Pieces on Oblivion

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Since we're all desperately waiting for the game (I even started to buy PC Gamer), I' have decided we should have a topic to post all the articles about Oblivion on the net comfortably under this thread.

The Oblivion Announced
The Elder Scrolls official homepage

Bethesda Softworks LLC, a ZeniMax Media company, today announced that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion™ is currently in development for PC and future generation consoles. In development since 2002, Oblivion is another leap forward in role-playing with its combination of freeform gameplay and cutting-edge graphics. Oblivion is the sequel to the best-selling, award-winning role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind®, named 2002 RPG and Game of the Year for both PC and Xbox.

"Since starting this project two years ago, our goal has been to create the quintessential RPG of the next generation," said Todd Howard, executive producer of The Elder Scrolls® series. "We looked back at what we had done with the series, and then looked ahead to what the future of video games could be, and we think this is it."

In keeping with the Elder Scrolls tradition, players will have the option to experience the main quest at their own pace, and there will be plenty of opportunities to explore the vast world and make your own way. Numerous factions can be joined, such as the thieves or mages guilds, and each contains its own complete storyline and the chance to rise to the head of the faction and reap further rewards.

Howard commented, "Our games have always been about great depth and variety in creating any kind of character you want and going out and doing whatever you want." He added, "With Oblivion, we're taking the idea of a virtual fantasy world as far as it will go."

NEW FEATURES

Oblivion features a groundbreaking new AI system, called Radiant AI, which gives non-player characters (NPCs) the ability to make their own choices based on the world around them. They'll decide where to eat or who to talk to and what they'll say. They'll sleep, go to church, and even steal items, all based on their individual characteristics. Full facial animations and lip-synching, combined with full speech for all dialog, allows NPCs to come to life like never before.

GLIMPSE OF THE STORY

Oblivion is a single-player game that takes place in Tamriel's capital province, Cyrodiil. You are given the task of finding the hidden heir to a throne that sits empty, the previous emperor having been killed by an unknown assassin. With no true Emperor, the gates to Oblivion (the equivalent of hell in the world of Tamriel) open, and demons begin to invade Cyrodiil and attack its people and towns. It's up to you to find the lost heir to the throne and unravel the sinister plot that threatens to destroy all of Tamriel.

-Betheseda Softworks, 22 October 2004

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A GAME REWIEW
pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/558955p1.html

Bethesda Softworks has never been a company that could be accused of thinking small. Their flagship property, The Elder Scrolls series of RPGs, have always been known for their vastness and wide-open feeling. Long before anyone ever came up with the idea for an MMO, Bethesda was hard at work creating enormous artificial worlds inside the PC in which one could get lost. Their last game, however, Morrowind (along with its two expansion packs, Tribunal and Bloodmoon), went far beyond what even the company's most die-hard fans could have expected.

Morrowind was literally a world in which you could do anything you set your mind to. Want to go on the main quest of the story? Go ahead. Want to forget the quest and just become the wealthiest merchant in the land? The game could handle it. Perhaps you'd like to join a tribe of werewolves and bring pain and death down on the human inhabitants of Tamriel. The game could handle that too. Morrowind offered the huge worlds of exploration and adventure that make MMOs so compelling, but the experience was personalized for the player, something impossible in an MMO.
Even better, an Xbox version of the game opened the series up to a new group of fans. Console warriors who may have cut their teeth on Japanese-style RPGs discovered the very different but no less compelling D&D/Western-style RPG by finally getting their hands on one of the best in breed.

Once you've achieved something as monumental as Morrowind though, what do you do for an encore? Simple: jump to the head of the line. Rather than just going for the guaranteed moneymaker that would be another Xbox Elder Scrolls, Bethesda is bringing the next game in the series to the next generation of PCs and consoles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is being designed around the Xbox 2 (and the PS3, although the company could not officially confirm any platform besides the PC).

