How, exactly, would class restrictions work in a game that allows you to create your own class??

No idea where this concept came from.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as any restriction on an item preventing you from using it, regardless of level or class/skill.

The only potential level-related restrictions would be due to the widespread use of leveled lists for items. You won't be able to use certain things because you won't find them in the world, not because you try to equip them and are told you don't meet some requirement.

fallen wrote: "So what if I don't want to do the mainquest, and lets say I'm theiving a mainquest vital NPC's house, but he/she happens to wake up when I'm rummaging his/her goods. So he/she attacks, so I'm forced to kill but then all of a sudden once the NPC is dead, a pop up box appears and say you HAVE to reload."

What you've got right there is a perfect example of why the yield system was added. You're no longer "forced" to kill the character.

Neat how it all works out, isn't it?

The figure given in the demo is 16 square miles, though it's still just an estimation.

The forests are procedurally generated during development, not on the fly for each individual game.

Here's the deal: There was a lot to take in during the demo, and so many people saw it that they may have mis-interpreted some things, or missed a few comments. It happens, and it's not our fault.

The basic problem is that there has to be a very specific structure in place for it. Dialogue and scripts have to be written to accomodate the quest line. While it might be possible, it would also likely come out very differently from what you're anticipating.

The idea of starting a vampire clan, for example (since that was specifically mentioned) - it's feasible, but it would have to be very carefully planned for. That'd be the only faction the game would allow you to create; it couldn't be a "start any faction you like, and the game will react accordingly" unless that's about the only thing the game was set up to handle. And it likely wouldn't be a case of "turn anyone you want into a vampire and have them follow you"; again there would have to be a set structure, allowing only certain NPCs to join you (and giving them very limited options once they do).

But that's just my personal opinion on the subject...

PCZone wrote (article quote): "Each of the factions is like a role playing game on it's own. With the mages guild, you have to learn all the schools of magic from all the various cities, then you gain entrance to the Arcane University in the Imperial City. You can't make spells or magic items until you do that."

The quote is a little off, but they've got the spirit of it right.

Think of it this way - unless you're in the guild, and have done a certain degree of work to advance yourself, some of the best benefits of the Mages Guild will be withheld from you. Implying that it's tied directly to your skill level in the various schools of Magic isn't accurate.

There are two types of enchantable items - wearable items, and weapons. Wearable items are constant effect, weapons are cast when strike.

REAL mountains are gigantic, monstrous constructions that take up enormous amounts of space. As always, we have to determine whether it's a better use of our time to make gigantic mountains for the sake of having them be gigantic, or making somewhat smaller mountains and tweaking them so they look good and have decent content. I think the mountains we have are a good compromise. They're big enough to provide very nice landscape views off in the distance, and still manageable enough that they don't break the sense of scale in the gameworld.

Having red text for their name would be much more intrusive than the icon we've got. It's very subtle and fits right into the already existing interface.

Don't worry, you won't feel a thing ;-)

X wrote: "Give it up, they're not listening. At best, maybe when a few years pass, we'll find out just who was behind these "streamlining" decisions. If the devs are gamers, I'd think it was a mandate from higher up as I assume no one who actually wants to play these games would do this. It's a shame and I'm sure many of the staff are as disappointed as we are--but let's face it, they can't publically acknowledge that, can they?"

There's no glowy thing.

No one upstairs, down the hall, around the bend, or wearing a suit tells us what to do with our games. I will stand by every decision we've made 100%, so if you feel like you need to blame someone for something you don't like, you're welcome to blame me. I play the game every day and get to see it as a whole, and I know it's a hell of a lot of fun. You're certainly welcome to disagree and argue with us, but the idea that we're walking around the office teary-eyed because some anonymous "business person" is forcing our hand is dead wrong. We discuss, argue, and try out different things, and at the end of the day we make a decision that we feel makes the game as fun as possible. I'm sure we've got something great on our hands, something that rises far, far above whether or not a tiny icon indicates an essential NPC. When you're up at 3AM, trying to cram in just one more quest, you'll be sure, too. We've all spent years of our lives on this thing, and I'll stand by every decision, any day of the week.

It's a male. The "bulge" is just the effect of how he is turned kind of on a slant combined with the raised belt going across him. And the arrow is definitely on the proper side

MrSneak wrote: "Then there's the tail thing.
Arena Khajiits and Argonians didn't have tails, but every other TES game (that I've played) gives them tails. 3D Studio Max's "Character Studio" allows a simple CLICK-BUTTON option to "add tail" for instant animatability. It would be silly for them not to be included for "technical" reasons, or time constraints."

