Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Previews

Yet another trio of hands-on previews for Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have made their way to the ‘net. The first is at Hexus Gaming:

The four hours I spent playing the PC version of Oblivion only scratches the surface of the vast Empire of Tamriel. According to Take Two’s Adrian Lawton, the game takes around 20-30 hours to complete, if you ignore all the side quests and concentrate on the main mission, or around 200 hours if you were to complete every quest. This doesn’t include the time spent trotting around on a horse exploring the environment, bartering with the locals for the best deals, mixing new spells with your pestle and mortar, slaying wolves and bear cubs deep in the forest, or standing on a hill-top gawping, as I did, at the spectacular views across the city the possibilities are vast and time won’t even exist once you become immersed in this epic journey.

The second is at Gamehelper:

I joined two other hopefuls in front of a man with a torch. The man sent us on a quest to steal the captain’s the same captain who was seeking to end the Thieves Guild diary. Perfect, I thought, I can go tell him about this now. So off we went in our separate directions, seeking out this diary. I went straight to the palace in the hopes of finding this guard on duty and notifying him of the goings on; unfortunately he was nowhere to be found. After some time, one of the hopefuls found the diary. I’d become frustrated enough at this point, (due to the trouble finding the meeting spot and the guard himself), that I threw my figurative hands in the air, abandoned all hope of making any sort of progress with this in the play time that I had left, and decided to investigate the rare herb instead.

And the third is at GamersMark:

At some point riding across the land and enjoying the scenery, a bandit popped out of the bushes and started slashing my horse. If there’s one thing you don’t do, it’s hurt my pet, so I dismounted and proceeded to kill my attacker. Unfortunately, the blade I was using was of over-exaggerated size, like something you’d expect a character in Final Fantasy to carry, and I accidently hit my horse when defending myself and I think it’s safe to say that he got pissed. And behold! All of sudden this horse was galloping at a fast speed, attempting to trample me as I ran from him. The one thing to be done was to fight back and so I did. Thankfully, after I slashed him a few times he backed off in fear and ran way.