The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Interview

Bethesda Softworks has made quite a name for themselves, primarily due to their vastly successful Elder Scrolls series. Beginning in 1993, the series has seen three installments, all of which have been hailed as some of the best role-playing games ever made.  Now, eleven years after Arena first hit store shelves, Bethesda is once again hard at work on a new Elder Scrolls title called Oblivion. To learn more about the game, we talked with Gavin Carter, the game’s producer. Our questions and his answers to follow:

GB: How long has Oblivion been in development and what section of the game is currently being focused on the most?

Gavin: We’ve been hard at work on the game since just after we got Morrowind out of the door. No rest for the weary here! We started out by churning out huge documents filled with crazy ideas about how to make the greatest RPG ever, and then we chained our programmers to their desks until they made our ideas a reality.

Right now, we’re in full churn mode, with more features, quests, and locations coming available on a daily basis. We’re starting to move beyond simply playing the game for bug testing purposes, and playing just for the experience of the game. It’s an exciting period of development.

GB: What exactly is “Oblivion”, and what does it mean to Tamriel and the Elder Scrolls universe as a whole?

Gavin: The quick and dirty answer is that Oblivion is The Elder Scrolls version of hell. It’s the realm of the demons what we call daedra and in general, it’s not a very happy place. In fact, our main quest plot revolves around a Daedric assault upon the mortal realms.

There are many different facets to our concept of Oblivion, though, and not all of them are purely evil. The spectrum of daedra runs all the way from malevolent to mischievous to benevolent. Perhaps at some point(s) in your quest, help will come from unexpected sources.

GB: Do you plan on sticking with a vast single player experience, or will Oblivion potentially offer some sort of multiplayer component?

Gavin: Our opinion has always been that there’s plenty of life left to be wrung from the purely single-player RPG, and we plan on wringing with all our might this time around. Thus, multiplayer for Oblivion is off the table. I’d love to do a non-massively multiplayer RPG at some point, though the inherent technical and design challenges (especially considering how much we love to push the envelope) make the proposition rather frightening to me.

GB: It sounds like you’re making quite a few tweaks to the combat and transportation systems this time around. Care to give us a few details about each?

Gavin: Saying we’ve (tweaked) the combat system doesn’t do justice to the overhaul it’s getting. We demolished the Morrowind system of combat, and from its ashes arose something deeper, more engaging, and featuring a better blend of player skill vs. character skill. We threw out the wacky to-hit random rolls. Now if your sword hits an enemy, you’ve hit him, plain and simple. That simple change makes a world of difference in the experience. Combat is far less of an abstraction now.

No longer is simply clicking over and over and hoping that a random die falls in your favor a viable strategy. Now your enemy’s sword is something to be avoided, so you move. You dart in and out, getting in your swings while dodging out of his reach. You block with your shield or parry with your sword, then dash in as he recoils. Hit him with a strong enough blow, and watch as he staggers back, leaving himself open to your assault.

We haven’t taken skills out of the equation. They are integral to your combat strategies. If you’re starting out and come up against someone with a 100 skill in their weapon, you better start hoping for some godly intervention. Skills modulate your damage-dealing and defensive capabilities, as well as provide you with new combat moves to execute, and other perks. We’ve gone through three complete and fully realized combat systems prior to this one, and we really feel that we’ve achieved a very nice balance between the action-oriented combat that the Elder Scrolls have always featured, and the statistic-driven gameplay of a pen-and-paper RPG.

Transportation around the world is another area people were very critical of in Morrowind. This time around we’ve taken a long look at how players get from one location to another, and gone to great lengths to implement improvements. We have reinstated a (fast-travel) system similar to what was featured in Daggerfall and Arena. Now, if you’ve visited a location, it will show up as an icon on your map. Simply click there and the game will take you there. When you arrive, time will have passed realistically, and NPCs will be where you would expect them to be based on their daily schedules. No more tedious hours of trekking back and forth across the entire world to locations you’ve been to before, unless you’re into that sort of thing (and it’s amazing how many players are). You still have the option to traverse the great wilderness of Cyrodiil on your own two feet should you choose. And as I said, with only a few exceptions, you can only fast travel to places that you have previously visited. Exploration is a huge part of the Elder Scrolls games, and players should rest assured that there will be plenty to keep you exploring for hundreds of hours in Oblivion.

GB: What notable changes, additions, or enhancements do you have planned for character creation and advancement?