All we had to do was click a button??? Why didn't someone tell us that to begin with!? :-)

The reality is that real-time game engines are generally far removed from the WYSIWYG-ideal that most people think Max represents. It took a lot more work than that, but they're in.

As has been stated recently at one of the many E3 interviews, the dialogue takes up about half of the possible data space on the medium we'll be using for 360. Because of that, all the good juicy dialogue is reserved for quests. We don't wan to skimp on quest stories, do we?

The compass is easy to understand, there are no doubts as to anything the compass says. Directions by an NPC could be taken the wrong way. If things change place on the map of Tamriel during production (and believe me, they do) then we would need new dialogue to cover the new directions to the moved location. This increases production time and the necessity for more "Pick-ups" when we are done doing voice recording.

Those are a couple of good reasons (data space and design changes) why most quests use the compass.

We're really under the gun to create interiors where it is fun to fulfill all of our major play-types (warrior, mage, thief) and all of their sub-sets. So when we create interiors, we try to have many different perspectives about who the player is and what kind of character they're using. Our testers are geniuses when it comes to this.

The folks that made Thief had the luxury of only needing 1 perspective (I am a thief, what do I want to see/do). For us, we have the following perspectives:

What can I hit in here?

What can I shoot in here?

What can I magic in here?

What can I sneak & steal in here?

What can I interact with in here?

And more and more and more!

We also take into account the size and dimensions of things in both 1st and 3rd person persp. It's good to work with thorough and intelligent people.

I'm just saying that our game can be played about 100 different ways, and I usually only think in the frame of mind of 5 of them. The testers do stuff to our game that make my head spin. "If this is allowed, then using that functionality here will be a cheat." "If getting this thing means X, then won't Y and Z happen?"

QA raise tons of issues with game system balance that I never would have thought of. Good folks.

Unfortunately, we don't play the game to personalize a character and develop a story. We are playing the game to test every permiation of play that is available in the game to squash all bugs, and to ensure that there is fun at every turn. So, while we are exploring the places and quest lines in Oblivion, it's not so that we can express ourselves through the game character, rather it is to make sure that YOU can do that all you want. I will probably play every quest, with every race, with every major skill class by time we ship.

Personally, though, I think I enjoy tanking more than ranged magic or stealth gameplay. I like to make a big character, with a big warhammer/axe/sword who can take loads of damage and dish it out as well. ....but that's just me :-)

Power Attacks aren't appropriate for bows. There are skill perks you can get as your Marksman skill improves, but we'll talk about those later.

Just to clarify, NPCs cannot pickpocket you, and they won't ever steal quest items. But if you leave something else they like lying around, well who knows what might happen to it.

NPCs would have to be told to go into your house via Radiant AI. And even if they WERE, you could always lock your door...

th3undon3on3 wrote: "Does anyone know if the athletics skill increases with this warp thing then?"

That is a good question. No, you don't get any skill increases when you fast travel, which is another reason you might opt to walk instead from time to time. Plus, who knows what you might find along the way that you might have missed before? And you can always vary your route between locations if you walk or ride a horse instead of fast travel. Anyway, the choice is yours.

There is no learning aspect in RAI.

Turn Undead's a fun spell in Oblivion. I like playing "Zombie yo-yo" -- cast Turn Undead, the zombie runs away. Then the spell wears off and he turns around, running towards you again. Then cast Turn Undead on him just before he reaches you, and he runs away again. Repeat as long as you still find it funny and have enough magicka. :-)

That is Patrick Stewart as the Emperor. And the dude clutching the sword and plunging it into the ground is NOT the player. Note that the last thing the Emperor says is "Find HIM, and close shut the jaws of Oblivion"

The scenes with the emperor on the tower, the sword flying through the air, and the Emperor's heir catching the sword and then plunging into the ground and kneeling are pre-rendered and animated by the folks who made the trailer. The rest, aside from the text, is all in-game.

Neither good nor bad -- it's untrue.

In the demo, the player sneaks into a room where there are some goblins ahead. The player then draws the bow (there's a different animation when you're sneaking -- the bow is held sideways), and then zooms in (a marksman skill perk) on one of the goblins and lets fly. The goblin dies instantly -- but it's only because for the demo the creatures were set up with low health so that it wouldn't take forever to fight them all during the demo.

