CVG Interview February 13th, 2006

[Razorwing]

? Link
Of special interest in the comment in the preamble - for what it's worth is up to you to decide: "set for simultaneous release on PC and Xbox 360 on March 24"

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[blockquote]Bethesda's Pete Hines proves the developer's far from oblivious when it comes to shaping its forthcoming RPG follow-up.

With its enormous, detailed world and go-anywhere, see-anything philosophy, there's plenty of reasons why The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is getting a lot of people very excited indeed - and that's not even touching on the fact it sports one of the most stunning RPG graphics engines we've ever seen.

Bethesda's latest entry in the hugely-revered franchise is set for simultaneous release on PC and Xbox 360 on March 24 and, in anticipation, we leapt at the opportunity to chat with Pete Hines, the developer's VP of public relations and marketing, and here's what he had to say...[/blockquote]Morrowind was epic - where do you plan to go from there with Oblivion?

Pete Hines: There were definitely some things in Morrowind we liked and definitely some things we thought we could do better. For Oblivion, there were some things we wanted to try that haven't been done before - like photo-realistic forests - so that was one thing we wanted to accomplish visually. We have a big world to explore, so we want to push the graphics, then do things with the AI and implement a better combat system. The big goal for us is always 'go where you want, do what you want'.

The province in which Oblivion is set is massive too. Was it daunting populating it with so many people and so much lore?

Pete Hines: We look at it from several vantage points, and obviously, where it's set is going to play a big part in what goes in the world. We start with the big picture before we start asking about details, such as what's happening in the Thieves' Guild, what's going on with the Dark Brotherhood and what's the overriding story for them in the context of the world. Each of these interrelate to one other, and we have to look at how the main quest affects all of these people.

So how smart is the AI? Will they envy your sentience, or at least, pretend to be envious?

Pete Hines: We try not to go too overboard, and we've had to scale things back simply because we don't want things going on that the player doesn't understand. For instance, we don't let AI characters steal items from you - it sounds like something that would be cool and fun, having to lock your house and stuff, but the problem is that when you come back to your house and there are items missing, it doesn't feel like somebody's stolen them, more like the game's broken. We try to make sure that happenings in the game are understandable and are something that you can see and control.

You definitely seem to have a penchant for expansive environments - how big is Oblivion's Cyrodil then?

Pete Hines: If you place the Morrowind world into the Oblivion engine, you could literally see from one end of the island to the other. It feels like an amusement park because the scale doesn't fit and you can see so far. A lot of managing the size is just adjusting how far apart we spread stuff out, so that things like riding on horseback don't have you going from one side of the map to another in two minutes.

And seeing as this one isn't set on an island...

Pete Hines: We actually built a lot more of the world in the game space, so that when you get to the border of the game, you can still see off into the distance. We generated that terrain because even if you don't get to visit it, we don't want you to hit an invisible wall.

Oblivion's cities are far removed from the scattered villages of Morrowind. How did their design come about?

Pete Hines: It terms of art direction, a lot of it comes from our lead artist Matt Carofano - he drew the layouts of all these cities. We tell the artist what we want them to look like in general, and they come back to us with specific building designs. The imperial city for example: it's all white stone and you feel like you could be in Athens, then you visit a city in the north and it feels like you're in the woods, with log cabins.

Was it always planned to have such complex AI?

Pete Hines: Yes. Complex AI was one of our goals, and because scripting all of the NPCs we have would be prohibitive, we had to design a system much like The Sims where it's all goal-based - the AI has a goal and they have to work out how to go about achieving those goals. It's really cool to walk into a dungeon and find an adventurer going through the dungeon gathering stuff too. The first time you come across things like that, it's a smile-on-your-face moment.

And finally - how's Fallout 3 coming along?

Pete Hines: We've got a lot of folks working on that game now, and what I've seen of it so far is looking really good and has me very excited - I'm a big fan. We're approaching Fallout 3 as if we developed the first and second games - we're developing it just like we developed Oblivion. Fallout 3 is our baby, we want to stay true to what it is and we want to deliver something that all the fans think is worthwhile. We're trying to move the series forward, keeping it fresh and cool while staying true to its roots. When we're ready we'll let people know, and hopefully people will be excited about some of the ideas we have and some of the stuff we're up to.[/color]

[Razorwing]

Posted by Morten Skovgaard on ESF. A writer from a Danish game magazine elaborates on his impressions of playing Oblivion.

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Hello, all you Elder Scrolls fans. A friend just directed my attention to the recently closed topic about a new article in the Danish PC games magazine >pcplayer. Being the editor of the magazine as well as the author of the article, I got my share of good laughs over the general quality of internet debating when I read the thread(s) concerning my preview of the game and my apparent mental condition (which is fine and stable by the way, thank you very much).

Please allow me to clear up a few misunderstandings in connection with said article - and please feel free to ask me questions in this topic if anything is still unclear regarding what I (presumedly) wrote in my article. I won't have the article by hand until tomorrow, so you will have to do without direct translations for now.

First of all, I am not an Elder Scrolls n00b. I've been playing the games since Daggerfall, and I developed quite an obsession with Morrowind, despite the game's numerous flaws.

Second, I am an avid fan of role-playing games - obviously, I would not have taken on the task of previewing Oblivion to begin with if I did not like the genre at all.

Third, yes - I have been playing World of Warcraft for quite some time, and yes - there are a few comparisons in the article to Blizzard's game, some of them positive and some of them negative for Oblivion. It would make no sense to discuss the potential of a game anticipated as much as Oblivion without mentioning the most popular online RPG out there, really.
Fourth, my article was *not* a review, but a preview. That means that I am not writing any kind of 'final' judgment of the game whatsoever, but mainly a discussion of its strengths and weaknesses, as well as explanations about 'how it feels like to play the game' and so on. We had an approximately 4 hour long playing window, and obviously no serious media would base an RPG review on such short playing time. Fifth, we were playing preview code and not the final version of the game. One thing that I did not mention in the preview, for example, was that the PC version I played lacked all the shaders that make the game look *really* beautiful, so it 'merely' looked nice. But in the next room, people were playing the Xbox 360 version which looked absolutely stunning, so I chose to assume that the final PC version would look equally amazing.

I think that quite a few of my points from the game preview got lost in translation (as well as in subsequent interpretation and wild speculation) so let me try to clear the fog a bit.

To begin with, my impressions from Oblivion were basically very, very positive. The game is a mastodon, quite possibly the greatest offline RPG ever to grace the PC (we're talking Fallout class here), but I would not want to write an 8-page article with blind praise of the game since that would be uninteresting fanboyism which you could just find plenty of on the internet. Therefore, I basically spent a major amount of my playing time 'testing' the game in order to see if it actually lived up to the almost ridiculous amount of hype it has been getting (from my perspective, Oblivion is just as hyped as WoW was when that game was still in development).

That included my breaking into a house in one of the cities and looking around a bit. Pete Hines let us start playing without a long-winded presentation, but he was constantly available to take questions - and personally, I find that to be the very best strategy for game presentations. That meant that I was not aware of the new 'stolen items awareness' system in Oblivion when I decided to see if this game had the same loot flaw as Morrowind, where you could steal almost everything that was not bolted to the floor. As you have found out, Bethesda have remedied that weakness by making it much more difficult to carry around stolen goods, and I am quite sure that my article makes it clear in no uncertain terms that this is a very good design decision since it focuses the player more towards playing the game rather than just looting stuff. For detailed information about excatly how this 'loot awareness' mechanic works, you will have to ask the developers.