"We've always viewed The Elder Scrolls as a series that presents worlds no one else has ever imagined being done," said Todd Howard, the game's producer. "We love pushing the edge in every respect." According to Howard, when the Oblivion team started thinking about the project in mid-2002, they already had a couple of things they wanted to accomplish in the next game. "We aim to create 'The RPG for the Next Generation,' and this is not just in terms of visuals and platforms." Howard said, "It's in terms of how RPGs are played and experienced. It's time to move RPGs forward and really show how entertaining they can be." In a moment of candor, however, he also admitted that the length of time it takes to create an RPG also factored in the decision. Since the team knew there was no way this game would be complete before 2005 when the current generation of consoles would be reaching the end of their lives, they decided instead to "go big and go early" and create a game that would make a big early splash during the next gaming cycle.
It's all very well for the Oblivion team to sit down and say that they were going to create the next generation of RPGs, it's another thing to actually do it. Once they had their big target in mind, though, they began breaking it down into the basic RPG activities and deciding how best to implement them. "RPGs, by their nature, have repetitive elements." Howard says. "It's recognizing those things -- combat, exploration, and interaction with the world -- and putting the bulk of your energies into making those great." For combat, the team wanted the player to have lots of options, have it be visually exciting, and really, really deep. For exploration, the team is looking to create a world that is very lush and is always showing the player something new. For interaction, Oblivion will feature photorealistic faces that can show emotion, voice-overs for every line of dialogue and an extraordinary new "living world" system.

NEW FEATURES

Combat is one of the major gameplay elements that's being completely revamped in Oblivion. Some of the most interesting feedback the team got from Morrowind players concerned the nature of combat. PC gamers are used to Western RPG conventions, most of which are derived from Dungeons & Dragons -- conventions that include behind-the scenes die rolls to determine success or failure. Those conventions aren't nearly as common on consoles, especially in first-person perspective games such as Morrowind. Howard described it this way: "It's amazing how many people played Morrowind and said (to us), 'Why is my character missing when he swings? The enemy is right there!,' or 'Why did that guy see me? I thought I was hiding.'"

"We've realized how much combat people really do in a game like this and made it more of a priority to get it right," Howard continued. The Oblivion team actually developed three entirely new combat systems and did extensive testing on them all before settling on the one that will be in the final game. The basic idea of Oblivion combat is to impart the 'kinetic energy feeling' of guys bashing each other with swords. The game will have a number of special moves available and blocking is actively under player control, not automatic. As a result, timing moves, shielding yourself, and responding to the enemy becomes a key strategy in fighting. The team also didn't shy away from the gore either. It isn't over the top or gratuitous, but it does fall in line with the design philosophy of trying to make the game as realistic as possible. Basically, when you really smack someone with a sword, you expect a certain level of blood to come spewing out, so the team is trying to fulfill those expectations.

Action gamers, on the other hand, won't necessarily have an unfair advantage. As Howard himself pointed out, the combat system in every Elder Scrolls game has walked a fine line between RPG and action. They've all been first-person and players always controlled their sword arm in real time, but in prior games, the die rolls added an extra layer of randomness between the player and the world. While the combat system of Oblivion tries to remove those layers, RPG players can breathe easy knowing that their beloved stats haven't gone anywhere. This difference this time is that the player's stats determine what they can do, and how effective those things are, but they're now in full control of the "when." Blocking a blow is manual, for instance, but the effectiveness of that block is determined by your character's block skill -- things like how much damage the block absorbs, how much fatigues it causes and so forth. Striking an enemy with a sword is no longer random, but the amount of damage caused is a function of strength and weapon skill.

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To an extent, all RPGs are about exploration. In fact, one of their greatest attractions is the chance to travel an exotic land seeing incredible sights and encountering bizarre creatures (who inevitably get beaten to death like piñatas for the goodies they drop). Morrowind took this aspect of RPGs to an almost absurd level. The world of Tamriel was beyond huge. Players could wander the countryside for months, coming across miscellaneous generated quests and dungeons that were so elaborate they rivaled the main quests in lesser RPGs.
The problem was, Morrowind was so huge and free flowing that it turned off as many gamers as it turned on. Many of the people who started playingMorrowind stopped playing because they didn't have a specific direction or they simply got bored. Howard and the Oblivion team acknowledged the problems inherent in their previous games and are working to fix them in the new game. "That's what we want to address," Howard said. "Never let the player be bored, always be entertaining. We want to 'show you the fun,' and always be pointing you to something fun in the game, even if you don't know it's there." One of the major ways that they're doing that is by completely reworking the game's navigation and orienteering tools.