That was one of the first things we changed. Oblivion is MUCH easier to localize than Morrowind was.

There's a skill-based penalty for casting depending on how much armor you're wearing. So if you want to be a battle mage, you'll have to work on your armor skills -- get them up high enough and there will be no penalty.

This way, there's an actual DIFFERENCE between the pure magic user and the battle mage. Battle mages will simply want to choose an armor skill as one of their major skills.

Depends on the creature. They're all set up differently. Some can fight just like NPCs can, some can't. Some use magic, some don't. Some move around a lot in combat, some don't.

Some weapons have sheaths, some don't. Depends on the type of weapon. If a weapon DOES have a sheath, it's "part" of the weapon -- they're not two separate objects. So there's always an appropriate sheath for each specific weapon.

The only alternative is to individually model each leaf with polygons, which leaves you with two choices: not so many leaves, or fewer polygons on everything else. Otherwise you'll take a pretty nasty framerate hit with all the additional geometry.

For Oblivion, we did individually model the leaves & leaf clusters, and then converted them into billboards, so they look very realistic and have proper normal maps so the lighting looks correct.

It's not specifically PARRYING, it's BLOCKING with a weapon.

OK, so I was wrong. If you kill an essential NPC, you have to load a previous game save.

The number of NPCs you cannot kill is a tiny fraction of the NPCs in the world. The fact of the matter is that killing NPCs that quests rely on breaks the game. Many NPCs are so essential to the game world working, with our AI and so forth, that their deaths can cause any number of things to appear as bugs, or not as we intended. The designers do handle certain NPCs being killed in quests, the ones that make sense to kill, but not, for example, the Count of a city, or the heir to the throne. And it was either force you to re-load, or have the designers remove what made the quests entertaining and compelling in the first place. And I think we can all agree that it's better to have quests that are more fun to play through than quests that are artificially simplified because the designers had to worry about every obscure contingency.

But don't worry about accidentally finding yourself in this situation. We'll have a visual indicator of who's an essential NPC and who isn't, so the chances of you accidentally killing an essential NPC will be slim. And if you find yourself in combat with one, you can always attempt to yield.

Anyway, sorry for the confusion! :-)

Zingar Baltus wrote: "We agree with that. We just don't agree that what you are doing is going to make quests more fun or that it fits better with a roleplaying game."

You have it backwards. It's because the designers don't have to worry about the random deaths of crucial NPCs -- UNLESS THEY WANT TO -- that they are able to focus on making the quest lines better. If they had to worry about every possible contingency in every single quest, the inclination would be to make the quests simpler, less complex, less intricate, and less entertaining, because the more dependencies existed, the longer it would take to account for (and test) every dependency.

It's a little icon that shows up red if it's an essential NPC, and not red if he's not. Basically the icon says you can talk to them, and only appears when you're facing them and could initiate a conversation with them.

The game is nothing like Fable. It's huge, immense. There's a ton of content. You'll be reading LOTS of stuff. All of the quest lines are much more in depth, challenging and interesting. And there's a heck of a lot more to the game than just the guilds and the main quest. Lots and lots of other things to do that haven't been mentioned. Stats play a huge, huge role. Class actually has meaning this time. The game is better balanced. You have more rewards for advancement besides just getting better at things. The dungeons are better designed, the NPCs are more interesting, the dialogue is better written.

If you think this is a simple, dumbed down hack & slash, you couldn't be more wrong.

Blocking only works if you're facing the opponent attacking you. Same goes for NPCs, they have to be facing an attacker when blocking to actually block the attack.

When we say there's no locational damage, we mean that you can't target the foot, the arm, the head, or a specific body part, and damage that body part, not that we don't know the difference between front & back & left & right.

If you're that concerned about the armor penalty for casting, then just make sure you pick an armor skill among your major skills.

The pure mage should use defensive spells instead of armor, anyway.

Actually, there's a lot of features and changes in Oblivion that resulted directly from feedback about Morrowind. And the Bloodmoon expansion was made primarily because the fans wanted werewolves. So joking aside, we really do read the forums and take suggestions, feedback and complaints into consideration. So keep it up

It's possible. I have no idea what, if anything, is planned for expansions. Right now I'm more concerned with just getting the game finished :-)

Oh and even with the compass, it tends to generally get you in the vicinity of where you want to go, but sometimes the exact location isn't always apparent. The compass also transparent, so it really doesn't obscure much. One of my favorite features is that you can bring up the map and put your OWN marker on it, and it'll show you the direction to go on the compass with a green arrow. Very useful feature. I honestly think that the only ones who still complain about it after playing the game will just be complaining for the sake of complaining :-)

Monophonic wrote: "The only answer I thought was kind of sketchy was the NPC fading in and out of cells. Just seems like they could have done something better with that."

