How do I even begin to explain a gaming experience that is so amazingly deep, that you can spend over one hundred hours just exploring and doing side quests? I'd have more luck explaining what love is, or how the human brain works. This game is insanely long; but that is not a bad thing. The first time I beat Oblivion it took one hundred and thirty hours; that is three weeks of full time employment.

The main controls are standard for any FPRPG (First Person Role Playing Game) and that is great because you are going to have to learn layers of skills, spells, and tactics. A new control scheme might be a bit much. One of the newer and better features is seen in the inventory screen. Bethesda packs a lot of information in here; with four different category maps, skills and spells, items, and quests and logs, and five sub pages for each. Don't worry you will need all of them; the special word for oblivion is "options." Almost everything has multiple uses, upgrade options, or hidden powers.

Mage, swordsman, brawler, wizard, alchemist, pickpocket, thief, merchant, assassin, knight, and drug dealer, what do you want to be? There are 21 skills to master, with 5 different mastery levels, which can be mixed and matched how ever you want. There are 42 spells from 6 different classes of magic. You can have any combination to make a very diverse character. This means you will have a deep connection to your hero after putting in so many hours sculpting him/her. The shear quantity of option you can use in making completely different heroes and a unique play style leads to high replay value.

Sandbox games are not known anymore, so what do you do to make a new game interesting? Bethesda is trying to make the NPC (none-player characters) more life like with more dialog, full daytime and night time schedules, needs and wants, and most importantly agendas. They wanted people in the game to feel and act real. I have to admit they have got closer than anyone else so far. It's weird to see two NPC walk up to each other and start talking about something I just did, or when someone gets mad because you are following them. Even though there are thousands of NPC in the game, I think for the most part, Bethesda did a great making them seem like individuals. I got used to seeing the same people in certain parts of town and when they weren't they I wondered where they were. Did something happen to them? Then I was reassured everything was alright when they showed back up the next day. Is it okay to feel that way about NPC in a game?

Tamriel is huge! It takes almost ten minutes to run from one town to another, and just under an hour to run the full width of the region. They did a great job of loading it with little caves, towns, ruins, and camp sites. There are some real incentives to explore and find new things, lots of quest start in places that are not on the map till you find them. I spent many hours just wondering the country side seeing what I can find. Due to the power of the 360 you can stand on a mountain side and see for miles trees, rocks, water, and building are rendered; all the time. It would be easy for a world like this to be to big and if you had to walk every where this is easily a 400 hour game. In the inventory screen you have a map that can be used to travel quickly from point A to B. If you opt to travel byway of the map then you just sacrifice the in game time it would have taken to do it. So it might be day when you choose to travel back to town; but it might be dark when you arrive.