Now, to non-RPG fans, all of this is probably enough to have made you think you won’t need to bother yourselves any more with all this fantasy tosh. Think again. Once you have played this game for anything more than five minutes, we challenge you not to be enthralled and enraptured. It is stunningly beautiful, fully immersive (an overused word in games journalism, but not in this context) and one of the most perfectly balanced RPG’s ever made.

By perfectly balanced, we are particularly referring to the tutorial section of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Now this is usually the stage at which we - and many other gamers too, we suspect - become turned off role-playing games. We are just not that interested in spending time reading and learning all about bafflingly complex systems of character stats and suchlike. We want to play games, and learning about statistics is about as much fun as, well, doing mathematics.

In this game there is none of that nonsense.​