ordered through Amazon and was annoyed when the game was postponed to 2002. I had worked myself into such a state of excitement by then that I changed my shipping preference to overnight shipping. The game arrived on my front porch on the morning of May 5. I installed it and was instantly thrilled by the music. Coming from shooters, I was not used to the concept of creating a character, so that took me a long time and a lot of study.

I can still remember my feeling of amazement when I walked out onto the ship deck and glimpsed Seyda Neen for the first time. The music, sound of the waves, the Silt Strider...I remember I just stood there, looking at it all for at least half a minute.

I pre-ordered Oblivion (overnight shipping again) and installed it the morning it was released. I was very impressed by the tutorial dungeon (I still think it's one of the better tutorials I've seen in a game). I was less impressed when I exited the sewers. Back then Bethesda hadn't quite gotten a handle on how to use LOD technology yet and the distant land behind Vilverin looked like crap. I was very disappointed, as I'd been subjected to months of intense public relations about how wonderful the game looked.

My second disappointment was bartering with a merchant in the Imperial City. It struck me as being incredibly lame that merchant's gold never decreased or increased. The fully-voiced NPCs began to annoy me. I hated having to see the White Gold tower everywhere I went. The near-infinite view distance made the game look like a model train set. Dialog zoom made me nauseaous. I hated the idea of towns not being a part of the game world. I stopped playing after about two weeks.

Three months later I came back. This time I was a little more mentally prepared to overlook the game's peculiarities. And I began to like it. Archery, I discovered, was much more fun than it had been in Morrowind. Magic was more fun to use also. I noticed that the animations were better. I discovered how fun it was to hit a monster with a spell or arrow and watch it roll down the side of a hill or fall off the side of a cliff. I realized that NPC schedules add a lot of life to the game that Morrowind never had. I'll be darned if I didn't start to actually like the game this time around.

And of course by the time I came back there were mods that were beginning to correct many of the things I didn't like. Now, nearly five years later, modded Oblivion is my favorite game of all time. Skyrim is going to have to be pretty darn good if it's going to bump Oblivion into second place in my affections.

Long time ago in a different era I got my hands on a Daggerfall demo.
Was shocked, you can make your own magic items, make your own spells?
A few days after I bought the game.

As I said on the Skyrim forum, I remember the pre launch Morrowind forum, I remember then somebody found out about the fortify intelligence potion exploit before the game was released.
Believe it or not its fewer trolls today, not sure why perhaps moved into caves in Oblivion, think about it every time you kill a troll.

I am not the owner of any of these consoles but, much like everyone else, I was very much in awe of the ES series back in 2004 (? I cant actually remember.) I spent a lot of time in the IRC, the official/unofficial ES channel which I believe still exists. I think the sole reason I am still playing Morrowind and am hooked on their latest incarnation is the lore. They have not used existing books, such as the D&D books found in some of the Bioware games, and there is enough for a LOTR trilogy and a Silmarillion to boot, all of it original to an extent. And if you stop and read the books you begin to wonder who wrote them: terms like "mytho-poeic" or "protonymic" certainly do not belong to the casual fan-fiction writer. It's a well thought-out, dynamic world.

But I am mainly an RPG player so I could not give you the experience from a different perspective. Was a good story though.

Wow nice to see so many TES stories.

I remember when I first played Morrowind. I was at my friend's house playing halo on xbox, back when I didn't even own an xbox (seems like forever ago). Anyway, there were like four of us playing for a few hours, and after we called it quits, he put in Morrowind. So everyone else is just kinda unwinding and getting food and stuff, and I'm sitting there while he's showing me his character, and the game and stuff. I've always really been into medieval fantasy, and I thought it looked awesome from the get go. So he lets me start playing.

When I get to character selection I saw Argonians (used to be a huge fan of reptiles lol) anyway picked one of those. From there it pretty much went like this.

"So I can be a giant lizard, decked out in armor, running around with a sword?"
"yep"

"And I can do whatever I want? I can run around and just collect robes if I want to?"
"yep"

"And I can kill this guy, take his house, and store all of my stuff there?"
"yep"

"... this is the greatest game ever.."

Didn't take long after that for me to get my own xbox, and Morrowind, which I spent hundreds of hours playing, and still do once in awhile. The best part is that, once I got the game, I actually took it more seriously, got hooked on the storyline and the incredible depth of the world, and found about a thousand more reasons why it was the greatest game of all time.

