"Much improved will also be the AI, now NPCs will have daily lives, they'll perform tasks you'd expect them to perform. A welcome relief from Morrowind where the NPCs effectively stood around all day, now they'll be much more dynamic and will react with whatever surroundings they find themselves in. However with this comes new problems (for the player that is), they'll be able to steal from you, as you can from them. The game will be populated with around one thousand NPCs, a smaller number then Morrowind but still huge, all the dialogue will now be voice acted and they'll be able to have limited conversations with each other, something that will greatly add to the realism of the world."

"All of our Elder Scrolls games follow a similar philosophy: "Live another life, in another world." With each game, we go back and look at how we can make that come alive for the next generation of hardware and gameplay. So the "big-world, do-anything" style remains, and I think that's an essential element to what we do with the series. The player needs a certain size and a large number of choices to really make role-playing feel meaningful. Lessons we learned? I think we learned that taking risks works. We took a lot of risks in changing our game systems to create Morrowind. Also bringing it to the Xbox was a big risk for us. Both of those paid off huge, particularly the Xbox, which is where the majority of our sales came from. I think a lot of publishers really underestimate how much a console player wants out of game, and how much they can handle. They're not stupid, and they love deep games done well. So going into this one, we knew we wanted to reinvent a lot of the game again, take on big technology jumps, and bring the game to as many platforms as possible."

"As many of you know, possibly the biggest weakness of the previous Elder Scrolls game was the insane vastness (I regret for using such idiotic phrasing, I really do) and complete open-endedness that made the game much less focused than it should've been [Says you and nobody else -Paul]. Many players would give up on the quests soon after realizing that they'd actually have to travel miles and miles (virtually) in order to get anywhere in game. Consequently they would lose focus, and then that sense of having too much freedom would actually limit their enjoyment of the game. This is something Tod and the rest of the team are definitely looking to change in Oblivion."

"The primary story of Oblivion takes place in Tamriel's capital province, Cyrodiil. There, the Emperor's throne is empty, and with its vacancy the gates to Oblivion (hell, essentially) are open. Demons are spilling through and attacking Cyrodiil's people and towns. You must find a proper heir to the throne in order to close Oblivion and restore order -- while also discovering what sinister plot triggered the chaos in the first place.

Oblivion will use a new AI system which Bethesda is calling Radiant AI. The developer explains that NPCs will now make their own choices based on the world around them. Each will go about its own activities, deciding when and where to eat, whom to talk to, whether to steal, go to church, etc. Bethesda is also adding full speech and facial animation for all NPC dialog."

"Right now we're working on our dynamic compass that will show you how close you are to dungeons while wandering the forests or where the person is that you need to talk to make a quest progress," Howard said. They've also altered the way players travel in the world. Technically speaking, the world of Oblivion is actually larger than Morrowind, but as Howard himself pointed out, Bethesda doesn't want "hundreds of hours of gameplay" to consist of a few minutes of fun punctuated by hours of boring traveling. Instead, the game will include a revised fast travel map that will hopefully eliminate a great deal of the annoying repetitive travel over long distances.