Oblivion

No, I don't mean the state of being oblivious. I'm talking about the game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's a game for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Specifically, I'm talking about the PC version.

I got into it when my friend talked me into it. I didn't even think I'd like it very much, but she was very persuasive. And since I don't have any game consoles I had to get it for the PC. I found a good deal on Oblivion and Fallout3. Now, I don't really care for Fallout 3 as much as I do Oblivion, but I may play it occasionally just for something different.

Anyway, this is about Oblivion. Oblivion is the fourth installment of the Elder Scrolls series (and the only one I've played), and is a fairly old game by now, but it is a whole lot of fun. What exactly is it? It's an open-ended role playing game. What does that mean? It means that once you finish the main quest you can still play the game for as long as you like. Role playing means that your character is an extension of yourself and you play them as you want to. Whether this means you have a white knight, a gray rogue/thief, a black assassin or a white/black mage or any combination thereof.

Every character in Oblivion has some magical talent, but some are more adept at it than others, some are better at sneaking, some are better at being a knight, so choose accordingly. The lore on each character race may also be a deciding factor in whether you want to play them, so you may want to study up on it at the unofficial wikia page that I use a lot. It's got information on all of the Elder Scrolls games, as well.

So, once you've created a character with whatever major skills you think they'll need, and you've played through the tutorial, you'll know what the main quest is. Namely, a Daedra Lord, Mehrunes Dagon, wants to open a gate from his world of Oblivion into Tamriel and the Emperor entrusts you to find his last surviving (illegitimate) son and stop Dagon.

Now, this is where the open-ended part comes in. You do not have to actually follow the main quest right away. Certainly you can take the Amulet to Weynon Priory and give it to Jauffre if you don't want it lingering around in your inventorty (it's zero weight, so that isn't a problem). But if you don't want to trigger the main quest any further, DO NOT EVER GO TO KVATCH!

Sorry about the yelling, but that is really important. If you go to Kvatch to find Martin, then all hell will break loose and you'll be obligated to follow up on the main quest. And it's very easy to avoid Kvatch and not even travel past it due to the convenient fast-traveling option. Since this isn't exactly a walkthrough, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail explaining things, I'm just giving you a few tips and tricks to help you earn gold and level up your skills.

So, now, about leveling. When you've leveled enough of your major skills, you'll get a message suggesting that you rest and think about it. This is a clue that you'll need to sleep. Find a safe place with a bed or a bedroll (any inn or campsite will do) and then sleep. You can choose how long you want to sleep, but one hour is sufficient, then you can choose which three attributes to raise. This is all dependent on what type of character you're building, I can't suggest anything, except maybe raise your strength as much as possible. Why? Because strength determines how much you can carry, and when you're dungeon-diving you'll see what I mean.

Now, getting gold. On the PC version you COULD use the console and type in player.additem f #, where # is the amount of gold you want, which means you could be a millionaire in a few keystrokes, if you wanted. However, this method is really unnecessary, as it's insanely easy to build up a gold supply ingame. It also takes most of the fun out of the game, for if you just give yourself a million Septims you won't feel the need to explore Cyrodiil and it's many caves, forts and ruins. However, I will discuss other things you can do with the console that will come in handy as you play the game.

So, onto dungeon-diving. There are an abundance of caves, Ayleid ruins, mines and abandoned forts all over Cyrodiil just waiting to be plundered. All of them will have either bandits, marauders or creatures/undead living in them that must be disposed of before you can plunder the treasure. And once disposed of, you can loot corpses and containers to your heart's content, up to your encumbrance limit, which is the amount you can carry at any one time. You can only carry up to one pound less than your total encumbrance. So, say you have an encumbrance of 200. That means that you can only carry 199, any more and you will not be able to move. So, my suggestion is to first kill every living thing in the area(s) first, without looting anything. But, be careful of wandering Adventurers. If you kill one of them, it's murder (and we'll get into that in another post.). They're non-hostile, so you can leave them alone. After all hostiles are dead, bring up your console (tapping the tilde [`] key) and type in tgm. Those three letters stand for 'Toggle God Mode'. Yes, you could leave this on all the time and never have to worry about dying or anything else, but where's the fun in that? Toggling this mode will allow you to pick up everything in the dungeon, so loot all the dead bodies and containers and take what you want, go to the nearest town and sell anything you don't want to keep.

Okay, I'll move on to another post to keep from giving you too much to read at one time.