Tom: Bruma keeps springing into my head, the snowy rooftops and cobbled streets and the web of lies about the vampire slayer. Leyawiin, planning Adamus Phillida’s death. The southern forests, and a hitman by a lake I hunted down on a vendetta. A little waterfall tumbling into a mountain pool I stopped to splash in. A cold peak miles from anywhere.
I loved Fallout 3, and I loved Morrowind, but Oblivion has actually stuck with me more than both. A tour of its most recognisable locations and the early quests would be pretty uninspiring, but if you live in that world for a while, it has an incredible sense of place. And it does feel like living. The total freedom of what to specialise in, what goals to pursue, how to achieve them – none of those things are unique individually, but put them together and you have something that’s more of a world than a game. That will continue to excite me more than anything else in the genre until Skyrim comes along and does it all again.
Rich: I found City-Swimmer dead in Bravil after sixty hours of play. Her corpse was draped over the steps to a tavern, and the town’s inhabitants were stepping over her lifeless form. I rifled through her pockets, and found the reason for her murder: a pilfered loaf of bread. While I was off at the edge of the world in Bruma, or staring at the sea in Anvil, or holding back the forces of disorder in Kvatch, City-Swimmer was stealing food to get by and living her own life. That’s what Oblivion feels like: a collection of independent but intertwined lives – a society – that the player joins.
Tony: The makers of Oblivion know that there are no shortcuts to creating a world. You can create deep, shaggable characters, you can write enough lore to fill a lore-shed, but to create a world you have to get out there and build it. Towns. Dungeons. Secret passages and secret societies. The physics of alchemy. The pathology of vampirism. The social calendars of the nobility and the unexceptional contents of the second drawer of a wardrobe in room no one will ever visit. Oblivion isn’t a game: it’s somewhere you live.
them for, obviously a lot of games codex doesn't particularly care for ( 
), but they are classics and/or important milestones in their respective genres, but also a fuckload of titles that are just 
.
