You can add magical spells to any fights you encounter, as well as numerous blocks and combos - all governed by character statistics that affect the kind of moves you can pull off and how successful they are. We've already seen exciting battles in elven dungeons against skeletal warriors, zombies, goblins and hellish knights, with the combat feeling much more brutal and realistic than Morrowind, metal clashing viciously against metal, anguished screams echoing through dark halls and blood spilling freely.
You also have the use of other weapons, such as arrows, that will stick realistically in wood or flesh, or bounce off stone. However, another weapon you can use in the dungeons is stealth - creep into the shadows and your aiming reticule becomes an eye, indicating that you're hidden from view. Now you can sneak up behind enemies and give them a well-timed smack on the back of the head with the butt of your bow.
If you need to check how your character is progressing, bringing up the journal screen will display everything you need to know. Bethesda has decided not to include experience points as in a traditional RPG however, with your character constantly improving different skills the more you play.
A major criticism of Morrowind was the lack of truly interactive NPCs, but this looks to have been improved drastically with Bethesda's new radiant Al' system. They'll engage in non-. You can have conversations with NPCs. The new 'persuasion area' allows you to give your replies some attitude, so you can bully them, for-example, or tell a joke - the one about the goblin and the farmer's daughter is always a winner.
You can tell by the superb facial animation and tone of their voice if you've managed to win them over - or become the social equivalent of an income tax inspector. With a total of nine main cities, dozens of settlements, gorgeous forests, huge dungeons including the yet-to-be-revealed hellish underground levels and a population of thousands of NPCs to interact with, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is definitely one of the most eagerly awaited role-playing games of the year.
Don't miss next month's when we'll bring you an exclusive in-depth preview, with unmissable info and never-seen-before screenshots. How Do You make the ground-breaking even more innovative, the freeform more focused and the visually impressive into the visually spectacular? These are the three challenges currently being faced by Bethesda Softworks - the team behind the now legendary Elder Scrolls series - as it charges relentlessly towards a Christmas release date for what could just be the most ground-breaking role-player in years, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Up till now, Bethesda has been teasing us with snippets of information about this fourth instalment of their Tamriel-based series, without ever unveiling too much. Until now. This near priceless information, however, cost us dear. After some extensive bartering that saw us parting with Sefton's life savings almost eight pounds in real money and Porter's food rations for the next six weeks a halfeaten packet of Frazzles , we managed to get hold of some exclusive new Infer and screenshots from Todd Howard - the game's executive producer.
What sets Bethesda apart from the majority of its competitors is its undying dedication to reinventing RPG conventions, and breaking away from the norm is at the very heart of the company's developmental ethos. For us, Oblivion is the chance to go back and look at everything we've done before and decide what we liked, what we wanted to do differently, and what new things we wanted to do, explains Howard.
We're big on blowing everything up and starting over again for every game. Even though we're essentially doing a sequel, we don't want it to feel derivative. Morrowind was a work of genuine innovation, its freeform, dynamic -though at times intimidating - gaming world providing a fresh new approach to the fantasy RPG genre. So when we recently heard that Oblivion would be less freeform than its illustrious predecessor, we were naturally a tad nervous.
Was Bethesda about to sell out on us or were there other, subtler, more refined reasons for making Oblivion less sprawling? I don't know if it's constrained as much as it is focused, Todd assures us. We simply felt a larger obligation to give the player better feedback on what they should be doing, and providing information to let them know they're being successful as they complete things.
We're not constraining anything, because it's still a completely freeform, open-ended game. It's more about the kind of feedback we give and making sure players aren't lost, unless they want to be lost. With that sorted, it was time to get down to the juicy details.
Judging by these screenshots, it's clear that the world of Tamriel has taken on an even more lifelike look than in Morrowind, with character faces displaying genuine depth and emotion and the scenery looking lush and alive. Howard assures us that the visuals will be made all the more impressive by the game's new physics model. We've really ramped up the level of realism and the sense of immersion In the environments we've created.
