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Bethesda Softworks, a company known for producing huge, quality RPGs, is now hard at work creating the most visually stunning RPG to date, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. We had the chance to talk with Ashley Cheng, senior producer on Oblivion.
Let's start with a question on many gamer's minds: Are those screenshots for real!? What hardware was it running on?
To quote Teri Hatcher (from when she was on Seinfeld), "They’re real -- and they’re spectacular." We’re not allowed to talk about any hardware specifics yet. Hopefully, soon.
Tell us a bit about the graphics engine, it's features, and what players can expect from it.
We’ve spent over two years working on our current technology, having started immediately after we finished Morrowind. It’s pixel-shader heavy – in Morrowind, only our water took advantage of pixel shaders. We now apply shaders to everything – whether it be metal, wood, stone, blood, skin, you name it. In particular we’re using normal maps (for lighting), diffuse maps (for color), specular maps (for shininess), and parallax maps (for geometry detail).
Is the engine of your own creation, or is being built off the Gamebryo engine (like Morrowind was, I believe)?
The foundation of our technology is Gamebryo, however many of the systems are our own codebase. Using Gamebryo lets us have the game up and running in a very short amount of time. It’s a great engine that we use for all our internal projects here at Bethesda.
Elder Scrolls IV takes place in Cyrodiil, the capital province of Tamriel, and Oblivion. What types of locales can we expect to visit (forests, cities, ruins, etc.)?
As you can see in the screenshots, we have massive lush forests that stretch to the horizon. If you were to go into those forests, you would find numerous dungeons waiting for you to explore them. We have more cities and settlements in Oblivion than we had in Morrowind and over 1,000 characters, each with their own unique schedules. It has much more of a classic fantasy feel to it than Morrowind did.
It comes as no surprise that Elder Scrolls IV will not feature a multiplayer aspect. However, will the game feature multiple storylines/paths/endings?
Our quests often have multiple paths, multiple ways of completing them. Often, we let the game systems handle it. You could steal it, kill who has it, charm them, persuade them, etc… As for the storylines, our main storyline has only one ending, but there are many ways to get there, and our main focus is the keep the action and characters compelling so that you keep going forward to progress the plot and find out what happens to the characters in the game.
The series is known for its huge game-worlds, which results in many hours of gameplay. Can you give us a rough estimate of how many gameplay hours Oblivion will have?
This question is actually pretty irrelevant to an Elder Scrolls game. We measure our gameplay hours in the hundreds of hours, not the tens. However, the majority of gamers do not have the time to spend hundreds of hours. But they love the fact that the content is there, that they could spend hundreds of hours playing Oblivion (or any Elder Scrolls game) if they wanted to.
But we are finding that most people want to get to the end of the game. They want to know how the main storyline ends. So, we’ve focused on tightening the gameplay experience without sacrificing the open-ended content. You should always know exactly where to go and what to do to complete the next step in the main quest. You still have the option to “do anything you want,” but we’ve made adjustments to point you to the fun and to make sure you don’t have any downtime. For instance, right now we’re working on our dynamic compass that will show you how close you are to dungeons while you exploring the outside world, or where the person is you need to talk to make a quest progress.
As with nearly all games, there are features left out because of time constraints. Were there any features left out of Morrowind that are being included in Oblivion?
I would say there are certainly features in Oblivion that we wished we had implemented in Morrowind. Though certainly this was mostly a reaction to the feedback from fans and reviewers about Morrowind. People often felt lost or without direction in Morrowind and we fixed that. Another complaint was that Morrowind’s NPC’s felt static and wooden – we’ve spent more time giving them their own lives and unique dialogue in Oblivion.
Tell us a bit about the character you play. Will the player be able to choose classes and/or skills?
Yes. This is a slam dunk no brainer for Elder Scrolls games. You play whatever character you want. We calculated that there are over 480 billion different characters you can create and play in Morrowind. For Oblivion, expect that number to go up. And when you add in the ability to customize their appearance, it becomes infinite.
It looks as though the TES Construction kit will be included for the PC version. What improvements have been added to the editor?
We’ve polished the Editor to make it faster to implement quests and content. A lot of object-oriented concepts were implemented that I know Modders will go crazy over it. We tried not to hard-code anything, so that you can create your own custom spells, spell effects, quests, characters, races, etc…it’s all customizable.
One new feature that just went in an Effect Shader object. Modders can create their own custom magic effects, using different parameters and settings. Think the fire damage effects fade in too quickly? Want to add more particles to the effect? It’s all adjustable via the Editor, with no programming needed.
More and more people today have a DVD drive in their PCs. Will Oblivion ship on DVD as well as CDs? And are you considering other forms of distribution? (ex. Half-Life 2 via Steam)
It’s too early to say.
One of the most unique aspects of the game looks to be the combat system. Explain to us what's being done to ensure a smooth and realistic first-person melee system.
We’ve gone through three iterations of combat and we’re still not done. We’ll start over and do a fourth iteration if we have to. We really are striving to get the kinetic energy of guys bashing each other with swords down. It’s not easy and it required us to re-prioritize our schedule so that we could spend more time and resources on combat. Basically, its playing it, tweaking it, playing it, tweaking it – and endless cycle that will continue up until we ship the game, I’m sure.
Half-Life 2 raised the physics bar very high in terms of item manipulation and realistic behavioral physics. Will Oblivion feature the same kind of physics depth? How will physics affect gameplay?
Imagine some of the spells that were in Morrowind like telekinesis and paralysis, huge area effect fireball explosions – imagine what we could do with realistic physics. Well, after we ship Oblivion, you won’t have to imagine anymore.
What are your plans for Elder Scrolls IV and E3 this year?
We have some special things planned to make sure Oblivion makes a big splash.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
We are grateful to all the people out there who buy and play our games, especially the passionate ones who champion us to their friends and to other gamers.