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"Right now we're working on our dynamic compass that will show you how close you are to dungeons while wandering the forests or where the person is that you need to talk to make a quest progress," Howard said. They've also altered the way players travel in the world. Technically speaking, the world of Oblivion is actually larger than Morrowind, but as Howard himself pointed out, Bethesda doesn't want "hundreds of hours of gameplay" to consist of a few minutes of fun punctuated by hours of boring traveling. Instead, the game will include a revised fast travel map that will hopefully eliminate a great deal of the annoying repetitive travel over long distances.
Of course, merely having a huge world to explore isn't much of a feature if the world itself isn't interesting. Bethesda seems to have that angle covered as well. First, the game is graphically amazing, not only on PC, where higher resolutions should be par for the course, but the eventual console versions as well. The Oblivion team is currently developing one code base that will work on PCs and next- generation consoles at the same time. "We don't focus on any particular platform and we try to do the best we can on each one," Howard said. "So, Morrowind may have started on the PC, but by the end of the project we were not focused on one platform or the other." With Oblivion, the team has known from the beginning that they'd be doing both console and PC versions, so a great deal of energy has been spent on creating a scalable code base that can be adapted to whatever eventual configuration the next generation of consoles adopts. In fact, one of the advantages of skipping the current generation of hardware should be avoiding the technological limitations that force scalebacks in design and gameplay that have plagued recent games that were developed simultaneously for consoles and the PC.

A quick glance at any of the screen shots for the game gives only a taste of the kind of graphic splendor gamers can look forward to Oblivion. Expect to see the kinds of light and water effects that were so praised in Morrowind expanded out to cover literally every surface in the game. Dungeon walls will now glisten with moisture. Skin, stone, blood and wood will accurately absorb and reflect light in amazing ways. Specific techniques include normal maps for lighting, diffuse maps for color, specular maps for shininess, and parallax maps for geometry detail. Parallax mapping is a new graphic technique that's similar to displacement mapping, but is much friendlier to video cards and will help ensure that the graphic splendor isn't restricted to the PC version.

Still, if there's one thing that reveals the game as a next-generation product, it would be the forests. Anyone even remotely familiar with game technology understands why RPGs like dungeons more than forests. Dungeons mostly consist of straight lines; forests, on the other hand, consist of trees -- and trees, with their millions of different sized and shaped leaves, are an absolute nightmare to render with any speed. That's what makes the forests of Oblivion so remarkable: the fact that they look so unremarkable. Looking at a forest in Oblivion is pretty close to looking through a window in Bethesda's office. The technology used to create these landscapes combines procedural generation of the ground based on soil type and years of erosion, places trees based on species and random growth clustering, and make a grass base on regional patterns, all of which create randomized yet realistic woodlands. When combined with full canopy shadows from the trees, Oblivion truly takes you to another place.
The best part about this new technology, though, is that gamers will be able to get their hands on all of Bethesda's cool new toys. The PC version of Morrowind came complete with "The Elder Scrolls Construction Set," a series of tools that allowed gamers to build their own worlds and tweak the game to their heart's content. In our discussion, however, Howard revealed that the release of the Morrowind tools was more an experiment than anything else. At the time, they weren't really sure that players would want to take the time to learn the sometimes difficult to use tools. The response from gamers, though, went beyond their wildest dreams. A quick glance at the Morrowind Summit page reveals thousands of homemade classes, quests, and modifications available to plug into the game. This time around, the construction kit will be easier to use, have better interfaces, and the code base of the product will have simpler script, object and quest systems that can be directly manipulated by the kit. Howard described the tool kit succinctly, "It's all in the Construction Set. We used it to create Oblivion, see what you can do!"