When you see an arrow bounce off stone or stick in a creature, we don't want you to think twice about it. You can walk up to a dead creature and pluck the arrows out because, well, that's how it's supposed to work. The combat system has also received a complete overhaul. How often in RPGs have you been left feeling like you've had little to do with victory, or had little chance to avert a crushing defeat, due to behind-the-scenes dice deciding your fate rather than personal skill?
It's an age-old RPG problem, but it's one that Howard and his team appear to be tackling with vigour and determination. The fact that two previous iterations of the new combat system are now lining Bethesda'S bins is testament to that fact. It took us a long time to get there, to find something that felt nght and worked within an RPG," explains Howard. We wanted things to be under the player's control and make sense, such as swinging a sword, seeing it hit an NPC and having it inflict damage.
But we also wanted to have the player's stats and abilities to have a very real impact on what's going on. I think we've found a balance that will make sense to anyone. Bethesda is also attempting to reinvent how you'll level up, by dispensing with experience points and replacing them with a revamped system. So, killing a skeleton with your sword and shield doesn't give you experience points, but it does improve your skill, more specifically, at using a sword and shield.
As those skills improve, your character levels up, and you'll eventually be able to do new things with those skills. So, if you get really good at blocking, there's a chance that when you block an attack your character will knock the enemy back with their shield. It's like an extra attack, and it's based on your skill, not on hitting some combination of keys. Sounds good to us. But of course RPGs - or at least the best RPGs - are never just about hitting undead beings as hard as you can until they run out of hit points, and the Elder Scrolls series has always prided itself on the quality of not only its freeform environments, but of the believability of its inhabitants, too.
If there was one major failing that Morrowind possessed, it was the woodenness of its NPCs. With Oblivion, Bethesda is seeking to rectify that farting. At first, we saw a lot of interesting behaviour from our NPCs," explains Howard. One time we had everyone in town show up in the same tavern at the same time to eat lunch, and one guy didn't have any money, so he went around trying to steal everyone else s food.
We've now got it to the point where we don't see too much wacky stuff anymore, but the process has been a lot of fun - to create this system and then watch NPCs do things you hadn't even considered. Clearly, Bethesda has matured as a developer over the past few years, its realisation that more isn t always better a clear sign of the new directions and priorities that are dnvmg Oblivion forward. It gives us every reason to believe that the fourth instalment of the senes could be its best yet.
And that's without us having even talked about the game's unique dungeons, each one jam-packed with fiendish traps to snare the unwitting adventurer, or the extensive cast of enemies, including skeletons, liches, trolls, goblins and various kinds of Daedra. And let's not forget the spells, which Howard sadly wasn't quite ready to talk to us about just yet.
That juicy info is yet to come. Oblivion really is starting to take on a truly gargantuan form, casting an ominous shadow over the RPG genre with its innovative ideas and mammoth ambition. It's hard to argue with Oblivion's promise, and with Bethesda having already proved itself so conclusively in the past, it's just possible that we could be about to see an RPG evolution that'll send the genre in new and exciting directions - one so consuming, so lifelike, that real life may become just a distant memory.
One of the most potentially exciting devices that Oblivion is set to employ is something called the Persuasion Area. This will allow you to use your character's unique skills to persuade NPCs to do what you want them to.
Some people will want to just run up to someone and hack them with a sword before they get two words out, so their idea of persuasion will lie more in the careful application of brute force, says Howard. But everyone in the world will respond to what you say and do. Many different factors will forge your persuasion methods and their effectiveness, such as what quests you've embarked on, what factions you belong to and how you've treated NPCs in the past.
If you get really good at Speechcraft, continues Howard encouragingly, you can take an NPC that really doesn't care for you that much, and sweet-talk them to the point where they're sharing intimate secrets with you. Frankly we're not too sure we that we want to know about an elf's deepest darkest fantasy involving an inflatable orc, three tins of Vaseline and a can of condensed milk. Then again As Sefton mentioned last month in his Oblivion preview, Bethesda paid a visit to Maryland University to learn all about nature.