My poor catburglary skills resulted in the owner of the house discovering me 'admiring' a silver plate ('admiring' involving eager hands stuffing it into a bag, obviously - I was not arrested for merely looking at something). He then called in a city guard who confronted me with a jail sentence or a fight, and since I had originally set out to test the game's limitations I chose the dark side and killed the guard. And the owner of the house. And the entire guard squard, a few civilians and, yes, an innkeeper (the innkeeper died because I was fighting a guard right next to her, and my sword accidentially hit her - entirely my own mistake). So the decision to basically f*** up everything was entirely intended since I wanted to see how the game would 'reward' players not just going for the goody-little-twoshoes career, as well as which consequences would hit me.

Luckily, I soon found out that my questionable actions were met with considerable consequences - not least that my threat level in the game world more or less exceeded that of Oblivion and its demons. Also, I was contacted during a night's sleep by a shady person from a dark brotherhood of assassins who had "heard about my skills", and that lead to an entirely new series of quests and events. Awesome stuff, basically, and although I only played rampage-style for about two hours, my impression is that the game contains all the kind of freedom you would want - and expect from an offline game, and even moreso than your typical MMORPG (I used WoW as an example here). After this, I spent the rest of my playing time following a more conventional hero approach - which will also be what we do when we eventually get around to reviewing the game.

I was never very fond of combat in Morrowind; I do acknowledge that it was intended to be skill and reflex-based, but it was flawed in many ways - and the combat system was the primary object of my scepticism in connection with Oblivion (another reason why I chose to, ahem, test it quite thoroughly).

Basically, you fight by moving around with WSAD/the arrow buttons, left-clicking the mouse in order to attack and right-clicking in order to parry. Magical attacks are controlled via hotkeys - I never got around to using these much, since they seemed to work as intended and basically did not present any problems, interface-wise.

The combat system works as intended, and combos are possible (however, I never learned to use them properly, since I did not have a manual available). But the combos are not the point here - my major gripe about the combat system in Oblivion is the same as with Morrowind: I do not get the amount of control or variation I would want. Realizing that this might be entirely a matter of taste and preference, I made a comparison in my article to the 'locked' combat system in a game like WoW where I find combat to work a whole lot better - since this game is basically much more geared towards combat than Oblivion is (that said, WoW's combat system has got a whole set of other flaws and shortcomings). You are obviously entitled to disagree with me completely on this - but do bear in mind that sharing a subjective, experience-based opinion is fairly normal in game-related articles, and that this is not a review conclusion.

I played the game on normal difficulty, and I had no problems taking out single guards (perhaps because I had looted a lot of decent gear?); most of the time, it was just a matter of timing my blocks to their swings - or I could just repeatedly swing my huge sword at them and overpower them completely. With more opponents, things got ugly, however, and I eventually had to flee the city with 4-5 guards on my tail since it is very difficuly fighting more enemies simultaneously (at least for me - but by the sound of it, this forum has quite a lot of extremely skillful players who might be able to single-handedly take down entire armies [/sarcasm]). The guard AI was very aggressive, and they would basically just zerg you and bash you up unless you maneuvred around a bit and mucked up their pathfinding so they couldn't get past each other (computer AI is, after all, just computer AI).


Well. I sort of lost track of all the questions and comments in the other 11-page thread, but feel free to ask me additional questions in this one since I am of course very intent upon having my article understood correctly - that's the problem with not just writing in English (and while I do approve of the attempts to translate my words, it is probably best done by myself).

As someone else stated in the other thread, it is basically illegal to scan a magazine article and put it on the web, and you will harm both my magazine, Bethesda and their publisher 2K Games by doing it, so please don't. Instead, ask me for more impressions (if you care for them) or read the other previews that will eventually appear on the web or in various other magazines.

Bear in mind that I have no particular interest in promoting neither WoW nor Oblivion, nor do I have any interest in doing the opposite to any of those games. I might have a lot of WoW playing time behind me, but I could dish out an impressive amount of criticism of that game (and I believe I have done so in my magazine as well). I merely choose to keep playing it since I do not see any other games yielding the same entertainment value for me.

Ultimately, let me say that I normally refrain from posting on official game forums. I believe that most of the discussions taking place in these places are basically meaningless since they tend to stem primarily from speculations and enthusiasm alone (just take a look at the official WoW forums - they are a cesspit of neverending stupidity). I was not too impressed with the first thread about my Oblivion preview - which prompted this lengthy response, so I suppose it worked as intended - and I do hope that this explaining effort will be met with sober, intelligent and relevant feedback, and not just mindless flaming. Just like the majority of you guys, I would love to see Oblivion become a great success since the gaming world is severely lacking in the offline RPG department (not least because the guys working on this game are eventually going to work on Fallout 3, which is hopefully going to be even greater), and I do believe the game has got huge potential, even though I do not lavish praise on its name in every single sentence in my article.

Just my two cents.

Morten Skovgaard,
Editor-in-Chief, >pcplayer

[Harikari]

Well thank god hes honest. All this is more useful then someone saying "The sounds great, the combats great, the AIs great blah blah blah". We actually got information from this

[Razorwing]

Hardgamers.com interview with Pete Hines, published February 20th, 2006.

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HG: First of all, the gaming community got a lot of new information about Oblivion in the recent days, so I guess the release date is pretty near. Bethesda team works on this title since four years now, what?s the point that you prefer the most with the results so far?

Pete Hines: Our favorite part of the game changes on a daily basis. The graphics, for us, just never get old. There?s always some new part of the world you?ve never seen, even if you?ve been playing the game for years. Vistas that make you stop and star in wonder for a few minutes. But at any time you?re always finding and seeing new things in how an NPC acts, or how a quest works, or something you?ve never seen that makes you smile and shake your head in amazement. There?s so much to see and do, it never gets old.


HG: Is there something in Oblivion that you haven?t the time to develop but are still looking for later (on official add-ons or mods)?

Pete Hines: Well, you always have to draw the line somewhere in terms of what's in and what's not. As far as add-ons or downloadable content, we'll have to wait and see.


HG: There?s a lot of controversy about the soft shadows everywhere on the Oblivion fan boards. Can the PC gamers expect a possibility to enable soft shadow as an option? What is the final point on this matter?

Pete Hines: Simply put, we changed the way we do shadows so that the game was actually playable, regardless of platform. The game looks the way it looks in all the screens we've released over the last year or more. It looks the way everyone has seen it who has played the game at any of our press events. It's more a reaction to what might have been than it is a reaction to what actually was.


HG: Many gamers would like to have more information about the Arena? Will the Arena work like a faction, like you?ll be able to gain rank? Is it true that you?ll also be able to bet on combats?

Pete Hines: It's like a faction in that it does have ranks you can achieve, and you can eventually become Arena Champion. But it's all done through fighting in the Arena, there are no Arena quests to complete. Just win. Yes, you can go and bet on fights as well if you don't want to fight, or you want to take a break from fighting.


HG: Morrowind got pretty strong sales on Xbox, do you expect that the Xbox 360 will be equivalent, even if the console is still pretty young on the market?

