After Jeremy Brayton pointed me to the solution to the Oblivion load-time issue, I was able to sit down and enjoy the game without getting distracted by jarring pauses every few seconds. Before Jeremy mentioned that there was a solution to the issue, I didn’t even think it was an issue at all – I just thought that was how the game was.

I’m glad I was wrong, though.

Yeah, I still hate orcs and elves and swords and hit points and gamer stuff like that, but I can’t help it – this game is jaw-dropping.

What’s getting me isn’t just the size, or the possible variations in gameplay, but rather that it works. Think about it. Anybody could come along nowadays and slap together a game engine that supports a gigantic world, and anybody could populate that world with things to do, people to talk to, and so on. The tough part would be doing it in such a way that it didn’t seem like the world was being held together with some kind of digital Elmer’s glue.

I mean, it isn’t even really a game. I started over tonight as a thief cat-person (was a violent white guy before), and the way I interact with the world, simply by virtue of having changed species and professions, has completely changed.

For starters, I just ignored all that Oblivion Gate crap right off the bat (for those of you who haven’t played (and who never will (why are you reading this?)), the main storyline is about these weird gates that open into some other hellish world that’s, like, dangerous or something). Rather than spending my precious time trying to save everybody from the demon things that hop out of the gates, I decided to just steal all their stuff instead, and it was fantastic.

I don’t know if it’s the repressed criminal inside of me or what, but when I pickpocketed someone for, like, an apple, I giggled like a little schoolgirl. The fact alone that it’s possible to pickpocket the other people blows my mind. That I could attack, converse with, steal from, or otherwise interact with these people is nuts.

Later, I started breaking into people’s houses and confirmed what I already believed about other people in life: they’re boring as hell. They don’t have anything interesting to steal. It’s just bags of grain and cabinets full of crappy books. I even found a broom lodged in a wine casket. It temporarily broke the illusion of the game, since nobody in his right mind would ever store a broom in a wine casket, but then I realized that I was a cat-person in a virtual world, stealing apples from the unsuspecting, and that maybe my suspension of disbelief should grow to accommodate strangely stowed cleaning supplies. Hell. We should celebrate that these little computer people are even cleaning their homes at all, yeah?

Wandering outside the cities, it gets even nutser. Things just don’t end. And you don’t have to go anywhere. I love that. I was raised on linear gameplay – Mario stuff, you know? Like, you could actually memorize the position of every single enemy on a level, and know precisely when to jump on the koopa. Not so with Oblivion.

If you want to move off the trail and hunt, you can do that. And, while hunting, you might come across some ruins. Coming across the ruins, you might feel tempted to explore them. Or you might not. That’s the whole freaking point – you can tell those ruins to just piss off if you aren’t in the mood to ramble through them.

But, if you do explore them, then you might meet this bad guy in a robe who totally explodes you with some magical bad-ass lightning stuff that drains some of your states.

So what do you do?

You hike up into the mountains and pick a certain type of mushroom that grows off the side of a tree, and then eat it to cure yourself.

That’s so awesome. Not the mushroom part, since I hate mushrooms, and I wish they’d all die and then be sent to mushroom hell to be presided over by mushroom Satan and be tortured for their crimes against Rory, but, rather, the part about being able to get sick and then wander into the forest to find your cure. And, as you wander into the forest and gradually ascent up the side of a mountain, the scenery changes, and it even starts to snow.

I don’t know, man. Maybe I’m way behind the times, and this is how video games have been for years, but this is the most impressed I’ve ever been by a game. It doesn’t mean it’s a favorite, but it’s definitely a “Whoah” experience to see it all.

Even the things kids are doing while playing this game - the ways they’ve learned to make the gameworld work for them – are fascinating.

I was reading a post in a forum yesterday by a guy who wanted to hide his loot somewhere in the game where it wouldn’t be stolen (because the world is large and doesn’t seem to have any hard and fast rules, it’s possible that leaving your loot lying around would be a good way to get it stolen).

What he did, then, was to walk to the bottom of a lake and just make a huge pile of his stuff there. Now, whenever he needs something, he just goes back to that lake and gets it.

No need for some special building, chest, safe, or whatever. This guy keeps his personal belongings twenty feet underwater.

The mind reels.

Specifically, it reels at the process that must have gone into creating this game. I’d love to know how they started, but I’m not even sure “started” is the right word. The game feels like it was created from the inside-out – like it had to evolve into being rather than be created in the traditional sense. I mean that, too – I really would love to know how they got started. From a geek perspective, it’s just so technologically impressive that one gets the feeling Bethesda might as well have saved itself a whole lot of time and energy with a smaller project, like curing cancer.

Blown away.

And now, my sleeping pill is forcing me offline.

Good night, people…