We are now flying through a blue sky above a vast landscape. Tremulous strings, portentous brass and the steady crash of cymbals escalate menacingly, then break and are replaced by a delicate, celestial chorus. There is a cut to one such gate, which, under a red and stormy sky, opens to reveal a massive machine of war lumbering toward us, flanked by an army of monsters (Figure 1).
TES IV OBLIVION SERIES
His voiceover predicts his own death and the opening of a series of flaming gates to the hellish plains of Oblivion. The sequence opens with a shot of the Emperor of Tamriel - Oblivion’s medievalesque setting - in a darkened space, his face lit by flickering candlelight. The opening sequence for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Game Studios, 2006 hereafter Oblivion) establishes the importance of landscape in Bethesda’s epic role-playing game (RPG). Keywords: Oblivion, pastoral, landscape, sublime, picturesque
But as the landscape becomes more familiar to the player it tends to migrate from the sublime to the picturesque mode, a waning that may be read in relation to the game’s resolution of its narrative conflict. This lends the game’s moral framework an epic grandeur. The landscape is encountered in the sublime mode, understood here through Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, in that it emphasizes an incomprehensible largeness and expanse. The landscape, which is made up of the human realm of Tamriel and the demonic realm of Oblivion, reflects a Manichean moral framework that is at the game’s heart. The landscape in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is treated here as an expressive aspect of the game whose meaning transforms as it is explored. The Pastoral and the Sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion by Paul Martin