Pete Hines: I think what we saw with Morrowind, and are still seeing, is that it wasn't a game that was done selling after 6 months. To this day, it still sells well and I would expect Oblivon is going to be very popular when it comes out....based on the pre-order numbers we're seeing, but I also expect that it will be around and continue selling for a long time.


HG: I remember that we spoke about the French version of the game for Quebec at the last X05. What do Bethesda / Take Two plan for the release? Do you think that you?ll be able to ship the game in Quebec province in French AND English version?

Pete Hines: The game will be available throughout Canada in English only with French and English paperparts. Shipping the game in both languages wasn?t possible.


HG: A lot of gamers, including me, prefer the kind of sandbox RPG, like Morrowind. Can we expect the same type of game, even if Oblivion seems to be a more much linear game than Morrowind?

Pete Hines: Oblivion is every bit as open-ended as Morrowind. Don't confuse being linear and providing information on where to go. They are very different things. We tried to do a better job in presenting information to the player on their different quests so they understood what to do next for that quest, but you are still just as free to go and do what you want as you were in Morrowind or our other Elder Scrolls games. That's what our series is all about, and we'll never stray from that.


HG: Will the Xbox 360 gamers be able to configure the controls?

Pete Hines: Yes, you can remap all of the controls if you like, including switching the sticks for our left-handed friends.


HG: I guess you played the game a lot since the beginning, but when you?ll be on your couch with the final version of Oblivion, what kind of character that you?ll be?

Pete Hines: I tend to play a sort of Ranger character, I always have, going back to my days with the AD&D "Gold Box" games. So I usually do marksman, blade, alchemy, light armor, security, stealth, and whatever school of magic suits my fancy at the time. Usually Destruction.


HG: The system requirements are a bit heavy for some gamers; can we expect a nice running game even with the minimum required? Otherwise, will there be a lot of options to change to be able to get some nice decent framerate? Briefly, what can we expect with the minimum configuration?

Pete Hines: There are a lot of options you can use to adjust your level of performance. The ones that will matter most will be on the GPU and will be things like draw distance. So, you won't be able to see out as far, or there may be other effects you have to turn off or adjust down so you get a good framerate. It'll be up to the user.


HG: A final word for our readers that eagerly wait for Oblivion launch?

Pete Hines: The wait is almost over. Thanks for your patience.

[Quentin Fortune]

Pete Hines: It's like a faction in that it does have ranks you can achieve, and you can eventually become Arena Champion. But it's all done through fighting in the Arena, there are no Arena quests to complete. Just win. Yes, you can go and bet on fights as well if you don't want to fight, or you want to take a break from fighting.

Great news for Silgrad's secret Fight club ... rule #1 ...

Greetings

Quentin

[Razorwing]

Wow, three previews and one interview, all posted on February 25th!

• Voodoo Extreme (preview)
  
• Gamers With Jobs (preview)
  
• GameSpot (preview)
  
• eToychest (interview)

The "Gamers With Jobs" preview is quite critisizing but also informative - and as with the Voodoo Extreme preview it comes with new screenshots!

[blockquote]Those of us invited by Bethesda Software to give their new crown jewel a spin were limited to about four hours of playtime total, and only allowed to progress roughly an hour and a half?s worth of solid gaming time into the main story, so, this is, by far, not the be-all-end all word on the title, positive or negative.

The game begins with your character imprisoned, in a tutorial level that reminded me greatly of Baldur?s Gate II. You do some dungeon-crawling, the beginning of the plot is revealed, and you begin to personalize your character, both in appearance and in skills. There is a broad selection of races to choose from, each with their own advantages and disadvantages that may benefit you based on which classes and skills you develop later in the game.

I wasn?t thrilled by the character creation system. Given the myriad of options most sports games offer to their players today, I was a bit disappointed that Oblivion (and most RPGs for that matter) have not followed suit. It never really made me feel like I was really customizing my character, more that I was just tweaking a preset base.

Where one really is able to make a character theirs is in the ?RPG? portion of the experience. The player is presented with a myriad of classes, from Assassin to Wizardslayer. My biggest disappointment with the demo was that I did not get to spend as much time as I wanted to exploring the classes, their advantages, disadvantages and how they develop over time. That said, the number of skills presented, and the manner with which they developed (want to improve your skill with bladed weapons? Grab a sword and get hacking) is very intuitive and easy to handle.

I began the game with a melee-oriented character, so I didn?t delve very far into the abilities and spells that would be conferred on a wizard, but magic is a vital part of the game, even for the more melee-oriented. Scrolls and potions abound, meaning that even the burliest warrior may be able to turn the tide of a battle by using a scroll at the right time.

When the tutorial level has ended and you?ve got a character you can stand, you enter into the world of Oblivion, and it is, truly, a world. If Oblivion can claim anything, it?s that it does a spectacular job of setting the scene. The art direction is highly reminiscent of Isengard and the Lord of the Rings trilogy at times, but Bethesda have done a fantastic job of giving the world a sense of scope, filling it with beautiful, vast landscapes, mountains that rise high into the clouds, and forests more lavishly detailed than I?ve seen in any previous game. Being able to walk off the beaten path, through the brush and encounter what looks to be an ages-old shrine that has fallen into disrepair, to stand on the stones, overlooking the countryside below, is an experience few other games can match.

Moreover, even with all this size and scope surrounding you, it will be very difficult for the player to get lost. The game provides a compass at the bottom of your HUD which keeps you oriented, along with a large, unmistakable red arrow on the compass that will keep you pointed towards your next major objective.

The cities themselves are given the same kind of loving treatment, so that every city really looks like it was built by hand, with some buildings beginning to show the signs of wear and decay, and others standing proud against the sky. I?ve never seen the thatched roof of a farm look quite so appealing, or looked up at the king?s palace and really felt like it had a royal majesty to it.

The landscapes really are a graphical achievement, one that will certainly help players immerse themselves in the world. All of this would be absolutely perfect, if not for one small flaw.

Load times.

Sadly, the beast that has plagued gaming for so long still roams the countryside in Oblivion. More frequently than I?d like, when running through the lavishly detailed countryside, the game will halt for a second or two, indicating that it is loading more of the area before picking up again. It?s not a game-breaking problem, and for me, it was not much more than a minor annoyance. However, if you go running through the countryside for five minutes, you will see at least five ?Loading Area? prompts pop up.

Where the problem is most pronounced however, is inside of cities. Upon entering a city, and any building within a city, you?ll have to wait while the game loads the area. It?s not an agonizingly long time to wait, but the load times are comparable (roughly) to those of GTA: San Andreas for the PS2, which is a bit disappointing.

Thankfully, when you enter these cities, you?ll find that they?re as alive as those in any other game. This is where the vaunted ?Radiant AI? Bethesda has been hyping up comes into play. It manages to give every citizen their own desires, likes and dislikes. You can learn about new side-quests simply by overhearing a conversation on the street. It?s not a complete simulation of human life, but it does its best to place you into a world, and the experience leaves the player wondering how much longer it will be before games can replicate the hustle and bustle of walking through Istanbul?s Grand Bazaar.