Oblivion was the only reason I bought a 360. Even though I now have like 20 other games for it lol, I still bought it for one reason. Oblivion never quite did have the same impact as Morrowind, but that's probably because I was older, my friends weren't as into it, and I wasn't exactly a noobie to the series when I got it. Either way, it was still an awesome time. Can't wait for Skyrim.

Here's my TES-story.

It must have been early last year, when I was browsing through Gamespot's lists of games. Here I came across Fallout 3. It looked very interesting and had gotten a 9/10 score, so I watched the video review. I watched until some weird tree-like creature came on screen. I closed the window immediately. "That's not a game for me," I thought. Tree-creatures were awesome in LotR, but in a video game? I dismissed it, until a couple of months later. I was browsing, again, and I came across Fallout 3, again. I said to myself, "I have to give this game a chance." So I watched the review again (the whole one this time). I became very interested in the game, so I ordered it from a Danish web-store. A few days later it arrived in the mailbox. I had read that it was quite laggy and buggy compared to other games and that it was a good idea to install it. It was the GotY-edition, so I installed the add-ons too. I started the game, and I was immediately immersed by the awesome music, and the weird and wondrous menu background. I clicked "New Game" and I watched as a light bulb turned on. A light bulb in a radio. A radio in a bus. A bus in a post-apocalyptic nightmare... I glimpsed across the barren wasteland of DC. A soldier in metal armour with a peculiar rifle in his hands entered the screen. He turned his head and cast his eyesight into mine. The screen went black in an instant, just to be lit again by sinister images, only accompanied by the words "War never changes". I was hit by a shiver, and I thought to myself, "What an epic intro."

A few hours later I stood before a giant steel door. I clicked on a control panel of sorts and the door slit aside. I walked through the doorway, only to find another, maybe more common, door. I opened it and found myself blinded by the light and beauty of the world; a world which I never had seen. Shivers went down my spine, and I watched the landscape in awe as I slowly descented from the hill. Fallout 3 grew to become the best game I had ever played.

A week or so later, after having played Fallout 24/7 for that week, I ordered Oblivion, seeing as it was supposed to be kinda like Fallout 3. It arrived the next day, and I loaded it up. I guess you know how it went from there on... I actually didn't really start playing until a few months ago. I was way to busy playing Fallout 3, which was the one I preferred. I don't anymore.

I realize now that Oblivion could have turned me into a Xbox fan, I am grateful that I avoided that. Waiting on the PS3 was smart move in my decision, god only knows how much anger I would have experienced dealing with the Red Ring which was very common when Oblivion was released.

In 1977, I designed and hand wrap wired my first computer (on a breadboard): an 8085 micro processor with 4K of memory. It was hot stuff at the time. I created a complete programming language for it and programmed it to play games like tic-tac-toe and nim.

Fast-forward to 1985; The Amiga computer came out and within a week I had one (and was $1000 in debt.) For a few years, it was the most awesome computer in existence. As the PC caught up and began to surpass the Amiga, one could find bargains in the soon-to-close Amiga software shops. I picked up an RPG game called "Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny" sitting in a bargain bin marked 'misc'. It was my introduction to RPGs

I played Daggerfall when it came out and continued until Morrowind came out. Then I played Morrowind until Oblivion came out. I played Oblivion fairly continuously up until about six months ago. During that time, I wrote about my characters on this forum and even wrote a fan-fiction about my final character; Angel. AFAIK, it's still buried somewhere in the Elder Scrolls fan-fiction section.

Nowadays, I am an occasional lurker on the forum reminiscing about the glory days before the constant focus on kill-or-be-killed began to pall. It is my hope that in times to come, games will be even more stunning in beauty (even ugliness can be beautiful in its own way) and more creative in focus.

I'm currently between 17 and 18 and my father used to play a lot of games like Diablo, Morrowind, Halo, you name it.
After he made me try Morrowind I kinda looked down on the series. Not because it was bad but I was like 10 years old and the game was way to complex for me at that time.
Then a few years later he buys an 360 and of course Oblivion. After playing it with him I just had to have my own.
That is basicly how I got started in the series.
A year ago I bought Morrowind for myself and found it to be an even deeper game than Oblivion, but the quest-log was kinda bad.
So... Yay Elder Scrolls bliviongate:

Also hate the quest log of Morrowind. Morrowind is indeed deeper than Oblivion and more atmospheric. The lightning in Morrowind gave me a fright. I was swimming into a wall for athletics training while watching TV and I heard a large bang sound which caused me to jump, I then looked and saw it was Morrowind's weather.