“Oblivion” expanding soon

Although I feel its part of my job to keep gamers aware of as much current gaming news as I can, I would always rather report on games that I’ve actually played. I’m not proud to admit it, but at the time of this writing, the game I’ll be discussing this week has taken up at least 80 hours of my life so far – and I’m still no where close to beating it.

Considered by many to be the best role playing game of last year, it isn’t hard to see why so many people love “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion”. The mythical world of Cyrodiil, a province of the continent Tamriel and where “Oblivion” takes place, offers gamers up to 200+ hours of gameplay. Players can choose from a variety of character creation options then after a lengthy tutorial/introduction players can complete any quest, be it part of the huge main quest or a short side quest, they want at their leisure. Exploring the gigantic land of Cyrodiil is almost a quest in itself. As the story goes, a strange, evil cult has conspired with a Daedric prince, a being widely considered to be a demon in Tamriel, to assassinate the emperor and plunge the land into chaos. The players main quest is to find the emperors last remaining son and heir to the throne and restore order to Cyrodiil.

“Oblivion” not only packs in a massive amount of features and gameplay, but it is also one of the best looking 360 titles. The attention to detail on each of Cyrodiil’s strange, but interesting, creatures is incredible. On top of the impressive graphics, “Oblivion” also sports more lines of dialog than a movie so expect to talk to a lot of people.

But even though “Oblivion” offers a few hundred hours of gameplay, it also has been out for almost a year. Developer Bethesda Softworks has taken advantage of Xbox Live Marketplace and released a plethora of additions to the “Oblivion” world. These new features range from a band of pirates you can hire to plunder and give you a cut of their ill-gotten gains to an entirely new quest called “Knights of the Nine.” But all of these recently released extras pale in comparison to the brand new expansion pack Bethesda is releasing in March.

Though the world of “Oblivion” is quite beautiful and full of life, the setting can become stale after a few hundreds hours of play. But Bethesda plans on remedying this by releasing the “Shivering Isles” in late March.

It would’ve been quite easy for Bethesda to have simply added new quests and items to the already huge world of “Oblivion,” but they have gone above and beyond what most expansion packs have to offer. “Shivering Isles,” first and foremost, introduces a new plane of existence, the Realm of Madness or more commonly known as the Shivering Isles, that is 25% the size of Cyrodiil for eager adventurers to explore. This new locale will also include two distinctly different lands – Mania and Dementia. Each area will also feature a capital city which reflects the land it is located in – Mania’s capital being Bliss while Dementia’s capital city Crucible. There is also a third city called Split which lies, as you can probably guess, between Mania and Dementia. The most odd feature of split is not only that it bridges the gap between the two different lands, but that each citizen in Split has his or her counterpart in the opposite half of the city which will undoubtedly make for some strange, almost Twilight Zone-ian quests.

“Shivering Isles” will also introduce new weapons and items for players to gather on top of new locations and quests. One such weapon is a blade called Dawnfang that will actually level up the more it is used during the day but at night the blade transforms into a different form of the weapon called Duskfang.

Overall, “Shivering Isles” should give gamers hungry for another adventure into the land of Tamriel about 30-40 more hours of gameplay. Considering that this add-on alone packs the content of an original game, it will definitely be worth purchasing from your favorite game retailer or from Xbox Live Marketplace when it is released.