Those conversations that happen on the street are, thankfully, entirely plausible, because the writing, and especially the voice acting for Oblivion are top-notch. The people do sound believable, the dialog isn?t too over-the-top (it is a bit, given that it?s a fantasy game about saving the world) and there are various accents strewn from region to region.

Conversations with NPCs aren?t anything that gamers haven?t seen before. You still select from a pre-made list of statements and responses, and the NPCs react based on what you?ve chosen. You can do some light gossiping and ask about the local rumors, but you?ll never get into a meandering conversation with the armorer about superior smelting techniques.

People do react to you, both positively and negatively. While I didn?t have enough time to see the full extent of the AI in action, I was a bit befuddled by the new persuasion system. A person?s opinion of you can be improved through a minigame that I found mildly confusing. You are given four options of statements (boasting, joking, admiration and coercing) and must select the proper one from a dial in a set amount of time. All the while this is happening, the person?s opinion of you drops. I personally found it to be a little haphazard.

The gameplay keeps itself moving along nicely, although the first-person perspective and style of gameplay it imparts did leave me a little disappointed. With a fatigue bar that depletes with every swing, jump or running step you take, you?re forced to occasionally stop your attacks and hide behind your shield, but that didn?t stop combat from occasionally feeling like a medieval version of Quake. Battle against a multitude of enemies occasionally felt a lot less like parrying and countering the thrusts and swings of your opponents, and more like circle-strafing your way to victory.

Combat is still entertaining, if somewhat shallow. The player is given two attacks, a normal swing, and a power-swing, which you charge up before hopefully delivering a solid shot to your opponent that will inflict extra damage, or stun them if they were blocking. Fighting against equally well armed enemies generally felt good, as I had to judge my attacks and wait for openings before launching into the offensive. Against ?lesser? opponents, like Goblins, things had an unfortunate tendency to degenerate into a whirling, button-mashing hack-fest.

In the time that I played, I only had one experience of combat against a magic-user, a Goblin mage, so I didn?t really get to see what it?s like to fight an experienced wizard. The goblin mage I did fight was obviously designed not to be very challenging and simply charging headlong at him and slicing him to pieces did the trick. I would hope a little more thought is required against other wizards in the game.

The weapons themselves and their various qualities will really affect the way you approach a battle, as some players will prefer the quick slashes of a short sword to the lumbering swings of a halberd or great sword. However, while being able to recover your used arrows from the corpses of your defeated enemies was a nice touch, the use of archery in the game at all seemed a little superfluous. Anytime an enemy detects you, they generally will come charging at you full-speed, leaving you able to fire a shot or two before whipping out your melee weapons and getting to the evisceration. I understand it?s a unrealistic to expect the Battle of Agincourt when it comes to archery, but I just didn?t see much use for archery in the game.

This brings me to the stealth system and the enemy detection AI. A special stealth icon has been introduced for Oblivion that turns different shades, darker or lighter as you go from undetected to seen. It?s nice, and it allows for some sneaking, but, unfortunately for those people out there who might want to play the part of a stealthy assassin in this game, detection seemed to be an all-or-nothing gambit. Less pleasantly, some of the enemies seem to be rather deaf, as I managed to get into a hand-to-hand battle with two goblins, with a goblin mage no more than 15 feet away, and the goblin mage never even noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Getting around the world is exceptionally easy, thanks to the fast-travel system in the game. Any place in the world that you?ve been to can be accessed instantly simply by going to the map and selecting that place. It cuts down a great deal on travel time, as you don?t have to go running across miles and miles of terrain to get from A to B, but I was a bit disappointed that this method of travel didn?t include an occasional random encounter with bandits or wolves to keep things interesting.
With a good law and order system governing the world, the ability to buy houses, join guilds, or grab a horse and just go riding. Oblivion impressed me with the sheer amount of what it presented. Impressed, but it did not really ?wow? me.

I left Bethesda?s event thinking that I could not see this game being badly received by fans of the Elder Scrolls series. It?s more of the same, done better, with more polish and thought going into its execution. The world is vast, expansive, and most importantly, feels to be alive. From what I?ve seen, Bethesda has created one of the highlights of the year thus far, a title I really can?t see letting anyone down. I wouldn?t go so far as to say that it struck me as the ?next big step? that gaming is going to take, but damned if it isn?t enjoyable, which, for my money, is all I care about.[/blockquote]

[Razorwing]

[title]Game|Life preview [Feb 25th, 2006][/title]
Link to the preview
An unusually critical preview that reportedly stirred up a lot of emotion.

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So yesterday, I played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the highly anticipated Xbox 360 RPG set to hit shelves this spring. Note: this will not be a gushing preview. There will be complaints.

I'm actually late to the party on this -- most other people had their impressions up at midnight, which was when the press embargo was lifted. (Clever, actually, to embargo the only hands-on coverage of an incredibly anticipated game until Friday evening, meaning that all this weekend, the major feature on practically every games website will be on their game.)

Also note that I put exactly zero hours into the game's Xbox predecessor, Morrowind. So these are impressions from a total newbie.

Here's what I liked. If I felt like it, I could have spent another hour or so just screwing around with Oblivion's character-creation system. By this I don't mean "rolling D20s for stats," although I could have done that too. I mean the physical editing, which lets you adjust every little proportion, color, and size of facial features.

Sadly it's a first-person game. So you very rarely actually see yourself. Since this is a standard D&D-inspired American RPG, you do a lot of slashing rats for the first hour. Lots of rats. Then the occasional goblin. Combat feels solid. Ever wondered why you can't pick up weapons from the bodies of dead soldiers in other RPGs? You can here. In fact, all sorts of weapons, armor, and other items (bones, rotting food, sticks, cups) litter the opening dungeon, and you very soon realize that just like in real life, you are not supposed to just run around picking up everything that's not nailed down. Eventually you can't move anymore and have to start throwing things away. But when you do, the stuff you drop stays there. Forever.

Developer Bethesda says the world of Oblivion is about sixteen square miles large, and I have no reason to doubt that from what I played. Imagine walking sixteen miles in real life. That's how long it would take you to walk from place to place in Oblivion.

They're pushing the realism angle hard, which is going to turn off as many players as it attracts, I think. Towns are full of guilds that will let you start to branch off from the main storyline and start taking all manner of side quests and alternate paths, should you choose. Bethesda didn't say how many quests were in the game, but again I was in no position to argue. They could have handed me a press release that said there were sixteen bojillion possible stories and from what I saw I'd have printed that verbatim.

[blockquote]Here's what sucked. 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."

But this ain't the next-gen experience I was promised. Weren't these kind of massive game-worlds supposed to be running in high-def grandeur, with smooth framerates and seamless transitions, by now?[/blockquote]

[Razorwing]

[title]ING Preview #1 [Feb 24th, 2006][/title]
Link to the preview
Information about Guild of Fighter's quests.
This is the first of two IGN previews, written by Charles Onyett.

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February 24, 2006 - Stumbling from the elevator of San Francisco's Clift Hotel, I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes, yet couldn't be more alert. After a short trek down a purple hallway lined with massive circular mirrors, IGNPC's Dan Adams and I were greeted by Bethesda's VP of Public Relations and Marketing, Peter Hines. He led us to a sizable suite where we could sit down at one of around 20 23-inch LCD TVs, all displaying the start screen for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Unlike many gaming events, there wasn't pounding techno music or other pretenses that suggested we weren't all present solely to play videogames. The room was dark and quiet with headphones at every station; the perfect way to experience a four-hour play session of Oblivion.

