"Jashin: “Bigger, longer, more content-saturated than Morrowind�… With such a beefy graphics engine, how would you make good on the promise of surpassing Morrowind?
kathode: Yes, Oblivion is bigger as far as land mass goes. On the art side, it is a challenge, as higher fidelity art does take longer to produce; we have developed several specialized tools to help us with these problems. For instance, we have tools that can procedurally generate landscape based on parameters we provide, which just beats the pants off of doing it all by hand like we did in Morrowind. Adding lots of really talented artists has helped a lot too.
Emil: I think with Morrowind, one of the biggest criticisms was that the NPCs felt a bit stale. There were so many of them, and they weren't unique enough. With Oblivion, we're really taking pains to imbue the NPCs with specific personalities. That includes facial expressions, specific dialogue responses, stuff like that. That's really just ONE way we're exceedingly what Morrowind had to offer. Another area of the game that has really gotten a stellar treatment is that of cities. When you look at the cities/towns of Morrowind, like Seyda Neen...they pale in comparison to the cities in Oblivion...."