Oblivion is a contradiction.

On the one hand it's a wonderful mesmerising world with amazing characters as fun and interesting as they are goofy and campy, the questlines are interesting stories instead of a set of chores to climb ranks like in previous games, and the main quest feeling exciting from beginning to end.

On the other hand it's also a severely flawed train-wreck of a game. The levelling and world scaling are so poorly thought out and implemented that without very careful planning of your levels it can single-handedly ruin the game and turn it into a slog of mindlessly slapping seemingly bottomless health bars for minutes on end in every single enemy encounter, the titular Oblivion gates themselves number in the triple-digits but with only a single-digit set of possible layouts the quickly get so repetitive that you've seen all you need after only two or three.

Oblivion is, to me, an incredibly flawed masterpiece. It's buggy as all hell, a nightmare to run without constant crashes or fear of save corruption particularly on modern systems, and some of the core gameplay systems fight with all their might to make sure you can't enjoy the game properly without playing bizarrely to force an optimal levelling curve or get the best version of a levelled item. Yet despite all this, the strange denizens and colourful living world of Cyrodiil mesmerise me in a way very few game worlds have ever done before or since, the whacky dialogue and radiant AI may make the people of Cyrodiil feel strange or even outright schizophrenic at times but it also makes them feel alive and memorable. It's a damn shame Bethesda stripped back on the radiant AI in future games rather than developing it further, because for all the laughs people get out of it it's one of the things that really made Oblivion special.

Even the DLC is a contradiction. On the one hand, Horse Armour was the damned herald of the modern low value microtransaction, a rip-off that cemented low value micro-DLC and it's place in modern gaming. On the other, The Shivering Isles is one of the greatest video game expansion packs ever released. A large slice of the best of everything Oblivion has to offer, taking it's fun and creative writing, fun characters, great story and interesting living world and adding new interesting and (slightly) less repetitive dungeon designs to the mix along with a more Morrowind-like alien world of strange and interesting people, flora and fauna. It's dungeons can be a little over-long and maze like, and it's biggest flaw is that Oblivion's core problems or levelling and scaling still haunt it, but still an incredible expansion.

Oblivion is a must experience game, but even for first timers I'd recommend grabbing a couple of mods to smooth over the games biggest flaws before playing it.

To fix the level scaling problems I recommend:
- PistachioRaptor’s Attribute Progression Redesign, to make anything less than perfectly optimised levelling less punishing.
- Mitchalek’s Auto Update Levelled Items And Spells, to not feel like the game is punishing you for doing any of its content without grinding to level 20ish first.
- PushTheWinButton’s Real Retroactive Health Formula, Balanced Creature Stats & Balanced NPC Level Cap, to fix enemies turning into health sponges in higher levels and players being one-shot if you didn't rush up your Endurance immediately.

Still, I can't take mods into account when judging a game critically and as it comes out of the box Oblivion's flaws hold it back to just almost being a masterpiece.

The interesting and strange world of Morrowind and the rewarding sense exploration with static hand-placed and interestingly designed loot all over the game are the main draw of The Elder Scrolls III, but to enjoy it you have to climb over a steep hill of tedious main quest design and somewhat clunky combat that has aged less than gracefully.

Morrowind is an incredible RPG and more of an actual "RPG" than any other game in Bethesda's catalogue. You can be a maniac and murder anyone you like and just have quests dead-end break on you rather than the character waking up a few minutes later, you can get yourself locked out of progressing through a couple of the guilds by working with the wrong people in a different one. Reading the quest text to find your way around leads to a sense of exploration, adventure and discovery that can't be replicated when you're mindlessly following an objective arrow. And while there's no conventional fast travel, part of the reward with becoming familiar with the game is learning all the different ways to get around by teleportation, boat or silt-strider to functionally "fast travel" just as quickly but so much more immersively than in Oblivion or Skyrim.

That said the game is not without some pretty major flaws. Morrowind's main quest and a large amount of it's major side-questlines, while full of iconic and unforgettable characters like Caius Cosades and Dagoth Ur, are frankly all kind of terrible. Half of the main quest is spent walking circles around the map to do busywork for pointlessly remote NPCs, and most side-factions barely have a story at all. The combat too is a poorly aged beast, and while once you understand it the TTRPG style chance to hit will start to make sense and become intuitive it still feels terrible early on to flail wildly at your enemies with no result or feedback as to what's going on beyond a series of "whoosh"ing sounds. It tooks me a half dozen attempts at the game before Morrowind finally "clicked" for me and I wouldn't judge anyone for finding Morrowind just too archaic to really get on with, but I'm glad that eventually I did.

While held back by cumbersome poorly aged controls and clunky hard to decipher combat, along with a fair dose of Adventure Game Logic, Redguard is far too charming an adventure to skip entirely and should be experienced at least in some way by any Elder Scrolls fan.

That said, should you play it yourself? The depends. If you've got an actual machine of the era laying around, or you're very well versed in either running old games in virtual machines or manually configuring different DOSBox forks and dgVoodoo to get it running properly in Glide mode, then definitely! But if you're not familiar with troubleshooting and getting old Windows 3.1 games to run on modern computers then I'd say not much is lost by watching a playthrough on YouTube rather than playing it yourself, the game as it's packaged on Steam and GoG comes in a pretty sorry state out of the box.