Dan sat down at one of about 10 PC stations, while I made my way over to the Xbox 360 table. After picking up the controller and hitting the start button to begin my journey, I only moved once over the next four hours to get a coffee (aka nectar of life). In case you didn't already know, Oblivion promises to be a titanic single-player only experience for those willing to put in the time. Just running through the main questline alone will take around 20 to 25 hours. Checking out all the superfluous content such as cavernous dungeons, mountainside cottages and completing the various Guild and NPC quests across Cyrodiil will take well over 200 hours, according to Bethesda.

Since the game is so huge, even a four-hour session only barely scratches the surface. It proved to be enough, however, to fully create a character, escape the first dungeon, explore part of the outside world, do some quests, steal a horse, join a Guild and level up. Once out of the initial dungeon, Dan and I tried to head in different directions and involve ourselves in different communities to present the most comprehensive play summaries possible. After reading through here, be sure to head over to Dan's preview for more detail as well as specifics on how the PC version played. Since this preview is not short, you may just want to load up the new interview and gameplay footage to accompany your reading.

The game starts out with a character creation screen. I chose to play as a male Imperial, a race that closely resembles humans. Oblivion gives you a surprising amount of options for adjusting facial appearance, providing sliders for manipulating cheek angle, forehead slope, eye size and separation as well as hair style and color. By the time I was done, my character looked suspiciously like Alan Rickman's Snape from Harry Potter.

The game started me in a dungeon you've all probably seen by now, with its hanging chains and insult-spewing prisoner across the hall. The emperor Uriel Septim wanted to escape the castle through a hidden alcove in my cell. On his way by, he recognized me as someone with a higher purpose and allowed me to follow him into a network of stone tunnels and grimy warrens called the Imperial Sewers. This area serves as a training ground, as I faced off against easy foes like rats, weakling goblins and slow moving zombies. On my way through I picked up a bow and arrow, mortar and pestle, a two-handed warhammer, upgraded leather armor, a few shields and a ton of rat meat.

The game also gave me a brief tutorial of stealth mode, which is activated by clicking down on L3 (left joystick) and puts up an eye icon in the center of your screen. As long as the icon remained translucent, I was hidden. There's a cavern area in the Imperial Sewers where a few goblins mull around campfires. I snuck up behind one while stealthed, readied my bow and arrow and launched a sharp projectile at the back of his head. Upon impact, a message popped up at the top of the screen indicating I'd just done double damage with the sneak attack. The goblin tried to charge me afterwards, but I was able to kill him by quick-switching to my two-handed warhammer and crushing his nose.

[1ST]t[/1ST]he quick-switch weapon and spell feature is extremely useful for eliminating baddies in Oblivion. When I accessed my menu to equip weapons, armor, items and spells, I was able to press Y over a highlighted item to bring up an eight-slot radial menu. The slots correspond to the eight directions on the D-Pad. Pressing a direction on the D-Pad equips that item to the corresponding slot. This way, I was able to input my most frequently used spells and weapon sets for quick access while fighting.

Since weapon swings and spell casts are initiated with different buttons, Right Trigger (RT) and Right Bumper (RB), respectively, this allowed for highly effective combat techniques. For instance, I could hit RT to swing the warhammer, hit RB right after to launch a fireball, switch over to my iron longsword and shield combo for added defense and faster attack speed, switch to a healing spell to regain health, then back to the hammer for a powerful finishing blow. If I'd bothered, I could have also mapped healing potions and spell scrolls for added help in battle.

Weapon swings come in two varieties, weak and strong. Tap RT for a quick, weak attack. Hold RT for a stronger but more drawn out attack. Holding RT also charged my character forward a few steps, so it's ideal for kicking off a fight. While swinging my weapon I had to take into account my fatigue level, which ticked away with every swing, and regenerated when standing still or walking slowly. The difference between cutting through the air with a one-handed longsword versus the warhammer was extremely noticeable, with the warhammer taking a painful amount of time to wind up. When not swinging your weapon, I had to actually tap Left Trigger (LT) to put up my shield or weapon to block. It didn't happen automatically.

Moving on from the downed goblin, I set my sights on a magic caster standing by a larger fire in the cavern. Before doing anything, I opened my inventory and poisoned my sword with a potion I was carrying. I snuck an arrow into the back of the caster's head only to realize that a goblin archer had been standing next to him the whole time. The ensuing battle was frantic, especially since the caster seemed to be having a great time launching lightning bolts at me.

Switching to my shield and longsword, I pursued the archer first. I took a few arrows, but managed to cut him down after he fled from my charge. Circling around to the caster, I closed the distance between us while launching fireballs to lessen his health. Coincidentally, enemy health can be seen during combat as an arc curved around the targeting reticule at the center of the screen. As my fireballs landed, his arc shortened enough until I was able to render his ugly face dead with a few swings.

Plundering the corpses for loot turned up a number of valuables including the caster's staff, called a goblin shaman staff. It was a magic item, denoted by a blue circle next to its inventory icon, and still had some charge left. In fact, it had a charge of 78 out of 150, with eight uses left. I'd also picked up something called a soul gem which could be used to recharge magic items. Using the gem brought up a menu of all my magic items. Having only one, the staff was the sole item listed. The gem didn't recharge the staff all the way, but did allow me to get a few more uses out of it. Eventually, more powerful stones can be found that recharge your items all the way, even a few that recharge every magic item in your inventory. Repair hammers, which I found a few of, work in much the same way, allowing you to mend weapons and armor that have been beaten up in combat.

[1st]W[/1st]hen equipped, the staff appeared as a long wooden stick with a goblin's bloody head on the end of it. While checking out my character model holding the staff on the menu screen, I happened to notice that a few of the archer's arrows were still sticking out of me. These went away after a time, but it was interesting to note that when I got hit by arrows, some of them were actually added to my inventory. Not all of them, however, since, according to Bethesda, some are assumed to be broken. Still, for a character with a heavy emphasis on archery, that's a useful yet counterintuitive feature if you ever run out of arrows in a tough spot.

Though the battle was over, one more problem cropped up as I went to move further into the sewers: I was encumbered. Basically, this means I'm carrying too much equipment to move. The only solution is to toss the most useless, heaviest items in my inventory. Trust me, throughout the course of Oblivion you're going to be picking up a lot of junk. For instance, I tossed away a human ribcage, a skull, a shield and some armor that were duplicates of what I was already using so I could move again. I also had a multitude of potions and alchemy reagents like flowers and plants, which, if I wanted to, could mix together to form more powerful items.

Soon after I met up with Uriel again, who had taken another path through the catacombs. He kept getting attacked by would-be assassins, and he instructed me to follow him and his guard as they attempted to flee the city. I eventually wound up in a stone walled room with Uriel as his guards battled enemies outside. He gave me his Amulet of Kings and instructed me to pass it along to Jauffre, who could be found at Weynon Priory outside the city of Chorrol. Apparently it was Jauffre who would know more about the location of the emperor's son; the one destined to sit on the throne. It was at this point I was able to pick a birth sign. Though there were many options, I chose the Warrior, which gave me 10 bonus points to my strength and endurance statistics.

