Last year's best role-playing game is about to get a lot bigger--25 percent bigger, to be precise. Next month, Bethesda will ship The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's first true expansion pack, Shivering Isles, which will add a sizable amount of new content to the already massive world of Cyrodiil. But wait, you're thinking, there have already been several content updates to Oblivion. What about last fall's Knights of the Nine? The previous patches introduced incremental new dungeons and quests, and Knights of the Nine was the largest, with an entire new faction to quest through. But all those minor updates took place in the game's existing lands. By contrast, Shivering Isles will introduce an entire new plane of Oblivion that's said to be roughly a quarter of the size of the original game, and it will be full of new settlements, characters, and quests and will include a lengthy new storyline and 10 new achievements to boot.
That storyline explains the appearance of a single new dimensional gateway on a hill just above the Imperial City. This door leads to the realm known as the Shivering Isles, an Oblivion plane whose residents are dominated by madness and plagued by an unexplained phenomenon called the Greymarch, which periodically exterminates everyone in the land. The isles are ruled by the daedric prince Sheogorath, who many players will have brushed up against tangentially in the original game. Ol' Sheo is searching for a mortal champion who can determine the cause of the Greymarch and stop it. That's where you come in. To complete the expansion's main quest line, you'll have to rise through the ranks of Sheogorath's mad high court to a place of honor and complete the task the manic lord has set for you.
The colorful land of Mania will provide a pleasant backdrop to half of your adventures in the Shivering Isles...
As soon as you set foot through the gate, you'll realize you're not in Kansa...er, Cyrodiil anymore. You're greeted in a plain dark room by Sheogorath's enigmatic right-hand man, Haskill, and once you accept his challenge to enter the realm, the room impressively melts away in a flurry of butterflies, revealing the otherworldly land of the Shivering Isles. The isles are actually split almost right down the middle into two disparate halves. The northern half, Mania, is brightly colored and full of gigantic, towering mushrooms and little sparkling, flying sprites flitting around. The other side is dark, cruel Dementia, home to repulsive enemies like giant spiders and hounds with no skin, and filled with the gnarled roots of trees stretching up from the ground like twisted, grasping fingers. Each side even has its own guards: the fair, armored Golden Saints of Mania and their malevolent counterparts in Dementia, the Dark Seducers. The two sides do have one thing in common: Sheogorath's word is universal law.
Before we even got to the two halves of the land, though, we encountered the formerly deserted village of Passwall, which had recently been reoccupied by a group of crazed characters who were waiting for Sheogorath's permission to pass through the final gate and enter the isles. A necromancer living in the town had created a hulking, Frankenstein's-monster-like undead golem to protect the gate, and the keys for this doorway were unfortunately sewn right into the monster's flesh. So we went through a relatively short but satisfying quest during which we had to obtain information from several townspeople (and specifically use our persuasive skill to make one of them talk), put a few clues together, enlist the aid of a traveling fighter, break into a local boneyard, and finally bring down the creature at the stroke of midnight to prove our worth, get the keys, and enter the realm itself.
...though the twisted Dementia will give a stark, unpleasant contrast for the other half.
We didn't make it all the way to Sheogorath's capital city in the short time we had to play--the Shivering Isles are a big place, after all--but in addition to the main quest line, the expansion will contain several sizable towns and numerous smaller settlements, not to mention plenty of one-off quests to go with them. We stumbled into a town in Mania humorously called Split, where every resident had recently been faced with a doppelganger of him- or herself. The townspeople were none too happy about this doubling up; most of them seemed keen on having you murder their clones outright, in fact. As you'd expect, the odd goings-on in this town will tie in to a quest series that will likely see you setting things right.
In another instance, we were caught with stolen goods by two Dark Seducers while exploring the dark wilds of Dementia, and we found that going to jail here was a more unpleasant experience than it was back in Cyrodiil. We were thrown into a dank dungeon cell and stripped of all our equipment and armor, and we had to fight our way out with only our bare hands (and a few choice spells) at our disposal. This wasn't a typical dungeon from the original game--it was filled with the knotted roots of the trees that mark Dementia's surface, which occasionally released poisonous gas that docked our stats temporarily. We also had to fight our way through a succession of grummites, armed troll-like creatures who recharge their health when in contact with a body of water. When we reached the top of the dungeon we finally retrieved our equipment and emerged from the depths. This seemed like a slightly harsher penalty for theft than we remember from the first game.
You'll have to figure out how to best this guy just to gain access to the isles in the first place.