We had bigger battles to fight. The player isn't shown opening load doors and walking through them, either. It just isn't important enough. And it's only for load doors. They open up non-load doors & walk through like you'd expect.

GhanBuriGhan wrote: "But won't towns and cities be full of these kind of load doors, and isn't the whole point or RAI to make such places look lifelike? Don't ghostlike appearing and disapearing NPC's kind of clash with that vision?"

It's really not as jarring as you seem to think it is. It just wasn't felt that it was important enough to devote resources to adding in all the extra code, art, animations and AI to support animated load doors.

Right -- in Oblivion, increasing your Minor skills does not count towards leveling up, so in that sense they are similar to Morrowind's miscellaneous skills.

There are 21 skills total. All characters have all 21. The class you choose (premade or custom) dicates which 7 are Major, and the rest are minor. The class you choose, plus your race and possibly other things determine the starting levels of all of your skills. As Kendar said, you can raise all 21 skills to 100, but it'll take much longer for the minors as they start out at such a low level. It makes class much more important for more of the game.

saner wrote: "What if you enchant arrows? Would that enchant the bow?"

Nah, if an arrow is enchanted, that enchantment is the only one that's used even if the bow's enchanted.

Now if you equip a poison when you have a bow equipped, the next arrow you fire will be poisoned IN ADDITION to either the bow's enchantment or the arrows, if either are present.

GhanBuriGhan wrote: "There were certainly a lot of enachanted items that were useless because of their short term nature in Morrowind. Feather for example really only makes sense as a constant effect, or something that at least lasts for hours, instead of seconds. But I also deplore the reduction in complexity this change will bring. It will make the game a little more "conventional" as constant effect is what you usually see in most RPG's. Sword+1 type of stuff. I totally understand the reasons behind streamlining the game. I just wish they would try harder to streamline WITHOUT simplifying."

Originally, constant effect items had their charge wear out over time. You'd have to continually recharge them like you did enchanted weapons. But after playing it, the game ended up turning into a hunt for "batteries" -- populated soul gems you could use to recharge your CE items. Not fun. So we decided to go back to constant effect being always on, and balanced it by limiting which effects you can use and their magnitudes. It ends up playing a lot better and prevents exploits. So you get useful items that don't turn you into a god, and you're not constantly hunting for soul gems. You still need them to recharge your weapons, but it's not as dire a situation as it was when constant effect items lost charge. We thought about extending the length of time they'd last, but then it comes down to a "why bother" point.

It's not JUST about streamlining or simplifying -- it's also about gameplay.

No constant effect summonings, sorry.
There are other enchanted items in the game -- staffs, which shoot projectile spells, and scrolls, which can be self, touch or target but of course can only be used once and then are destroyed. But the player is not able to make scrolls or enchant staffs (all staffs in the game are already enchanted.)
But mages can still make spells as complex as they're able, with multple effects from multple schools, containing any combination of self, touch and target ranges.
If you want complex spells, well your character is going to have to study and practice get to the point where he or she can make them. No more free rides for non-magic users :-)

Cast when used enchanted items allowed non-magic users every bit of power that magic users had, plain & simple, and without any of the penalties, since a magic user had to focus on magic skills, while ANY class could effectively use enchanted items. In other words, cast when used enchanted items, along with giving players the ability to make any enchantments they wanted to at any time, unbalanced the game unfairly against magic users. There really wasn't much point in BEING a magic user.

So enchanted items are now still extremely useful, but between the changes to them and the changes made for magic users, the classes are now better balanced.

You'll need populated soulgems to MAKE enchanted items, too. Just because enchanting is a guild perk doesn't mean you get it for free.

Feng wrote: "Well enchanting is out of the picture. soulgems are just for recharging items as they do not charge themselves anymore."

That's not correct. You have to have someone make your enchantmented items for you, this is true, but you still have to provide a populated soul gem. So you'll need soul gems with souls in them to both have new enchanted items created for you and to recharge your enchanted weapons.