Eventually the guards came back in, and I was then asked to pick my class. There were even more choices here, ranging from Warrior and Bard to Witch Hunter and Battlemage. I was also able to completely custom build my own class. When I chose that option, the game asked three questions. First, I had to choose between concentrating on combat, magic or stealth. Second, I could pick two primary attributes, either speed, personality, luck, willpower, agility, endurance, intelligence or strength, which would give me another bonus. Next, I had to pick seven major skills, be it destruction magic, heavy armor, blades or numerous others which would give me even more bonuses. Lastly, I got to enter a custom name for my class, for which I put Groindestroyer. It wasn't a very good name. In the end, I just went with the Barbarian class for simplicity's sake. A Barbarian, as you might expect, is focused on combat. My favored attributes were strength and speed, and my major skills were armorer, athletics, blade, block, blunt, hand to hand and light armor. All in all, it just means I can totally destroy stuff.

With my character totally customized and my first quest handed to me, I hacked through the remaining rats and zombies in the murky sewers. As I approached the exit grate to the outside world, the game prompted me with a list of all the decisions I'd made so far. I agreed with them, so I continued on. However, you're able to change any of your decisions regarding character customization up to this point if you wish.

[1st]F[/1st]inally free of the darkness, I found myself on a grassy slope looking out over a rippling body of water flanked by misty mountains. For escaping the sewers, I earned my first Oblivion Achievement, of which there are many. The draw distance was truly impressive. However, the extremely low resolution textures that blanketed the far-off mountains caused me to wince. It can be understood that for the sake of framerate, high resolution textures can't be loaded everywhere. Still, the far off tracts of land and hill didn't look very good. That being said, the textures surrounding my character, the various sizes of trees closer to the water and the small bushes and vegetation around me were great. The sky, too, was packed with detail. I'd apparently emerged right before dusk, as stars were starting to come out all over the orange-blue sky and a huge, red moon loomed on the horizon behind banks of wispy cloud.

It was at this point I started playing around with Oblivion's third-person perspective. Clicking down on the right stick (R3) pulls the camera back behind your character letting you see all the armor and weapons you've equipped. Unfortunately, the controls felt slippery while in this mode and overly sensitive, causing my character to often head in directions I hadn't intended. Hopefully this is an issue that gets worked out before the title releases.

Just over the river were a few bandits who attacked me on sight. After forcefully plowing my sword into them, I managed to net a two-handed claymore from their camp. It was at this point I remembered my time with the game was limited, so I brought up my map, found Weynon Priory and fast-traveled there. The fast-traveling system is an extremely welcome convenience after the ridiculous amount of plodding around characters had to do in Morrowind. Some locations in Oblivion, mostly major towns, are immediately accessible by fast-travel. Other, more remote locations, like cottages or farms, required that I actually walk up to them in the game world before a fast-traveling option would be available.

Within seconds, I was standing before the Priory, a stately stone building, and found Jauffre not far inside. After handing over the Amulet, he told me I needed to go out to Kvetch in search of Martin, the emperor's son. A mere matter of seconds later, I'd fast-traveled over to Kvetch. Of course, finding Martin wasn't as easy as it seemed. My arrival in town followed the appearance of an Oblivion Gate, and Martin was trapped near it. Making my way through the makeshift camp the town's survivors had built, I made my way up a hill towards the actual walled city of Kvetch.

As I climbed, the sky grew dark, thunder rumbled above and eventually a light rain began to fall. I reached the summit to find a massive fiery gate planted in front of Kvetch's main entrance. A nearby guard informed me how the gate had suddenly appeared and Daedra, demons from the Oblivion dimension, had poured out and ravaged the town. Looking at the ruined stone walls and fires behind the gate, it was clear the Daedra weren't the kindest of creatures. The gate itself was a graphical treat, with torrents of fire swirling between two massive stone columns. Emanating from the angry portal were waves of heat distortion as well as more Daedra. Crap! The guards and I managed to take down the few that spilled out, and afterwards I offered my help in defending Kvetch. Doing this involved heading into the Oblivion portal and finding a way to shut it.

[1st]H[/1st]owever, I decided to locate Martin first. Finding myself in a ruined courtyard before a sprawling Gothic cathedral, I was jumped by four more Daedra that were damn difficult to defeat. I managed to do it, though, thanks to my claymore and healing spell combo. The church itself, called the Chapel of Akatosh, featured some great graphical effects, particularly the faint glow behind the massive stained glass windows and the architecture of the vaulted ceilings and stone buttresses. I found Martin inside as well.

My task was to bring him back to Jauffre in order to begin work on thwarting Dagon, the Prince of Destruction. However, Martin didn't want to leave the people he'd rescued and brought to the cathedral. At least, not until the Oblivion Gate was closed. Unfortunately, heading into the portal was forbidden by Bethesda, so my experience with Oblivion's main questline ended here.

That doesn't mean the overall experience ended. After Kvetch, I fast traveled west to a town called Anvil. Just outside the town was a stable, and in the stable were a few white horses. Though there are several types available in Oblivion, horses are generally very expensive. This particular white horse cost 4,000 gold, which I definitely didn't have. Instead of paying, I just stole it.

After riding it around for a while, I can definitely say horses give you a significant speed boost and are much more fun to use than your feet. They are susceptible to fall damage and enemy weapons, however. Should they die, you have to buy a new one. Also, if you actually own one, they will go along with you when you fast travel. If they're stolen, they'll simply walk back to the stable when you get off.

I dismounted and was greeted with a dialogue screen suggesting I take a nap. After a solid eight hours of sleep, I discovered I'd leveled up. Leveling in Oblivion isn't something based on experience points, but rather on skill improvement through use. The more you jump and run, the more your acrobatic and athletic skills increase. The more you swing swords, the better your blades, the more you sneak, the more stealthy you become. Once a certain amount of skills are increased by a specific number of points, you level up. Leveling enables you to increase some of your attributes, making you more powerful, able to carry more, able to cast more spells, or myriad other improvements depending on where you allocate your points. I was able to choose three attributes: speed (+4), endurance (+2) and strength (+2). The numbers in parentheses represent bonuses based on my previous character customization decisions.

I then headed into Anvil, a city of decent size with stone buildings that seemed to mix stark Grecian columnar designs with more ornate bits of architecture. I found the Fighters Guild not too far inside the walls, and signed up immediately. Some guy named Azzan declared me an Associate, and I took on my first quest assignment. It seemed simple enough: find Arvena Thelas in Anvil and take care of her rat problem. Pretty standard rat kill quest, I thought.

Back on Anvil's cobblestone streets, I checked the compass in the bottom center of my screen to figure out what direction Arvena's house was. In Oblivion, the location of whatever quest you've selected as active in the journal is marked on your map. It's also marked on your compass, and even color coded. A red arrow on your compass means the objective is indoors. In order to reach them, you'll need to first enter a building. If it's green, however, you'll know the target is outside. This should prove immensely helpful in larger cities and crowded forests.

[1st]A[/1st]rvena's house wasn't far from the Guild. I found her upstairs, crying about her rats. Specifically, she was crying about how her beloved rats were being mauled by some creature in the basement. In the basement, I found Arvena's rats were being carved up by a gigantic mountain lion, who I promptly dispatched with my still-useful claymore. Arvena then tasked me with eliminating the source of the lions. I had to track down a hunter named Pinarus Inventius, who led me a little way outside the city. There, we battled against a pack of mountain lions, and were decidedly victorious. But the questline wasn't over.

