DailyGame: Is the “fast track� transportation system your solution to making Oblivion more approachable for ADHD gamers, or did you conceive of it more to help gamers simply traverse the larger area more quickly?

Pete Hines: It was one of those areas we looked at and asked ourselves why it worked the way it did previously. Why make someone start dialog with an NPC in order to be able to fast travel from one spot to another? Why only those locations? What’s the point of not letting them quickly go back to someplace they’ve at least been once, and probably more like a hundred times? We try to look at making decisions that make a game more fun without forcing the player to make our choice. If you don’t want to fast travel, don’t. Nobody’s forcing you to. But it’s one of those things you don’t really think is a big deal until you play the game with it in, and then you can’t imagine playing without it. I use it all the time to hop around between parts of the Imperial City, just to save time traveling and spend more time doing fun stuff.

"After Pete showed off the parts of the demo we'd seen at X05 and again at an event in San Francisco, he moved into some new territory. The first was a city that we've seen a few screens of before but never anything in motion. As one of Oblivion's nine major cities, this one seemed huge. As we walked through there was evidence of a great attention to detail including towering rock walls, quaint cobblestone houses, gardens of small trees with bright red leaves, and a gigantic stone chapel."

"BT: On a further Xbox to PC issue, there has been much talk of ATI's Unified Shader Architecture in the Xbox 360. However, this technology is not available on PCs currently, and will likely not be until at least the release of Windows Vista at the end of 2006. So will this be a benefit to Xbox users that they have it, or will there be no visible difference in speed for PC users? Will the PC version require being patched to make use of this if and when the technology shifts?

GC: The unified shader architecture definitely does help with the speed of shader processing. Plus, it's completely transparent to developers as the optimization all occurs behind the scenes on the hardware side of things. However, we've optimized our shaders so that the overall difference between Oblivion running on the Xbox 360, and Oblivion running on a fast PC with a Shader Model 3.0 card should be slight. We're locking the framerate at 30fps on the 360 so you probably won't see framerate improvements vs. the PC, but you might see a more stable framerate."

"BT: Speaking of physics, the forests look amazing. And it has been rumored that the trees even sway with wind, which got me thinking. Wind is something that is very difficult...it's hard to think of all the subtle interactions it creates. If there's wind that is swaying trees, etc, will there be leaves blowing free? Will it blow your cape, if your character wears one, or their hair? Or change an arrow's course of flight, since you spent so much time in the effort of making ranged fighting more realistic?

GC: The forests and grass do animate differently in response to changing weather conditions. There are also ambient effects to increase your sense of immersion like leaves falling from trees, butterflies flying around, and birds chattering in the trees above you. No cloth physics unfortunately. We found they are a huge sink for processing time and we'd rather spend it in places that really make a difference to the gameplay like AI. Arrows will shoot through the air using physics; arcing based on force and gravity. Wind won't blow them off course however. I think that would really decrease the fun of archery, and you'd start wanting to clutter the UI with things like wind indicators."

"XG: What types of enemies should we expect to see and how many classes?

You’ll see the full range of things. Undead like zombies and skeletons, classic fantasy creatures like goblins and trolls, different types of Daedra (demons), and so on. There are probably 40 to 50 different creatures, and lots of variations within each creature."

XG: How does stealth work in Oblivion? Has the 360 brought anything new to this aspect?

There’s nothing really specific to the Xbox 360 that has enhanced stealth gameplay. We spent a lot of time walking on it in general in terms of creating systems that allow the player to play as a thief-type character without getting out of character. So you don’t have to resort to magic or big weapons if you don’t want to. We do a lot more things with light and shadow and detection while you’re in stealth mode- how quiet you can be when in certain types of armor, or based on how fast you’re moving. At higher skill levels of Sneak you get bonuses, like successful attacks while you’re sneaking, things like that. I’ve been doing some of that stuff lately with my character, having just joined the thieves’ guild. It’s fun stuff.