Gavin: Character creation in most RPGs is an abstract process. You stare at menus, pick some options, roll some dice, and a character is spat out at your feet. The entire process relates very little to the experience of playing the game. You’re largely taking guesses at what skills or stats might be fun or useful to you before you play. In Morrowind, we tried to move away from that abstraction by having character generation be an actual section of the game you experience.

With Oblivion, we’re taking that concept even further. Our character generation sequence takes place as a flight from the emperor’s assassins, and as you play through the opening, you get to experience different aspects of the game before you commit to a character type. Naturally, all the old options for creating your own custom class will be making a return as well, all wrapped up into this fluid experience.

Gavin: Magic is another area where we really want to try and raise the bar from Morrowind. We’re taking a hard look at all aspects of it balance, visuals, effects and really doing our best to step things up. We’ve got a lot of plans here, and you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the future.

GB: Tell us about some of the new environments around Tamriel we will be adventuring through during the game. Any favorite areas you’re working on that you can detail for us?

Gavin: I fully believe that even though we’re one of the smallest development shops out there, we’ve got some of the most talented artists in the business working for us. The stuff they’re churning out on a daily basis is nothing short of jaw dropping. As far as environments go, a major emphasis for us was to pull off real, fully realized forests. We don’t feel like this environment has been tackled in a realistic way in games yet, so we decided that for Oblivion, we were up for the challenge. You can see in some of the screenshots we’ve released that we’re not just blowing smoke. We’ve gone all out, with hyper-realistic trees, special shaders for shadow and lighting effects, wind playing through the branches, and more. And trust me, the shots don’t compare at all to the experience of walking through these environments in the game.

GB: What sort of new adversaries will we be battling in the game and what sort of AI enhancements can we expect when battling such enemies?

Gavin: The Oblivion bestiary is quite large and varied. You’ll see the return of old Elder Scrolls favorites, plus the addition of more than a few new critters to smash or sneak by, whatever your preference. One of our new favorite guys we’ve nicknamed (Codename: Billy.) He’s a really awesome variation on a popular creature from past Elder Scrolls games.

The combat AI has been rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of all the new options our improved combat system offers. Enemies will use their weapons effectively, block, dodge, and react to things like you getting blocked. If the fight is going poorly for them, they also have the ability to yield to you, depending on their attitude towards you and their confidence in winning the fight. You can choose to accept their yield, ending combat, or continue to the bitter end.

In addition, we’ve implemented a system that gives us a tremendous amount of control over a single NPC or creature’s individual AI settings. We can alter everything from how likely they are to block, to how long they wait between attacks, to giving bonuses to different attacks, and a huge number of other settings. You can make two identical enemies with two different combat styles, and they will behave totally different in combat. So we can really make individual enemies as smart and brutal or slow and dumb as we want. I think modders are going to really have a blast with things like this.

GB: Due to the advanced features and sheer complexity of Oblivion, will current console systems like the Xbox and PS2 even be able to handle it? Or will we be seeing the game on the PC and next generation consoles only?

Gavin: We’ve billed Oblivion from the start as a next-generation game, with all the connotations of that designation. So the features we are really trying to push the envelope on for instance, fully realized forests, dynamic around-the-clock NPC AI, unmatched graphical fidelity really preclude the possibility of putting it on a current gen console system. Right from the start we envisioned Oblivion running on the next generation of PC and console hardware, and we’ve developed it to take full advantage of all the computing muscle those machines have to offer.

GB: Do you have any plans on releasing all supported platforms (console/PC) simultaneously or will there be a staggered release?

Gavin: We’re not ready to talk about release dates or specific platforms just yet. We’re working as hard as we can to get content in the game and make it fun.

GB: Will we be seeing some of the more popular armor and weapons from the first three Elder Scrolls games in Oblivion? Any plans for totally new armor sets or weapon types?

Gavin: You’ll see the return of many of the old favorites as far as types go Daedric, Glass, Steel, etc. Of course, they’ve all been totally reworked from the ground up, even in terms of concept. The high bar we’re shooting for with Oblivion’s visuals means that our artists have a lot more freedom to bring their ideas to life, and they’ve really grabbed the ball and run with it. For instance, we use specialized shaders to simulate the reflectivity and surface properties of different materials. So when you don your steel armor, it will shine like metal. The leather is dull and mottled, and daedric armor has tips that have a subtle, unearthly glow. And yes, you will see armor and weapon sets that were not featured in Morrowind.

Thanks for chatting with us, Gavin!