Upon returning to Arvena's house to tell her the threat was eliminated, I found yet another mountain lion in her basement. After slaughtering it, Arvena told me she'd seen a neighbor, Quill-Weave, snooping around her house at night. I headed back to the streets and found the intrepid lurker. I tailed her until dark, and in the process witnessed Quill-Weave engage in several random NPC conversations, evidence of Oblivion's Radiant AI system at work. In the course of a couple hours of Oblivion game time (a few minutes in the real world), she managed to hit on a town guard and I overheard another conversation trashing Arvena for having rats in her basement. Eventually Quill-Weave snuck behind Arvena's house, placing a piece of meat near an entrance to the basement.

When I approached her, Quill-Weave explained she had no intention of luring mountain lions in, but rather thought the meat would lure the rats out. However, she offered me a bonus to my acrobatics skill if I kept it quiet. When I returned to tell Arvena I'd solved the problem, I neglected to mention Quill-Weave and got a cash reward anyway. Upon returning to the Fighters Guild, I was promoted to Apprentice, and also told by Bethesda I needed to leave.

To try and sum up this mess of a hands-on, the Xbox 360 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is looking very good. Its framerate did tend to slow down a little when characters crowded onscreen, but that didn't make it any less playable. The game enters a loading screen when moving through doors, and in open areas will take brief pauses to load new textures when traveling across the countryside. Across all instances of loading, they were consistently swift. The only disappointing features I saw were the wonky third-person controls and ultra low-resolution textures that blanketed distant objects. Other than that, shadows, character detail, weapon models, water effects and animations all looked excellent. The PC version looked slightly sharper and ran at a better clip than the Xbox 360, but Dan and I agreed both looked strikingly similar. Clearly, there's a ridiculous amount of options available to players, way too many to fully describe in this preview. While I was only able to get four hours of play, I definitely got hooked. Writing this preview made the urge to play even worse.

Contrary to rumors flying around, Bethesda has not made an announcement about the official release date. However, they are promising the date soon, as Peter Hines states in our new Oblivion interview you'll find in the media section below. Be sure to check out the new gameplay footage and screens as well. Of course, we'll have the release date as soon as it's available.

[title]ING Preview #2 [Feb 25th, 2006][/title]
Link to the preview
This is IGN's second preview, this time written by Dan Adams.
Sorry for the double-post, it wouldn't fit in the previous one.

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February 25, 2006 - It seems like I've been waiting to play a PC version of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for a long damn time. I've always been interested mind you, but the demo at E3 2005 put the desire into my belly big time. So was I happy when Bethesda dropped a note to say they'd be in town to let us play the game for 4-5 hours? Yes. Yes I was. The better news was that I would be able to play the PC version while my compatriot Charles "I'm a Nerd and Take Lots of Notes" Onyett over on the Xbox 360 site would get to play his own version. Thusly, we have two previews from different perspectives. You can see his preview right here should you desire it.

I guess the dumb thing about this is that the two versions of Oblivion are nearly identical. Aside from the controls and a very small difference in visual quality in favor of the PC (running on what was surely an awesome rig, mind you) the two versions the same. Yet we both had pretty different experiences playing. He was an underhanded thief fond of attacking hugely powerful members of the fighter guild while I was a humble orc interested in helping people, picking flowers, and on the total annihilation of the goblin race.

This was a great event for the simple fact that we were sat in front of a computer and told to go to town without someone looking over our shoulders. In fact, we were given only one rule for our session: Don't enter the Oblivion gate. Sure, it sounds like that might be a bummer, but considering I played the game for a good five hours straight and never lacked for things to do, I didn't really care.

Starting out my game took a while. Not because of anything tedious, but simply because the character creation is a lot of fun. Anyone that's played an Elder Scrolls game in the past will be familiar with the wide range of races available from the get-go so it's probably not too hard to understand that deciding who to be and what to look like on such a basic level can be hard.

For some reason I often end up playing human characters in RPGs so this time I decided to go burly and picked an orc. Orcs are ugly and brutish, but have some decent advantages to outweigh their lack of social niceties. Basically, I can smash a lot of things to bits and wear cool armor. I was pleased to find that playing as an orc didn't seem to make a huge difference to the way people reacted to me in the early game (I didn't run out of town chased by a gang with torches and pitchforks anyway) but there were certainly quite a few town folk were resistant to my conversation offerings. I actually found several orcs living in towns already so blending in wasn't much of a challenge.

Every race has the option to customize the face. This includes everything from facial deformation like the slant of the brow and lift of the cheeks to texture details like the color and complexion of the skin. It's an awesome tool that allows for terrific customization of character type. Those looking to create gigantic monsters may be a little disappointed as body type is unalterable through the character customization screen, but taking all things into consideration, this was a great way to start an adventure.

And that was it. Once the character had been created visually, it was off into the game. If you've been following past coverage of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you've probably seen a lot about the beginning levels of the game already, but I'm going to repeat a bit of it anyway for those that haven't.

The game kicks off in prison on the wrong side of the bars. Whether it was a false imprisonment or not is unclear. The important thing was that fate had conspired to place me in this particular dungeon... which just happened to be the entrance to the secret getaway route out of the castle.

Before long, two heavily armored guards busted into my cozy cell with the emperor in tow hoping to escape assassination through the secret passageway. Both of the emperor's sons had already been killed so the emperor was apparently the realm's last hope. Thankfully, the emperor let me live believing he'd seen me in a vision of some sort. He also allowed me to skidaddle right out of jail through the escape hatch. Of course, the guards wouldn't allow me to follow after a short while, but that's fine, it provided the opportunity for a bit of solo-adventuring which is really what the game is all about.

This prison escape serves as a great tutorial by providing instant action and several opportunities to try out melee, ranged, and magical combat along with attempting to pick a few locks (one of Oblivion's mini-games). At this point in the game, I didn't have much of an identity aside from a name and some scraps of clothes. But before long I had picked up weapons from dead goblins, treasures from crates and boxes, and a good understanding of the particulars of how to operate in the world.

After a bit, my path through the dungeons accidentally crossed with that of the emperor and his Blade guardsmen. After helping them dispatch a group of enemies, the emperor invited me into his cadre. During the conversation, the emperor even provided me with the next bit of my identity: my birth sign. Each possible sign grants different bonuses whether that be added strength, increased magical power, or resistance to some kinds of magic. Some even balance out particularly good traits with negatives like decreased resistance to fire attacks.

Though the guards were wary of letting me come along, one talked to me for a second, which provided for my last bit of identity: my class. The class structure in Oblivion is wide open. Not only are there a lot of pre-made classes to choose from but there's also an option to create a custom class. To create a custom class, it's a matter of picking to focus on combat, magic, or stealth, choosing two favored attributes (strength, wisdom, agility, etc...), and seven major skills which will all begin at much higher levels than other skills. The custom class is good when you just don't quite get the combo you're looking for. For instance, I really like the Battlemage, but I wanted a focus on combat instead of magic, so I simply went in and switched some things around to my liking. Once done, you can name your class for future use as I did with my Whackamol (minus the e thanks to word length restrictions) class.

