here is a little article i found about oblivion. here is the link :
http://xboxmovies.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/1985/The-Elder-Scrolls-IV-Oblivion-Video-Interview/
Think of Oblivion as the RPG for the next generation, we're very happy to be debuting the game on xbox 360 and taking advantage of all the power that it offers us. We've tried to look back at everything we did with Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind, and find out what worket, what we could really push to the next level given all the capabilities that the next generation is going to offer, so we pretty much took everything we did with morrowind and blew it up and reinvented the wheel for just about every system. Thats combat, magic, stealth..we integrated havok physics on all the objects in the world, we're doing these giant forest enviroments that are just amazing to look at. We're really pushing the technology as far as it will go in every area.
As far as our plot overview goes its basically the story of..the emporer's assasinated in the first few minutes of the game, you actually see it happen, and with the absence of a blood heir from the imperial line, with the absence of a blood heir on the throne the magical bonds that hold back the demon world of obliovion are broken down, and these gates start appearing all over the world, and there's an invasion of demons into the world that we call Tamriel, into like the mortal world. So we like to think of it as this demonic war movie, like demon Saving Private Ryan, something like that. You have to fight back these demonic hordes you have to find the lost heir who can restore the magical bonds that hold back these demons.
The technology that we use for the forest is all procedural, when you're talking about games our size its huge huge masses of land, and populating that with objects, trees, rock..anything like that just becomes untenable to do all by hand, even woth a large staff it becomes a huge drain on resources, just takes a lot of time to do that sort of thing. So in thinking about how we could do it we developed these tools that allow us to procedurally generate content, so everything you see in the forest is not hand placed by an artist, its been generated by the game. We have tools that allow us to specify different parameters for any area we want, we can specify what type of objects are in there, trees, rocks..what type of grasses, we can put anything, even creatures can be dispersed. We have all kinds of options built in for dispersal patterns, how close things are together, how much the synch in the world...hundreds of variables that we can set, and then we just hit generate and the computer goes to it. Our programming staff worked a little bit at the university of Maryland geology lab, they learned about the natural processes that form these actually in nature, and then they built that into out tools.
The combat system is completely different from Morrowind, we really went for a more actiony type feel, its alot more kenetic than it was in Morrowind so you really get the feeling of someone bashing you with a sword, or bashing another guy with a sword. We have standard attacks which are just clicking a button...if you hold down the button you do a power attack which takes more of your fatigue but does more damage, and once you get up in your skills power attacks get certain perks, for example there may be a chance to disarm your opponent, or you might just get extra damage or knock them back further. In addition blocking is now active, in Morrowind it was a passive ability, now its a button press...so if you block a guy he recoils, as his weapon bounces back - and it gives you an oppertunity to attack. You can also cast magic at any point, no matter what you have equipt so if you have a sword you can still cast a fireball with a press of a button. So we're typing to give you access to all those abilities at once to make combat a lot more fun.
Third person is always great for showing off how your character looks..decked out in all thier armour, its also useful in stealth because you can get a better sense of how cloaked your character is, in addition to your skills which play a huge part in how well you can sneak around an area we're incorporating a lot of light, shadow and sound into the equation as well. So if you're fully in shadow and have a really good sneaking skill then your basically invisible, if your guy is wearing a heavy suit of armour and is out in the sunlight trying to pick pockets you're pretty much screwed, even if you have a high skill. All these things come into play together, and third person really helps you with positioning and finding good spots to sneak in and snipe enemies with the bow, or anything you want like that.
Every town has its own shops, some towns have items you're not going to find in other towns - we're trying to balance the economy a lot better than we did with Morrowind, we're levelling all the objects that you find so you won't be able to find the uber sword just lying on the ground outside the starting town. We're giving you high level economic goals, for example buying a horse...horses are in the game, you can ride them around, they cost a lot of money. We're also doing houses you can buy, which cost a tremendous amount of money but we feel its really good to have these high level economic rewards for players to put their money into and save up..and it feels really good when you finally get that level where you can buy your own house.
We have about a thousand, maybe twelve hundred NPC's in the game right now, and they all use our AI system which we term Radient AI - this is a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week AI system which runs on all one thousan NPC's whether or not they're actually in the cell. Every NPC has a daily schedule that they go through - they eat, they sleep - some of them go to work, some of them will shop, they'll read books, they'll converse with one another - all this is running all the time on all the NPC's so if you suddenly travel to another town they are all going to be where you would expect them to be in the middle of their schedules. It controls all the creatures as well - they have a wide range of activities like I said they'll eat, sleep, read, they'll have dynamic conversations with one another based on whats going on in the world - so they'll talk about current events, all the conversations are random so you won't hear the same one twise - they'll talk about things you do as well like "oh did you hear so and so cleared out the cave down the road" - things like that. So we're trying to give them all a very good sense of life this time around - thats a major focus for us.
Our character system in the Elderscrolls since Daggerfall has scewed(?) experience points in favour of a use based system - so as you're playing your skills just naturally improve based upon what you use - we feel thats a lot more natural than experience points which are an abstraction of what you were actually doing. In our system if you really like to use a bow you'll find yourself getting better and better at it. We feel this is more realistic and less of an abstaction, same thing with magic - all the skills get better as you use them. We have a main plot which if you just put your nose to the grindstone and just charge straight through you're probably looking at about a thirty hour game, but we have all these seperate guilds you can go through - you can deviate from the story at any point in time. the guilds have their own quest lines - their own story arcs that don't necissarily link up with the main plot in terms of you're required to do them, you're not required to do them to advance - but they have their own rewards. If you did absolutely everything in the game we're talking over one hundred and fifty, two hundred hours - in that range. Its crazy!!!
As far as right now a DVD is what, nine gigs? Thats a huge amount of space to be able to fill up - we have fifty people generating content around the clock and we're coming in very nice on DVD size - so... more space is always nice - I think the basic DVD is a great choise for a platform especially...I'm assuming they did it to keep costs down. It's [xbox 360] a fantasic machine - its really - the three core processor is, I think, forward thinking - I think thats the way PC are going - you'll see PC's with multi cores a whole lot more for standard. I think its a great, powerful piece of hardware and whats better is they're really focussed on providing the developers with the tools that they really need to make development on their platforms as easy as possible - they're great at communicating things - they're great at providing regular updates to their software - and they really give us a helping hand in getting this game on the 360, looking great and running great. So its been a joy to work with.