The developers at Bethesda haven't made any real changes to the core gameplay systems or interface in Oblivion, and you can't blame them, since Oblivion landed on more than a few best-of lists last year. In the fashion of past Elder Scrolls expansions, they've chosen instead to simply provide more lands, quests, characters, and gear--in short, more content--to discover for those who have already made Cyrodiil a second home. On the Xbox 360, Bethesda will even make use of Microsoft's new achievement point allowance for downloadable content: Shivering Isles will contain 10 new achievements, most of which you'll obtain by playing through the main quest line and which will total 250 points. The company is promising around 30 hours of gameplay in the expansion, which will be available in a retail box for the PC version and as a download on Xbox Live starting in March.
That storyline explains the appearance of a single new dimensional gateway on a hill just above the Imperial City. This door leads to the realm known as the Shivering Isles, an Oblivion plane whose residents are dominated by madness and plagued by an unexplained phenomenon called the Greymarch, which periodically exterminates everyone in the land. The isles are ruled by the daedric prince Sheogorath, who many players will have brushed up against tangentially in the original game. Ol' Sheo is searching for a mortal champion who can determine the cause of the Greymarch and stop it. That's where you come in. To complete the expansion's main quest line, you'll have to rise through the ranks of Sheogorath's mad high court to a place of honor and complete the task the manic lord has set for you.
The colorful land of Mania will provide a pleasant backdrop to half of your adventures in the Shivering Isles...
As soon as you set foot through the gate, you'll realize you're not in Kansa...er, Cyrodiil anymore. You're greeted in a plain dark room by Sheogorath's enigmatic right-hand man, Haskill, and once you accept his challenge to enter the realm, the room impressively melts away in a flurry of butterflies, revealing the otherworldly land of the Shivering Isles. The isles are actually split almost right down the middle into two disparate halves. The northern half, Mania, is brightly colored and full of gigantic, towering mushrooms and little sparkling, flying sprites flitting around. The other side is dark, cruel Dementia, home to repulsive enemies like giant spiders and hounds with no skin, and filled with the gnarled roots of trees stretching up from the ground like twisted, grasping fingers. Each side even has its own guards: the fair, armored Golden Saints of Mania and their malevolent counterparts in Dementia, the Dark Seducers. The two sides do have one thing in common: Sheogorath's word is universal law.
Before we even got to the two halves of the land, though, we encountered the formerly deserted village of Passwall, which had recently been reoccupied by a group of crazed characters who were waiting for Sheogorath's permission to pass through the final gate and enter the isles. A necromancer living in the town had created a hulking, Frankenstein's-monster-like undead golem to protect the gate, and the keys for this doorway were unfortunately sewn right into the monster's flesh. So we went through a relatively short but satisfying quest during which we had to obtain information from several townspeople (and specifically use our persuasive skill to make one of them talk), put a few clues together, enlist the aid of a traveling fighter, break into a local boneyard, and finally bring down the creature at the stroke of midnight to prove our worth, get the keys, and enter the realm itself.
...though the twisted Dementia will give a stark, unpleasant contrast for the other half.
We didn't make it all the way to Sheogorath's capital city in the short time we had to play--the Shivering Isles are a big place, after all--but in addition to the main quest line, the expansion will contain several sizable towns and numerous smaller settlements, not to mention plenty of one-off quests to go with them. We stumbled into a town in Mania humorously called Split, where every resident had recently been faced with a doppelganger of him- or herself. The townspeople were none too happy about this doubling up; most of them seemed keen on having you murder their clones outright, in fact. As you'd expect, the odd goings-on in this town will tie in to a quest series that will likely see you setting things right.
In another instance, we were caught with stolen goods by two Dark Seducers while exploring the dark wilds of Dementia, and we found that going to jail here was a more unpleasant experience than it was back in Cyrodiil. We were thrown into a dank dungeon cell and stripped of all our equipment and armor, and we had to fight our way out with only our bare hands (and a few choice spells) at our disposal. This wasn't a typical dungeon from the original game--it was filled with the knotted roots of the trees that mark Dementia's surface, which occasionally released poisonous gas that docked our stats temporarily. We also had to fight our way through a succession of grummites, armed troll-like creatures who recharge their health when in contact with a body of water. When we reached the top of the dungeon we finally retrieved our equipment and emerged from the depths. This seemed like a slightly harsher penalty for theft than we remember from the first game.
You'll have to figure out how to best this guy just to gain access to the isles in the first place.
The developers at Bethesda haven't made any real changes to the core gameplay systems or interface in Oblivion, and you can't blame them, since Oblivion landed on more than a few best-of lists last year. In the fashion of past Elder Scrolls expansions, they've chosen instead to simply provide more lands, quests, characters, and gear--in short, more content--to discover for those who have already made Cyrodiil a second home. On the Xbox 360, Bethesda will even make use of Microsoft's new achievement point allowance for downloadable content: Shivering Isles will contain 10 new achievements, most of which you'll obtain by playing through the main quest line and which will total 250 points. The company is promising around 30 hours of gameplay in the expansion, which will be available in a retail box for the PC version and as a download on Xbox Live starting in March.
