You don't see the problems for the first hour, because you're exploring a massive underground pathway that takes you through dank sewers and pitch-black caverns. You can't see more than a few feet in front of your face, sometimes, so everything looks decent -- not incredibly impressive, but fair enough.

When I got outside, things got hairy. I could see across to the other side of a lake, but it was completely undetailed. Just big, formless blobs of blues and greens. I turned around and looked at my more immediate surroundings and realized that the draw distance was awful. As you walk around, the ground teems with individually rendered blades of grass, bushes, mushrooms, all sorts of stuff. But only a small radius around your character is fully realized -- the rest of it is drawn in, quite visibly, as you move around.

This is the HD Era? Watching bushes and trees pop up out of thin air as I walk around? At one point I was heading towards what I thought was an empty forest clearing, when big-ass chunks of building started magically appearing. Come on. (Or maybe I was doing so well in the game that its denizens had started building shrines to my glory.)

Things get even worse when I jump on a horse. Now, I'm actually trotting at a steady clip, and Oblivion starts not just to have draw-in issues but framerate problems as well. It's chugging. It can't keep up with my speed, and quite frankly the horse isn't even going that fast. At some points, I keep seeing the "Loading Area..." message pop up every couple of seconds, which brings with it another framerate stutter. It's herky-jerky-all-over-the-place as I climb up the hill to the gate of Oblivion. My reation to the graphics has, over this sequence, gone from "unimpressed" to "nonplussed" to "annoyed."