Fans of Morrowind may be a bit disappointed to find out that Oblivion isn't a direct continuation of that storyline. It does, however, begin the way the previous Elder Scrolls game did, with the main character in prison. While you're there, the Emperor comes through your cell via a secret door trying to escape from an assassination attempt. The escape, unfortunately, fails, leaving the player with the dying Emperor who hands over the "Amulet of Kings," the token of the true Emperor along with a charge to find the one person who can "shut the marble jaws of Oblivion." Oblivion, the Elder Scrolls equivalent of Hell, is sealed away from Tamriel only by the will of the Emperor, and with him dead, the land starts to see an influx of demonic creatures bent on destruction.

The player will never find out why they were in prison. According to Howard, that's because putting down a backstory for the main character might hinder that player's freedom of choice when it comes to determining how they're going to interact with the world. So whether they feel like they're wrongly incarcerated for a crime they didn't commit or they're a multiple murderer looking for a little payback, the moral, ethical and lifestyle decisions each player makes is completely up to them. Indeed, how they approach the main quest of the game or whether they choose to pursue it at all is likewise up to them. The beauty of Oblivion is Bethesda's new "Living World" system, which means that the choices you make will be reflected in the world around you.

"We've really gotten much better at this," Howard says when discussing the living world of Oblivion. "We're really focusing this time on how people in the world react to you, because that's the most fulfilling thing about being good or bad or in-between." The game sports a new "Radiant AI" system that Howard says is best described as a combination of Ultima 7 and The Sims. Rather than following pre-scripted paths, every NPC is given a set of general goals they'd like to achieve, but the details of fulfilling that goal is entirely up to them. If a citizen is hungry, they'll look for a way to get food. They might buy food, hunt it, or steal it, then find a place to sit to eat and so on. This means that every one of the game's 1,000 NPCs follows a full 24/7 schedule that continues whether or not the player is there to witness it. It also means that the NPCs react to each other, so a townsperson who decides to steal a loaf of bread in full view of the guards may find himself under arrest.

It also means that everything the player does in the game that's witnessed by NPCs is processed and remembered by them, who will then use that information to decide how to react to you. Interactions are governed by what the player has done to them, what groups or guilds they're both a member of, whether the player has messed with anyone in their family and what their general reputation in the Empire is. Players who just watch the NPCs going about their daily lives will often witness townsfolk in unscripted dynamic conversations gossiping about what's going on in the kingdom and what rumors and news is currently hot.
In fact, one of the interesting problems that the team has had to face came about precisely because the AI is so good. According to Howard, the AI has caused guards to decide to eat and go hunting deer, only to get themselves arrested for attacking something. When they fight back against the arresting guard, the other guards see a fight and try to join in. In not too much time, every guard in the town was involved in the scuffle, which left the rest of the town open to thievery by other NPCs, resulting in empty stores. Much of the team's current effort is going into putting sensible governors on the AI's behavior to avoid situations like empty stores that would result in situations that wouldn't be fun for the player.

The team is also focused on creating a world that's interesting enough that the player would want to take sides. The game's factions are much more polarized this time around and they include options as diverse as the Fighters' and Mages' Guild who are generally good, the Thieves Guild, which is generally bad, and the Dark Brotherhood, which is really evil. The Nine Divines lets the player become a monk, while the Arena Guild obviously focuses on gladiatorial combat. All of these factions have their own stories and intrigues and contain enough stuff to do that by themselves they'd probably fill a whole separate game. Putting them together ensures that no matter how much time the player spends in the game, there will always be some choices passing by that they'll want to come back and try later.

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WHAT NEXT?

There has long been a tendency among gamers to decry an obsession with graphics power over quality gameplay. This is certainly not without merit, as we all have a tendency to be dazzled by the next advance in graphic technology. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion though, shows we may finally be coming to the end of that cycle. Graphic beauty in the next generation will not be in how we display the fantastic, but in how close we get to the ordinary. Oblivion is an amazing harbinger of things to come because the Oblivion team is using their power to create not just spectacle, but a believable world in which to experience that spectacle. With this game as an indication of what the next generation of consoles is capable of, the future of gaming is brighter than anyone believed possible.

-Gamespy, 22 October 2004