User blog:Aleksandur/A return to Cyrodiil after a stroll in Skyrim

I've always been a console gamer. The first video game system I was introduced to was a Sega Saturn back when I was some 5 or 6 years old, back in the days of MechWarrior 2 and the first Tomb Raider. Since then I moved on to the Dreamcast, the Xbox, the PlayStation 2, and finally, the Xbox 360. It was shortly after upgrading over to the 360 that I came across what became my greatest passion in videogaming: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Until then, I had been a casual gamer, when I discovered Oblivion, that's when I really started to sink in the hours. The fact that I was 12 or 13 years old when I first played it obviously had a major role in pulling me into the game world, since it was all so beautiful, exciting and engaging, even more so because I was a kid back then.

Since then the hours of countless fights, quests and exploration have long surpassed the 350 hours mark.

A few years later I started to get more familiar with PC gaming, and that's when I began to discover the modding comunity for Elder Scrolls games, and I feasted my eyes on all the mods my character in Oblivion never had the chance to try.

Then Skyrim came out, and I became truly worried about which system I was going to buy it to. The fact that my laptop fried to death, and consequently, my cousin gave me his laptop (he upgraded to a desktop), wich is capable of running Skyrim on low/medium with the help of some performance mods, sealed the deal.

It wasn't an easy choice; I lost a bit in graphics and FPS, but I gained so much more thanks to all the mods out there.

Then, a week ago, disaster struck. I came back from the beach and my laptop simply didn't turn on anymore. Heart broken (specially because it was my cousin's laptop), I switched back to my old laptop, who had since been fixed. As a result, I spent a week without playing Skyrim, and so I decided to revist the land that's so dear to me: Cyrodiil.

I booted up my 360 and came face to face with my character, which made me remember of Lucien Lachance's words when he reunited with Shadowmere: "... my dear and old friend." After an hour or so of strolling around Cyrodiil, revisiting all those places, I saved my game and turned off the 360.

I was shocked.

I couldn't believe the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim. After playing Skyrim, Oblivion just felt so... plain. It's hard to believe the two games are from the same generation; Bethesda truly made a huge leap from one game to the other. And this actually made me feel quite sad. Oblivion, the game I had spent the most time with in my life, had simply lost much of it's appeal, after having a taste of Skyrim.

And I couldn't help but think that if I had bought Oblivion for the PC and made use of all the mods out there, the shock wouldn't have been so big. And that took me to my next big decision: I'm going to fully "convert" to PC gaming.

I've been saving a bit and I've started to construct a list of all the components I'm going to use in my custom made gaming rig, and hopefully, in the near future, I'll have the conscience that I have Skyrim on the best platform available, and all the mods will keep me busy for a lot longer than the 350 hours I sank into Oblivion. And maybe who knows, I might even get Oblivion for PC on one of those Steam sales, and then I'll be able to revist Cyrodiil in all it's modded beauty.