There is a special kind of stone you can find (there aren't all that many of them) that are embued with magical effects -- a touch effect and a self effect. You can use this to enchant either a weapon, which gets that one touch effect, or a piece of clothing, jewelry or armor, which gets the self effect. Then the stone is destroyed. You only get one of the stone's effects or the other, and you don't get to pick from the magic effects you know. So while anyone can use one of these stones to create an enchanted item without anyone else's help, you are limited to the effects available on the stones themselves.

HardCode wrote: "I'd contest that by saying that the joy of Morrowind was that you weren't "locked in" to a class that you chose from the beginning. The ol', "If you want to be a Magic User with full armor, you can!" principle, but in this case it's reversed: "You can be a warrior, but no powerful magic items". Kind of a reverse discrimination if you will."

On the other hand, mages don't get powerful magic items, either. Plus, it may take a while, but ANY character can build up any or all of their skills, Major or Minor, so Conan, with a lot of work and practice, can eventually become as good with destruction as he is with a blade. Or you can choose or create a class that includes weapon AND magic skills in your majors. But what it ends up meaning is the CHARACTERS are more important than the ITEMS.

You cannot make scrolls in-game. The scrolls you can find or buy can have touch, range, or self-targeted effects. Instead of enchanting arrows, you enchant your BOW with a cast-when-strikes enchantment, and the enchantment gets transferred to any non-enchanted arrows you fire. You can find or purchase enchanted arrows, but it'd be a waste to make them.

All staffs in the game are already enchanted. Therefore you cannot create newly enchanted staffs. Unenchanted ones don't exist. And even if you could, they can only fire projectile spells -- they cannot cast on self. They are not melee weapons, they are ranged magic weapons.

By the way, while staffs can only fire spell projectiles, and have no melee attacks, you CAN block with them. So a mage can go into battle using the staff to shoot fireballs at enemies and block melee attacks, and casting restores & buffs with his free hand. It's pretty nifty.

Sometimes there's fog.
Sometimes there's not.
It depends if it's foggy or not.

Every NPC and the player has over 300 animations. Various animations for walking, running, swimming, jumping, sneaking with and without various weapon types, shields, staffs and torches equipped. Blocking animations with shields, weapons, staffs, hand to hand. Normal left & right attacks for all the various weapon types, plus variants for attacking while sneaking. Multiple casting animations depending on what's in the character's hand. And then multiple power attack animations for various weapon types, hand to hand, and even for different skill levels. Equip and unequip animations for all weapons, shields and torches. Special animations for block attacks, staggers, recoils, getting up from the ground. Animations for mounting and dismounting a horse (and a special set of animations while riding a horse). For the player, there are two versions of all of these, for first person and third person. In addition,there are over 120 special animations that can be played for certain circumstances, such as sitting, praying, etc. And all of these need to be available to all 10 races and both genders (this does not count creatures, who have many, many, many animations of their own.)

Because of this massive volume of animations, it was decided to make the beast races lower bodies more human-like. They still have tails. But we would have had to make special versions of dozens and dozens of animations just for them. Which would have taken more time to make and refine, more space on the disk, more memory when the beast races were loaded, etc.

Or, we could have simplified the animation system, kept the number of animations lower, and stuck with bootless beast races.

Dude, just select an old quest and it won't show you where to go.

The Mad God wrote: "Actually, he said that if you select an old quest, it won't put any indicaters on your compass."

That's not what I said. I said that if you select an old quest, the marker wouldn't show where to go for your current quest -- but it WILL show where to go for the old quest.

Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes NPCs will give you verbal directions when they give you quests. Sometimes you can ask NPCs for directions to places. Happy?

It's just dialogue, I would have thought it'd be common sense that they'd give directions. We're making a game that YOU play, not that plays itself :-)

We are working up something a little different this time, but I'm glad you like the previous maps.

We made the land as big as it needed to be to be fun. Realism was never our first priority. If it was, it'd take a week to travel by foot from one city to another, and probably a month to travel from the mountains up north to the ocean in the south. Not exactly the most exciting game if this was the case and it would probably take 50 years to develop.

Actually in early development we played with several different land sizes until we settled on the final size. Bigger is not always better, even if it sounds that way on paper.

I encourage everyone to give the game and world size a chance, play it and see for yourself.

Billy is bigger than a breadbox.

The dog wasn't scripted. In fact there were several times that when the demo was run that the dog decided to just stand around for a few seconds instead of heading for the food. Eventually the temptation of the meat was too much for it and it ate.

