In an attempt not to get too overwhelmed, I decided to stick to the main quest. The emperor had asked me to deliver a pendant to a nearby man of the cloth, and I was happy to oblige. The journey wasn't terribly far, so I started hoofing it, following the winding path over bridges, through villages teaming with life and into a few dodgy-looking ruins. One of these ruins was guarded by a band of wayward goblins, nothing a few fireballs couldn't handle. The flames flew fast and furious, sending each goblin flying back and landing in a charred, lifeless heap (gotta love ragdoll physics). Further investigation of the ruins uncovered a mysterious door that led into an ancient underground lair. Without even realizing it, I was already off the beaten path, deep in the ground trading blows with zombies and skeletons for nifty loot. That's a common occurrence in Oblivion, since you're never told what you have to do...just what you may want to think about doing. In the end, the decision is up to you.

You still choose a birth star and class, but instead of limiting your character to certain behaviors, these grant new skills and improve the efficacy of old ones. For example, if you choose to be born under the Shadow Star and to be known as an assassin, you'll gain the ability to turn invisible once a day from your star, plus improved damage on all of your sneak attacks as an assassin. The rest of your skills and abilities will be up to you to develop through play. Even the bonuses you receive for your class are customizable, and should you decide you don't want to be a cat-faced stealth killer, you're given the opportunity to change any choices you made regarding your appearance, race, star or class upon leaving the first dungeon.

The Bad News

Graphical hiccups. In general, Oblivion has seen a sizeable improvement in performance since we last saw it--aside from some small stutters in big fights, the game runs smoothly. Still, the frame rate needed a bit more fine-tuning before we'll completely give it a pass. We also saw a few visual abnormalities, including a tree that appeared to be hovering in mid-air one one level. These issues may or may not be the fault of lingering bugs in the pre-release code, so we'll have to wait for the final build to know for sure.

Then there's the issue of draw-in. You may have heard about the Wired blogger who trashed Oblivion because he saw some items pop into view. We were vaguely aware of some detail draw-in--you could see grass fade into view as you moved, and sometimes trees and buildings popped up out of nowhere. But all this controversy is overblown: the draw-in is minor and totally forgivable. And it's an unfortunate but worthy tradeoff when you consider the game's brilliant graphics. We're still following up on rumors that the pop-up is worse if your Xbox 360 isn't equipped with a hard drive--more to come on that front, but for now, Bethesda's not talking.