The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Love in spite of first sight

For the occasion of the Bethesda Publisher Sale, we asked a couple of our teammates at GOG about their favorite games from this publisher, and why they loved those titles, or what made them special to them. Below, you can read the second entry (the first one is here), from our QA Tester, Ross.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion happened to be the first TES game I’ve ever played and completely fell in love with. It came out when I was in sixth grade, had a potato PC, and no internet. Unsurprisingly, my PC couldn’t handle the game and it ran extremely badly, but a good friend of mine came to the rescue and found some tips on the Web on how to lower the graphics even below the available settings.
After tweaking the configuration parameters we managed to make the game playable and the result was “stunning”: the game had no trees, grass, shadows, or other visual effects (such as fire) and all dungeons were bright as day, but it still managed to blow my mind. A fascinating story, a spectacular setting, numerous well-written side quests, and one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard in any game to this day – that clearly was love at first sight.
It goes without saying that I spent a tremendous amount of time in Oblivion and highly recommend everyone to do the same thing, especially if their rig is better than my good old potato PC from 2006. Oh, and make sure to hear of the High Elves.