Actually the demo looks scripted, but after watching it a number of times, you start to see differences that occur each time. But Todd probably practiced giving the demo a hundred times before E3 so it would go off smoothly. Even little things like tossing pumpkins on a trip wire to trigger a trap required skill. I saw several people play through the demo and mess that section up and had to use an arrow from the bow to to trigger the trap instead.

Technically, speedtree leaves face the player as they are 2 dimensional objects. That's just how the technology works. The thing is, unless you literally face the tree and move REALLY, REALLY slowly around it, you will never notice this occuring. Oblivion's not the first game to use speedtree. Several massively multiplayer games use speedtree. But, I think it sounds worse when someone mentions it in a post than it really ends up being. So people start assuming that the tree is going to be rotating around as you walk by and look weird. It's not like that. I wish everyone could have seen the E3 demo so you could see that the forest looks very real.

Yeah the interface was re-done from scratch and it works a thousand times better. Also, for the console people it will be far easier to use.

As far as showing UI screenshots. Most likely we won't release any of those until very shortly before the game ships as UI usually gets tweaked until the very end. Which is a reason we never released Morrowind UI shots until we showed them on the game packaging.

Proweler wrote: "Do the PC and the Console get the exact same interface?"

They will be very similar, with small changes to help the console people navigate easier with the controller. Kind of like Morrowind where the Xbox UI looked similar, but worked a little differently (as far as no movable windows,etc.).

From my recollection, Morrowind was about 9 to 10 square miles or so, and Cyrodiil is 16. And if you think that's small, you'll be surprised. It takes a long time to cross that much territory, not to mention the amount of content contained within.

Honestly, exploring the forest is how you want it to be. That is, if you dont want to use the map, don't. But I'll tell you... I've wandered through the forest already (and all of it isn't even in yet) and I've walked right by stuff that was "a few trees away". Anyone that's been in a thick wood will know what I mean.

Can't say how thick the forest will be in detail, but I can say that all the hallmarks of what you'd expect to find will be available... downed rotting logs, tree stumps, moss-covered rocks, underbrush, etc.

Trust me, you're going to get lost if you wander in these forests and don't use the compass or map.

No, it's not confirming anything. The compass isnt the size of Nebraska in the center of the screen, so if you choose to ignore it, you can. And no, we haven't said wether compass will be optional. You'll have to wait and see, sorry.

IceBear6666 wrote: "Whats the point making a big new complicated jail system when all you have to do is quick load and make sure the guard doesnt see you next time? I think the save system should be different to prevent save-load whoring where you can actually manage to do someting you almost had no chance in doing... Also it gets more exiting knowing you have limitations to saving.

I'm perhaps bringing up 2 subjects here, but they fit together fairly enough so.. Whatc'a think bout it?."

The short answer is all the skills you need to bust out successfully will be boosted (get "experience" for)... it's the same reason people clear rooms in a dungeon they don't need to go through. Also, it's fun!

Can't say wether or not we hobble your skills for a jail stay, but look at it this way: Infamy would be more likely awarded for being arrested than staying in there, so doesn't matter. More incentive to break out? Perhaps...

When you think of schedules, don't think literally (like 9am wake, 10am drink, etc.) for them. Think of it this way:

Creature wanders inside a cave in daytime... it doesn't like the light, then at night it exits the cave and roams the woods until near sunrise when it makes it's way to a farmer's fields to raid it. Then (if it lives) it goes back to the cave for daytime again.

That's a more realistic way of looking at it.

Bear in mind that M can mean more than just gore. Some people want M because they want gore; this is unquestionable. But some want M simply because it limits the developers less, and leaves them free to make the game the way they feel it should be. If the devs are worrying about the rating, they may leave out something that could be a lot of fun. If they're not thinking about the rating at all, what goes into the game is what they feel belongs in the game. That might earn an M rating, and it might not, but as a player, and for that matter, as an employee, I'd rather see Bethesda making games the way they feel they should be, rather than considering everything from a rating point of view up front.

Also, on the matter of gore--you hit someone in the head with an axe, it's going to be messy. Some people are also tired of things being "sanitized." If something is bloody, they want it to be bloody, not cleaned up for their protection.

Everyone in Oblivion, including the player, is named Darryl. This makes life much simpler for the voice actors, though we have found that it makes introductions a bit more awkward.

"I'm Darryl. This is my brother Darryl. This is my other brother Darryl." (so help me, if anyone takes that seriously...)

Well, since I am a creature animator, I will chime in.