Skills themselves are built up through use. Bury swords in enemy skulls and the blade skill will increase. Play the human torch and throw fireballs all over the place and destructive magic will increase. Run around the world and athletics will increase. Once enough skills have increased by 10 points, it's a matter of taking a nap at the inn to level up to get better stats.

Now, in all my talks with the emperor, the guy just wouldn't quit about how he knew he was about to die. Yes it seemed a bit fatalistic, but he was right. Before I had even come close to tasting my first breath of freedom, the guy gets bushwhacked and killed. Thankfully, our last talk provided him the opportunity to hand off a special amulet, the Amulet of Kings, into my care to deliver to Jauffre, the leader of the Blades in a place called Weynon Priory. Naturally I accepted being the kind-hearted orc that I was.

From there it was a matter of traversing the sewer areas underneath the castle and out into the wide world. Though many a goblin tried to kill me, I killed them first. Though many a rat tried to nibble off my toes, I nibbled on theirs innards instead. It was pretty much a cakewalk getting out of the sewers, but it sure was fun throwing fireballs and slinging my sword around.

Once out into the open air, I had a look around my new surroundings. Off across the water in front of me was a small ruin. Behind me were the tall walls surrounding the outer edge of the Imperial City. Everywhere else was hills and trees. After checking out the surroundings for a bit (level of detail is pretty heavy so stuff up close looked a lot better than surrounding hills), I looked at the map to check out my immediate surroundings as well as take a look at the location of Weynon Priory.

One of the best things about this map (and biggest improvements from Morrowind) is the quick travel feature. While you never have to use it to get places, those of us that are extremely impatient with traveling can simply open the map, find a known location (most major cities are already known at the beginning of the game), double click on that location, and travel there instantaneously. This makes some of the lesser missions that simply involve delivering a message (or something similar) much more enjoyable.

While pondering the feature, keep in mind that places of note will not appear on the map until they are discovered. For instance, when I passed on the fast travel option when heading to Weynon Priory so I could do a little exploring, I came upon a ruined keep. After a message popped onto my screen noting the discovery, it was added to my map as a selectable fast travel location. Not only is this great if I do receive a quest to go there, but I can also loot the hell out of the place, fast travel to town to sell off some stuff, and then fast travel back to continue the looting fun. Hooray for greed!

But as I mentioned, exploring nothing will reveal nothing, so I went a wanderin' for a bit. For the most part I stayed near the roads as I preferred not to get lost in such a short play session. Halfway up the road to the priory, I ran across that abandoned keep I was talking about. At first, it didn't seem as if much was there, but upon closer inspection, I found a door. Inside this door were fresh goblins to kill and plenty of loot. These types of dungeons can be found all over the landscapes in Oblivion. Some of them will have quests associated with them while others will simply be open for exploration.

Once back outside the dungeon, I headed up some stairs to check out the view from the top of the keep. Halfway up, some movement caught my eye back down the stairs. Closer investigation proved violent as a highwayman jumped out to rob me. The bastard actually though I would pay him! I said no, he attacked me with his gigantic two-handed axe, and I killed the hell out of him and his stupid thieving face. Just to teach his corpse a lesson, I robbed him and left him dead and naked on the ground. Bad kitty!

While a little bit miffed that this guy tried to bully me right from the start, the battle re-taught a valuable lesson learned in a million other video games. Blocking is good. Putting that shield up can not only prevent damage, but also stun an attacker for a moment, giving all of the opening needed to press an attack. That brings me to an observation that while combat still is hack and slash, it seems more solid than it did in Morrowind. I suppose the most important thing to note is that I was having a lot of fun fighting, which should be the goal. The combination of fireballs, blocking, and stabbing served me very well indeed.

Following that confrontation, I headed to the priory and met up with my contact there. He was understandably grieved to hear of the emperor's death, but was happy to see I had brought him the precious Amulet of Kings. Apparently the thing is incredibly important for keeping some ancient evil from ransacking the world. Jauffre then bade me bring the last surviving, if illegitimate, son of the emperor back from another city to wear the amulet and be crowned emperor. Now, the emperor's son Martin was off in Kvatch to the south, but seeing as I was right outside of another city named Chorrol, I wasn't in the mood to run off and help out so soon.

So I headed off to Chorrol to wander around the confines of the city, talk to a few folk, pick up some quests, check out the stores, and see if I could really notice the radiant AI. Sure enough, the town had citizens wandering the area, going about their business. When they ran into another NPC, a conversation began which gave clues to other happenings around the realm and even hints about where to find action and which people were important in the town.

My attempts at social overatures were met with mixed results. Some folks just sneered and walked off while others were perfectly civil. For those in between and uncomfortable talking about certain subjects I used a bit of persuasion. Anybody will take bribes in this game, but that has diminishing returns. So playing the persuasion mini-game works wonders. When successful, people grew to like me enough to start telling me secrets I might never have known otherwise.

I found my first two quests through simple conversation to people around Charrol. One was a man who people kept mistaking for someone in a different town and the other was an old farmer too scared to go out and help his son battle monsters that had taken over his farm. One was easy enough and constituted a quick travel over to a different town to find out the man had a twin while the other had me heading out to help kill goblins raiding a farm. The second one seemed easy enough until I realized one of the sons had died in the effort. Whoopsies. My reward was appropriately smaller and the old man was quite sad.

While talking to random people is fun, the easiest way to find quests is probably through the guilds. After joining the fighter's guild and taking on a quest, I headed out to deliver some weapons to a mine and then help the other fighters guild members there rid the mine of goblin troubles. This time, I was given a point on my map that I could walk to (or ride to in this case as I had already secured a horse) in order to reach the mine. Upon arrival, I delivered the goods and the other fighters went raging through the cavern. One, who cloaked himself at the beginning (a very cool effect) went raging a little too hard and got himself killed before I could save him. So much for the best reward again...

On the way out, I started noticing tons of mushrooms and other plants in the mine and remembered that many of plants found around the game world can be harvested to be used in alchemy. It's a simple process that requires a mortar and pestle (along with other optional equipment) and some ingredients. Considering the wealth of plants in the game world, it's easy to see this could be a huge form of income and/or very cheap method to collect powerful potions.

At this point in the day, my time was growing short. Aside from a bit more exploration, including the accidental discovery of the Dark Brotherhood's hideout (big glowy red doors with skulls on them make me walk the other way), it was just a matter of heading out to find the emperor's lost son Martin. Upon arrival in Kvatch, I was greeted by a man who told me that an Oblivion gate was sitting in the town where Martin was supposed to be staying. I sighed the big sigh of troubled times and climbed the windy path on my horse only to find the sky turning red and a big glowing gate sitting in front of the town entrance. The soldier outside wanted me to run on into the gate and see if I could somehow make it go away. I would have loved to oblige this ridiculous request but rules are rules so that part of the story will have to wait for another time.

So yeah. I had fun. In fact, Charles "Stream of Consciousness" Onyett and I have started to go through some slight withdrawals from being given five hours to become attached. Our only consolation is that it's not going to be too long before the game is released to stores. Consumer site estimates put the release date at March 20th right now (as does the Microsoft product page) but Bethesda has yet to announce it officially. Either way, the release is nigh.