game-worn

As Addicting as Oblivion
Finally got the expansion pack thanks to a buddy and I seem to spend all my off-time in the Shivering Isles. As addicting as the original game, but with more challenging creatures to beat and new objects to find/collect/use. I've just started, and the missions seem a little sparse, but then again, I have not scoped the entire isles. The missions do seem to take on a darker side and things are definitely more crazy than before! Big recommendation for your Fantasy RPG-nerd!

An occasionally annoying distraction from the main game
I got this expansion as part of the Game of the Year edition of Oblivion. I was highly skeptical of what I saw as basically a completely different reality world opposite of Cyrodill, and as such I put it off for maybe a year before deciding to enter with my new character.

Please note that I am an obsessive-compulsive person, with a sick need for organization, decisiveness, and something else I forgot.

As such, imagine how horribly I'd be set off upon discovering that you can apparently enter NOT two different worlds, but two different versions of the SAME world; Mania and Dementia. This set me off big-time because you can pretty much only enter it once, unless you want to fast-travel back to the gate just to re-enter. What makes it worse is that I see absolutely no difference between the two upon entering, making me wonder what the hell is the purpose of lying to us by making it seem like two separate worlds, when really the northern part is all Mania, and the southern part is all Dementia.


While it was a novel idea to have everyone be either arrogant or insane, but this idea's brilliance never left the paper it was written on as everyone, as in the base game, is STILL only voiced by the same three or four voice actors, all doing as spectacularly lazy a job as they did in the base game. So instead of hearing something that brings memories of Heath Ledger's Joker or Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance, you get a decidedly lazy-sounding voice actor reading gibbering nonsense off a script with only a slight hint of understanding that they are supposed to be playing a crazy person, and not just recording Line 4,056 out of 11,100.

That slight hint immediately gets vanquished if you have the Game of the Year edition, or the other expansion pack, and you ask them about Anvil, in which they suddenly go from insane to sane, to repeat to you the same pre-recorded line about hearing about the butcher of the Anvil priests and the prophet of doom---despite the realm of the Shivering Isles being like a completely different dimension from Cyrodill, where people supposedly never really venture out, and very few Cyrodill people venture in.


Then the Prince of the realm, despite the energy and enthusiasm of his voice actor, was very poorly written. He immediately starts at a level of "I'M CRAZY YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA~!" and never once comes down from that level of such upfront and bluntly beating-over-the-head "weirdness" that he never once comes off as crazy, but just as someone trying much too hard to seem crazy, and utterly failing to elicit more than just a "well, he's weird" reaction. Subtlty is completely ejected from this role, as clearly whoever wrote the character did absolutely no research on mental illnesses, and never saw movies like "The Shining" or "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest" or "12 Monkeys". They just went straight for shock value, and as many references to playing with the player's intestines as possible.

The world itself looks new and original and weird, but the Dementia part, once you get past the giant mushrooms and craggly trees, you realize it looks like a putrid dump. The city of Crucible can best be described as "rotting garbage crafted into shapes", as everything is a shade of gray and garbage-green as to be more at home in Fallout 3 (also by Bethesda) or a Russian warzone in Call of Duty 4. It's such an unpleasant appearance that it nearly drove me mad for a few minutes.

The Duchess of Dementia made me do a quest called "Conspiracy" in which I had to torture random denizens of Crucible to find evidence of a fake conspiracy because she's a paranoid idiot who becomes sane long enough to tell me I should visit Anvil for more information on the Prophet. I spent an entire in-game day hunting down people and torturing them numerous times just to get somethign other than "I don't know anything!" and I grew so utterly insane I began torturing people endlessly for no reason other than I began to hate all of them with their stiff, poorly-acted voices, and I became immensely angry upon discovering (with the help of an online walkthrough) that the very first person I had tortured (and apparently let off too early) was the only one who could advance the quest by giving me some information.

I lost it, broke into houses, stole stuff, beat people up on the streets, killed several guards, and eventually died and had to re-load to my last save.


On the other spectrum, Bliss is much more pleasant, and Mania has pretty fireflies that drop sprinkly lights from them as they fly, and not all the people are piss-poor caricatures of insanity.



On the whole, the expansion pack is little more than more of the same as you get in the main game's quests, with the only real "new" things being new enemies, new weapons/armor/items, and a new landscape. Everything else is pretty much exactly the same.


Worth 30 more hours for 30 dollars? No. Though definitely worth picking up free when included with the Game of the Year edition of Oblivion.

This is a great add-on to Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion is my favorite game, and The Shivering Isles add-on is a must have to add additional quests and content. I would highly recommend this add-on for game enthusiasts. Another great add-on for this game is Knights of the Nine.

A good expansion back
I loved oblivion besides everything bad about it so I had to get the expansion. The world created is beautiful like always. This expansion will add a pleasurable experience that you will remember.

Sheogorath is hilarious!
The Shivering Isles creates a new world for you to explore, with new monsters, new ingredients to try out at alchemy, a schizophrenic world to explore, and as part of the storyline you'll get a cool two-in-one sword, the Dawnfang/Duskfang. Plus the character of Sheogorath, the Prince of the realm, is what was missing in Oblivion proper: a fun and engaging NPC with bucketloads of personality! The only NPC worth mentioning in Oblivion was the emperor (Patrick Stewart); all the other NPCs were flat and boring. Bethesda apparently read my mind and crafted a delightfully deranged character with the accent to match.

And the whole ironic storyline, in which you fight to defend madness against the encroaching forces of order, is wonderfully and hilariously sarcastic. I have to admit, after playing Oblivion for 200 plus hours, the game was starting to feel stagnant, and installing this expansion pack was the perfect swift kick to my rear end that I needed.

Bethesda has also done a great job designing the look of the environment itself; when you're in the Mania half of the world, the environment is full of splashy, vibrant colors, like you're high or something (is it a coincidence there are so many mushrooms around?). And in Dementia, the world is appropriately bleak, with nothing but browns and grays and blacks, with dead, twisted trees and swamps. It reminded me of being in an asylum or something (well, an outdoor asylum).

The Shivering Isles is a great expansion to a great game. Definitely worth your money.