April 1, 2007

The final Oblivion

With the recent success of the newly released Shivering Isles expansion, Bethesda Softworks took the opportunity to announce their final expansion for Oblivion. Originally intended to be the cover story of next month's Game Informer, the story has leaked onto the net (much like the Halo 3 story last year) and we have it for you! Here's a chunk of the interview from Bethesda president Vlatko Andonov:


"For our final expansion for the game [Oblivion] we wanted to do something different. I think Elder Scrolls fans will be very happy with it. What we have done... is open up the province of Morrowind for players to travel to. The end result is something truly amazing. We've had a team working on this almost as long as Oblivion itself. What we've done is taken the base [of Morrowind] and upgraded it using the Oblivion engine. Of course, it will be a different experience than playing the original Morrowind on your Xbox or PC. For example, we've scattered Oblivion Gates throughout Morrowind. You'll notice, though, that once you enter these Morrowind gates they will have a flavor all their own. Oh, and don't worry- the Morrowind expansions Bloodmoon and Tribunal are included."


He goes on to talk a little about how the game came to be:

"We've had many fans say things like 'If all of the provinces border each other why can't we visit the rest of Tamriel?'. So we decided: why not? As you can imagine this expansion is massive. Expect it cost around the same as Oblivion itself- about $50 or 5500 Microsoft Points when it releases this fall. We've also decided to keep the content Xbox and PC exclusive. This is mostly due to the reason that we started development for both platforms before we had PS3 dev. kits. As you can imagine, it's also much easier to upgrade a game when you can start with the same basic code. Morrowind was originally for the Xbox and PC so, naturally, we decided it would be easiest to develop the expansion for the 360 and PC. It would take far to much time and effort porting it to the PS3."

Finally, he talked a little about what to expect:

"...of course the visuals have been significantly upgraded. Also we've re-recorded the Morrowind soundtrack as well as 10,000 plus new lines of dialog. We've added some new enemies, dungeons, weapons, armor, and quests. You can travel between the two lands whenever you want and even take your horse along [in addition to your other Oblivion items and vice versa] ."

Does this mean you can be a werewolf and a vampire!? Probably not. Guess we'll have to just wait and see!

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