No, not because it wanted to start its own herb garden or nurture geraniums, but because it wanted to make Oblivion's forests of which there'll be plenty and landscapes look as realistic as possible.
We're using this system to procedurally generate the game's landscape, and so we wanted the system to create environments that looked right.
Not just how the trees and rocks appear, but how things are shaped, how mountains have eroded over time. We want you to look off into the distance at a group of mountains and swear they're real. As Job Interviews, go it'll be short and relatively painless. It's just you, a disinterested chap named Haskill, a bare room, a desk and a chair. After such an imposing entranceway, surrounded by otherworldly vegetation thats leeched through its tableau of linked screaming faces into the lands of Cyrodiil, you were perhaps expecting something a little more grandiose within.
Then, as the interview concludes, the dull, featureless walls melt away into a cloud of butterflies. And then it happens: you're somewhere slightly mad. The setting is the tom realm of the daedric Prince of Madness, one Sheogorath, if you haven't been keeping tabs on your Elder Scrolls lore. Bethesda's stated aim is to create a new self-contained land where the characters are more tightly defined, where dialogue is richer and where their quest designers can stretch their imaginative powers to the full, under the broad canopy of the insane, the unstable and the downright psychotic.
The Shivering Isles represent madness itself - eternally split both physically and politically between the bickering forces of Mania wild-eyed, unhinged and Dementia paranoid, gloomy, depressed. Sheogorath rules over them all, but his realm is in danger - under threat from the blank conformity of the Knights of Order who have begun to appear on its fringes. And guess what? Thats where you come in. Art-wise, Mania is a lot more vibrant colourful - almost over-saturated in parts.
In the lowlands, in Dementia, it's really more of a creepy atmosphere. A lot of mosses hanging out of dark trees and stuff - it's a very claustrophobic feeling thats meant to evoke more of a hard feel to it. Obviously we don't do survival horror, but its a creepier place in general. This ridge even runs through the capital city of the isles, New Sheoth, splitting it in two in true Berlin Wall-style.
The stunning fountains and impressive waterfalls of Manias half of the city known as Bliss are a sight to behold, yet they drain into the half ruled by Dementia known as The Crucible , and there the water congeals into dank, stagnant piles of sludge in the arse-end of the city. It's a land split between Alice In Wonderlandstye exuberance and the type of ancient and gloomy forests in which hobbits always seemed to be getting lost in the Lord Of The Rings movies.
You get a lot of obsessives, bizarre artists and the like, who are insanely creative but insane nonetheless. Whereas in Dementia you find the psychotics, the paranoid - people who are afraid of things they've created in their own minds. Once the fog of butterflies dissipates, you find yourself in a walled area known as The Fringe, and to escape this there's the small matter of getting past the goliath Gatekeeper that adorns this magazine's cover - a terrifying construction of the body parts of various creatures whose job description provides a fair amount t of the plot later on.
Once you're past him though, youll find yourself searching out the man of the moment: Sheogorath. And once you meet him, alongside his loyal chamberlain Haskill very much a Jeeves to the big man's Bertie Wooster , the plot starts ticking.
I need a mortal champion and you're the only one who's made it to talk with me, so you're him. You are my champion'," explains an enthusiastic Nelson.
Sheogorath only gives you bits and pieces - he doles out information slowly. He's the god of madness, and he tends to speak in unintentional riddles and go off on tangents about pudding. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Now as I understand there are some official DLC's released for the game like:. Where am I supposed to get them? I checked the official oblivion and bethesda websites but couldn't find anything regarding this. Can I get them for free or do I have to buy them? I would probably support paying individually for the mods, but I don't want to purchase a whole new game. Download Here Help Center. Share this post Digg Tweet Stumbleupon delicious reddit Facebook.
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