Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Previews

The weekend has brought us another pair of hands-on previews for Bethesda’s fourth Elder Scrolls installment. The first is at RPGFan:

This brings me to my next topic: controls. As stated before, Oblivion controls very well on the 360. It was pretty evident to me that the game was built from the ground up with the 360 controller in mind; the way weapons and spells can be mapped to the d-pad is way more convenient than mapping them to 1-9 on a keyboard. Similarly, the face button assignments really encompass anything you want to access, menu-wise, with the triggers letting you switch between parts of the menus. The only issue I has was the lack of an option to invert the x-axis; for some reason I just work better that way. Still, it’s a minor issue easily overcome. Hopefully PC players won’t suffer from the emphasis on creating the game for the 360 controller setup.

And the second is at Xbox 360 Advanced:

Eventually I ended up at this evil red looking gate type thing which according to one nice fellow at Bethesda, I wasn’t supposed to be there. So, basically my four hours were up and I was left with a cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. After exchanging business cards with the nice lady up front, I grabbed a few snacks and took some bottles of water and my buddy Dave Rudden and I left the room wondering what could have happened if we were just allowed inside that glowing red gate. Oh well, come March 20, if this date doesn’t change, I will finally get to see what lies beyond what was denied to me during the press showing.