"A wonderful place! Except when it's horrible. Then it's horribly wonderful. Good for a visit. Or for an eternity."
I really enjoyed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As an RPG, it stands out not only for the beauty and sheer power of its graphic engine but also for the breadth of the world it offered gamers. Oblivion was full of so many interesting things to see, quests to solve, monsters to fight and resources to gather that players could -- and did -- lose months of time exploring every inch of it. Even better, the game's mod friendliness meant that the experience only got better as mod authors did everything from re-working the game UI to creating new monsters, locations, items and quests to actually overhauling the very basis of the game's design. That made playing Bethesda's own Shivering Isles a unique experience. On the one hand, it's the mother of all content additions to the game, adding tons of great new stuff to see and do. On the other hand, as an "official" addition to Oblivion that was created around the game's original design, it does highlight some of the weaknesses that subsequent mods had removed.
Shivering Isles doesn't open up any new lands within the original Oblivion world, but instead places a bizarre Daedric warp gate outside the town of Bravil and invites mortal champions through it to offer their assistance to Sheogorath, the Daedric "Lord of Madness." Since everyone who has gone through the gate so far has come back as a gibbering, violent lunatic, this will naturally be an irresistible challenge to players. When they get to the other side, they'll be on the Shivering Isles, another plane of existence that's described as the "physical manifestation of the Madgod's delirium," enlisted to help end the eternal conflict between Order and Chaos. This naturally includes a long, involved quest and lots and lots of killing.
This main storyline is Shivering Isles' greatest strength. In terms of sheer complexity, it easily rivals the best quests of the original game and it far surpasses them in sheer fun. Early on in the main quest, Lord Sheogorath asks the player to reactivate one of his favorite "recreational sites." This turns out to be an elaborate deathtrap for adventurers in which the mad god can watch them run through his maze and push buttons that either drive them insane or outright kill them. Naturally the player also gets a chance to do this with a poor unfortunate party once the area is repaired, and it marked some of my most enjoyable experiences in the game.
Later the player has to uncover a conspiracy against Syl, the Duchess of Delirium, by escorting around a court inquisitor and helping them torture the citizens of the town. I will admit to losing the thread of this quest for a while because of how much I was enjoying just running around and hurting people at random. By the time the player finishes the main quest line, they'll have committed the nicest murder in human history, made a man's heart explode with pleasure, robbed a grave, built a monster, and betrayed almost everyone they've met on the island. It's all a blast.
It helps that characterization is much stronger in Shivering Isles than it was in the main game, which gives players a reason to care about what they're doing. Every citizen on the island is a subject of one of Lord Sheogorath's lieutenants, either the Duke of Mania or the Duchess of Delirium and as such, each manifests a different form of insanity. Encounters range from a necrophiliac with mommy issues to a claustrophobic insomniac to a suicidal coward to a petty bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur. Ruling over this crazy collection is Lord Sheogorath himself, an insane deity who offers alternately amusing and terrifying comments in a thick Scottish brogue. "They're getting more active every day. Not a good sign," he says when asked about obelisks around the island that unleash Knights of Order. "Know what would be a good sign? 'Free sweet rolls!' Who wouldn't like that?" All the residents are fascinating to talk to and their individual disturbances factor deeply into the resolution of the many quests available on the Isles.
The expansion also hosts a new set of visual wonders to discover and cool stuff to find. The Isles are actually one island divided in half. The Mania side is a brightly lit wonderland of giant mushrooms and banyan-like trees with enormous twisted roots. Delirium, on the other hand, is a depressing swamp filled with stagnant pools, thick mist and sinister shadows. New dungeons sets include claustrophobic root-filled warrens that twist and turn back on themselves in Escher-like configurations and ruined tombs and redoubts obviously constructed when Order ruled the land.
The game's new monsters are also a breath of fresh air. Rather than yet another variation on the standard fantasy orcs and goblins, we instead get the twisted tree-like Gnarls, lizard-like Grummites, angular crystalline Knights of Order and hideous Flesh Atronachs. All of them offer enjoyable new combat challenges to overcome (Gnarls, for example, actually get more powerful from some spells). There are also new sets of armor and weapons to craft and Dawnfang/Duskfang, a great sword with both a day and night form. Uncovering every little secret of the island should occupy many enjoyable hours for Elder Scrolls fans who live to discover every corner of the world.
The bad news is that, like Sheogorath himself, Shivering Isles has a dark side. Most of the side quests aren't particularly exciting. The majority of them are basic collection quests or a short, easy series of tasks without much payoff. There are some happy exceptions: the citizens of Split have been separated into Manic and Delirious duplicates of each other and both sides ask the player to kill their opposites, and I also really enjoyed helping a despondent man commit "suicide by adventurer."
There are also some unfortunate choices in terrain and dungeon design. The two portions of the island are separated by an enormous cliff that doesn't have all that many places for the player to cross over from one side to the other. Players are forced to make long detours in order to reach their objective, and getting around the island becomes a huge, unnecessary difficulty that doesn't add much to gameplay. Dungeon layouts are a confused series of twisty passages that go over and under each other and contain holes and trap doors that drop the player in wildly different areas of the same complex. It's basically the return of the RPG maze. One particularly annoying dungeon was filled with one-way passages which meant navigating a maze on the way in and a completely different one on the way out. This issue isn't fatal. The main quest is compelling enough that it'll get the player through these frustrations, but the size of some of Shivering Isles' dungeons could have been cut in half without losing anything.
The biggest disappointment with the pack is that Shivering Isles does nothing to address any of the game's basic design or structural flaws. When I first installed Shivering Isles, I did so on a clean install of Oblivion in order to get the un-modded "out of the box" experience. It was an eye-opener. Having been spoiled by countless user mods, I had forgotten just how annoying the original user interface (which was clearly designed for the Xbox 360 controller) is. Looking at the map through what feels like a tiny keyhole is more claustrophobic than any Shivering Isles dungeon and the enormous 36-point font and lack of a decent sorting ability makes inventory management a huge chore. The good news is that after getting about half-way through the main quest, I decided to load up some of the more common UI, bug and graphic enhancement mods, and Shivering Isles seemed to have no problem running any of them. It was like being able to breathe again to have some of these things installed.
Finally, Shivering Isles marks the return of the dreaded leveling system. Oblivion was originally designed so that the world leveled up with the player so no area of the world would be off-limits right from the start. However, it also removed one of the greatest joys of the RPG -- the ever-escalating feeling of power and progress, the fun of pounding the snot out of monsters that once tore you to shreds. That sense was returned to the game via great mods like "Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul" and as time moves on, mod authors will undoubtedly extend such mods to encompass Shivering Isles' content. But straight out of the box (or for those who don't know about such mods), it's very possible to jack up a character's skills to the point where one can blast through the content without breaking a sweat without leveling. Shivering Isles has an exceptional main quest line in which the player is challenged to take on the might of a god; it's awfully anticlimactic to actually face Jyggalag with Dawnfang while still level one and push him over as easily as a Tamriel bandit.
In the end, Shivering Isles kind of comes pre-sold to fans of Oblivion. If you enjoyed the original game, Shivering Isles is more of what made you fall in love with it in the first place. Its original problems are still there, but they're more than made up for by the amount of fun to be had in the main quest line. In its current state, the expansion is already fun enough to justify the $30 purchase, and, like the original, we're sure it's only going to get better as time goes by.
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