First off, thanks for the kind words on the skeleton. He was a LOT of fun animating and he will be tweaked constantly until we ship. All creatures and NPC anims will. The thing with mocap is tricky. Mocap is always pretty efficient when dealing with "humanoid" characters, but once you get things like rats, dogs, spiders, etc, you are pretty much back to brure force animation. Any creature that isnt bipedal tends to be a bt more work, and usually a bit more of a headache. But, you always strive to make every slight movement as interesting and unique as possible, keeping in mind that it should be lifelike and fluid. For example, the skeleton.... he should be lanky and gangly as far as movement goes, but keeping in mind that he STILL has to flow like a human, since he once was one. Then you have somehting with a large mass, like an ogre. He wont be as flexible as a skeleton or human because he has quite the girth, so he will need to appear a bit more solid and weighted with his flows. And of course, then you have creatures with MANY legs. I hate these. It takes a lot of time, concentration, imagination, and Tylenol to get these even close to right.

In all, I think the OBLV anims far exceed what you saw in MW. The anim system is far more robust and we were given a wider highway of possibilities to drive these anims down. I would love to be able to show you all the creatures we have in the game and get your feedback on them, but, it's just not within my power, heh.

As stated, no animation is final until we ship. I wouldnt be surprised if much of what you saw (and didnt see) is changed 100%. Thats just how anim development goes. We are "constantly" tweaking and changing anims, so no, things are not always left as they are till Todd Howard sings. ;-)

On the subject of animation blending, animators actually have a lot of control on the timing of these blends and exactly where we want them to blend. No number crunching programmer or fire breathing producer can dictate that to us. ;-) If we animators think it could use more or less, it's under our control. Blending is not a universal setting.

With good collision and havok working hand in hand, clipping upon death is hopefully something of the past. Instead of single collision boxes/spheres being used to calculate object collision, havok introduces the ability for individual limbs to collide with surfaces, thus allowing for more natural falls and resting positions. If all or most objects in a game have collision geometry, then characters should be able to react to these surfaces accordingly.

I would like to say collision AND havok make this perfect, but I also believe this procedure is still quite new to gaming and physics is in it's infancy still within gaming. Once developers get their hands REALLY dirty with understanding physics possibilities in games, it will be so perfect that the realism bar will be raised in gaming and some new implementation will need to be introduced to make people get their shock and awe all over again.

Oh, and trust me, working with physics/havok is no easy game. Working with creatures/characters alone pretty much doubles the work involved. There are LOTS of numbers involved and well.... I hate numbers.

This has been posted elsewhere, but in Oblivion's Arena, you'll be able to compete in gladiatorial matches against other combatants, or bet on matches and watch two combatants beat the living stuffing out of each other.

The Arena works much like a faction. You work up the ladder, fighting different opponents until you get to the top. Once you "beat" the Arena, you'll probably still be able to engage in special fights. Gotta keep yourself sharp, right?

Darkelve asked if I really thought the game was looking amazing. The honest answer -- yeah, I really do.

Okay, of course I'm biased because, you know, Bethesda feeds my family. But I'm also an old school Elder Scrolls player since the Arena days. We've still got a lot of polishing to do, but every day more and more stuff comes on line, and the game world feels so rich, so alive. The stuff that is shown in the E3 demo is so cool it boggles my mind, and I've seen it about 20 times. What's funny is that, to me, the game feels a lot like a next-gen Daggerfall. Just in feel and experience. A lot brighter, more classic fantasy. A lot less "alien" than Morrowind. But believe me, it's a quantum leap above Morrowind in soooo many ways. Visuals, gameplay, world interactivity, NPCs, combat, spellcasting, etc. (And stealth, of course! Can't forget stealth! hehe) Sorry to babble, but I really do get psyched about this stuff.

Everything E3 falls under me but it's definitely a team effort. Lots of people on the team have been pitching in to make sure that our demo looks great, the trailer looks great, screenshots, the booth, our mini-theater, etc. It's a lot of work for a lot of people, but hopefully it'll pay off in the end.

Oh, and pictures/video of our game will be taken over my dead body. We didn't do all this work to have grainy images of our game out there. We'll have plenty of official stuff out there and a few fans will be there to represent the forums and give you their own take.

It's a solid gold lock I'm playing it on Xbox 360.

42" HD TV, wireless controller and couch, or 21" monitor, desk and chair?

Hmmmm....

Just like the US, holidays this year.

