The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has lit up the sales charts this year, and has received heaps of praise from the press. It is, quite frankly, the greatest thing since slice bread to hit your game console or PC.

But in five years, or even two years time, will it matter? Will the success of the open gameplay and 100 hours of freedom in the Elder Scrolls world influence other games?

Bethesda has been making games like this for years. Not just the Elder Scrolls series either. Pirates of the Caribbean originated as Sea Dogs II, a pirate adventure in the same vein of Morrowind, but it was snatched up by Disney as a movie tie-in, which meant a drop-dead date to coincide with the film’s release. Which, ironically, drop-dead is what the game did, though no fault of Bethesda’s, because of the limited window to sufficiently QA the large, open-ended world. And of course there’s the vaporware Fallout 3, which has made a pretty good poster at the last two E3s but not much else.

Arguably, Oblivion has sold past expectations, and is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, hit Bethesda has had. But glance over the games shown at this year’s E3, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find more than a couple titles from the same mold. Are companies frightened at the immense effort necessary to put together such a title? Is the water just that much better at Bethesda? It seems more developers are aiming at World of Warcraft’s magic, although there can only be one WoW before the expected bounty becomes fragmented by competition.

So in five years, what will the landscape look like? Will Oblivion clones graciously scatter the gaming landscape? Or will we just settle for Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls V amongst a dead sea of failed MMORPGs and iterative franchises? Which really asks a greater question, are we learning as an industry? Without innovation, I fear it is in for a cleansing.