By far my favorite improvement over Morrowind is how quests are handled. All quests are entered into an easily accessible journal and each time you gain a new quest or complete a part of a current quest you’ll be alerted to that fact taking the guess work out of questing. This means you’ll never once be frustrated at all with quests from start to finish.

My second favorite new feature is the ability to discover new places on the world map and then travel to them instantly by clicking on their icon on the world map. It may sound like a bad thing to hardcore gamers but the game doesn’t force you to use them and it’s sure nice to have when you just don’t want to trek across that same stretch of forest for the eight time. Of course if you do this constantly you’ll never discover all the side caverns and areas that Oblivion has to offer so in some sense not using this teleport system is rewarded. Either way it’s very nice to have this option available.

The difficulty of the game seems to increase quite nicely in a gradual fashion depending on your level. Many quests can only be started if you are a certain level. On that note be sure to go to a bed and rest whenever a pop up window tells you to as that’s how you level. I was level one with level five experience before I realized this. Also most enemies will increase in difficulty automatically as you level making the challenge constant in the combat department. To complement this Oblivion has added a new leveling system for skills. As you get better at certain skills like Blade wielding you’ll gain new abilities that will allow you to perform neat actions from time to time. A high level marksman can even zoom in with their bow for example.

Then there’s the audio. Every single character has full voice, the sound effects are excellent, and the background mood music fits at all times. The voice work is truly some of the best to date in a game and really draws you in to this medieval world.