We've already said "holidays this year." That doesn't mean the one in early August, if there is one.

In any case, we were referring to the ones closer to the end of the year.

Just so you know, it hasn't been decided for sure. It's really just an issue of the sheer size of the data we have to squeeze on the disc(s). We're talking gigs and gigs of compressed data. The number of CDs that might require makes me break out in a cold sweat.

We actually never have used a PC DVD logo because we haven't ever released a game on DVD. I don't think we even had one created until recently. You'll note that the official site (www.elderscrolls.com) says PC Software.

What the game ships on won't be determined by what's at the end of the trailer. And if you thought it was going to be on CD only because of what was at the end of the trailer, then I'm telling you that may change. That happens sometimes in life (change).

For those of you that have been wondering, just a quick word. Oblivion does not REQUIRE a hard drive to work on Xbox 360. It will work on every Xbox 360. We would recommend you get one if you have the means because we use it heavily if you have one and it makes the game play smoother, but it is in no way a requirement.

We don't really favor one platform over another. To be honest, as a developer, it gets tiring to deal with people screaming at us who bought our game and go on the forums screaming about how it's broken and buggy, and emailing us screaming for tech support, and then we find out they're using a PC with an on-board video card with 16 megs of RAM on a Pentium II processor.

The people who own PCs and are hard core PC players know whether or not they're machine is good enough, because they're saavy enough. But many folks don't have a clue what a video card driver is, and have never bothered to update theirs, and so for those folks who are wondring whether their video card from three generations ago is going to run the game, we'd rather have them spend $299 or $399 on hardware that will absolutely run the game full-tilt, than have them spend $500 on a video card only to find out they need more RAM, and updated sound card drivers, and....

Because the people they yell at about that usually isn't the computer manufacturer, or sound card folks, or anyone else, it's us. "My computer runs Warcraft II without any problems, why doesn't your game work?!?!?!?!"

See my point?

In_leather_Armor wrote: "True, but if someone asks you if they should do a major PC upgrade clearly its likely they know something about PCs, therefore just saying essentially "get a console so we dont have to answer tech support questions" isnt very nice."

You couldn't be more wrong about a"clearly the know something about PCs" I'm not talking about people that are on these boards, I'm talking about the rest of the world that owns PCs.

I'm also talking about people like some guys I talked to that work for a competing console manufacturer who wanted to play Morrowind but didn't want to put in the time and effort to upgrade their PCs, so they just bought an Xbox...their competitor's console...just to play Morrowind. They're very tech saavy, but they only have so much money and so it's much better for us to point them to a most cost-effective one for them.

Again, we can't reply to every individual and go case-by-case on whether they should upgrade or by a 360. For most folks, 360 will give them the best possible game experience for the least amount of money.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath. There's nothing wrong with asking the question. Here's the answer, again.

There are quite a few people that do not have a PC that is as good for playing games as the Xbox 360 in terms of processing, particularly graphics processing power, and so forth. If it were a PC, it's a pretty high end PC, gaming wise.

So, my answer, our answer, has been to someone who isn't sure which version to get, they should get the Xbox 360 version. In most cases, that's very sound advice. The amount they'll spend is probably less than a top-of-the-line video card, we don't have to worry about any other shortcomings of their PC, etc.

Plus, and this is very important, people who are really into PC games are going to get the PC version. Same for console gamers. We're not trying to convert or play favorites. It isn't about which version is better. We're simply trying to talk to the folks in the middle who don't have any idea what to do and guide them to a sensible choice.

I don't like that people bought Morrowind PC and couldn't experience the cool water because of their video card, or they had to turn off or down some settings. I want them to play the game in all it's glory. And it turns out, for a lot of people, that meant getting an Xbox to play Morrowind. That is why we sold more Xbox copies than PC copies. People didn't want to hassle with upgrading their PC, so they got an Xbox for less and were able to enjoy the game. Not in our control, we didn't play favorites, we didn't make one version better than the other, the market decided that.

Is one version "better" than the other? No. Same game, different platforms. Would you rather play at your desk or your couch.? Controller or keyboard and mouse? Pretty much everyone on these boards has already made those decisions. We're not trying to convert you or convince you to change your mind. We're not saying some of you will have more fun than others. We just want the most number of people to get the best, most consistent experience of Oblivion.

Our goal is always to make the game for as many platforms as possible without changing the game, so that people can decide the platform that is best for them and enjoy it. We don't play favorites and we don't dumb down our games.