After years of development, countless promises of sublime quality, and a few minor delays, on March 20th, 2006 Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion was released to the world and it was good.  Wait, good is not a significant enough quantifying term, good is putting it too lightly. Oblivion is in essence one of the best RPGs of the last decade and its quality will be hard to match for years to come.  This is a standard folks, and I hope more in the future strive to emulate or match it.  So why the glowing praise right now?  Am I leading into something or just checking for polyps as I climb nose first up Bethesda's butt?  Thankfully it is the former and boy is it with good reason.  I had the distinct pleasure of an interview with the face of Oblivion itself at E3.  Who is this mysterious stranger?  Well lets sit down and find out what he has to say about Elder Scrolls Oblivion.


The_Spaniard: Okay, I'm here at the Bethesda booth with Ashley Chang who is the producer for Oblivion and he has agreed to do the best to answer any questions we have for him.
Ashley Chang: Hi, nice to meet you guys.
The_Spaniard: A pleasure.

TS: Now, I'm sure that most of us are familiar with Oblivion, console gamers PC gamers, etc we all know about it.  This is a very big title, one of the biggest of the season right now and looking at game of the year status so we are going to skip past the basic synopsis of the game (any and all info needed on Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion can be gleaned from the website here http://www.elderscrolls.com/home/home.htm) and ask about the future.  We want to know what you guys have planned for the future in the way of new content, bug fixes, general PC and console releases, just basically anything you can or would like to tell us.
AC: Sure, absolutely.  Every since we finished the game we have continued working on content for the game for Xbox live and the PC as well.  We have the Thieves Den that is coming out next week, and is geared towards stealth characters.  You get your own pirate gang and pirate cove.  We have other downloadable content that we will be announcing as well.  New dungeons, new environments and places for the player, we have all this continuing bonus content scheduled out to the end of the year so far and we will keep making more as long as people keep wanting us to.
AC: We also have patches on the way as well.  We are testing one rather large one right now that fixes a lot of quest bugs and a few crashes here and there.  We are planning on releasing that within the next two to three weeks as well.  The horse armor was very popular and we really felt that we could expand on that.  So a future release we want to have is improved horse armor and even Daedrec horse armor which was missing from the initial release.  We also have some big plans for content that won't be coming till later own in the year so definitely stay tuned because we are certainly not done with Oblivion yet.


TS: Ok, you knew that Oblivion was going to be an Xbox 360 title from very early on in development, so what was it like creating a title for a videogame console that did not only not exist yet but was so many years away from being released?
AC: We had to make a lot of guesses, a lot of assumptions, some of them panned out some of them didn't, but it was definitely very exciting.  We like to be on the cutting edge, we like to make things that are big and sexy and fast and good looking and that was our main priority, to essentially make the RPG for the next generation.  We knew fairly early on that we wanted the 360 to be our target platform, so about four years ago we got together and we made some guesses on what we thought it was going to be and overall I'd say we got pretty close to it.  As with anything, when you are making something this big and this risky you have to take a lot of chances and that will definitely affect the development.  There is a reason that our games take three to four years and again that is because we are on the cutting edge and we like to take a lot of risks.

TS: In what ways would you say you overestimated the 360 hardware and on the same token underestimated it?
AC: Well the biggest issue really is that our games are so big and memory intensive that our biggest concern was over how much memory the box would have.  We were shooting for 256 which was the original spec, and obviously Microsoft came back and changed that doubling it to 512 which was a huge huge boon for us.  So that there is an example of how we were trying to be conservative and then they came through for us and we were able to fit more stuff on the box. The CPUs are very fast and very powerful and with the multiple threading going on that's something that we have never had before, so there was a learning curve there.  It is really an awesome box and we are really excited to continue working on it.


TS: What would you say is personally your favorite scene in Oblivion gameplay or otherwise?
AC: Most developers have what we call their "Pet Features", they push for them really hard.  Some of them are rational and some of them can get quite irrational.  Now my pet feature was really Cloud Ruler Temple.  This place is very unique in the entire game and is the headquarters for the Blades, it is part of the main quest and you can get to it fairly soon.  We spent two to three times more on it than we were honestly supposed to, but all that extra time spent to trick it out was really worth it and it is definitely my favorite piece of art, my favorite location in the game.

TS: What would you personally say you prefer, the 360 version or the PC version?
AC: Oh boy, I don't know, that's hard to say.  You know, it's not quite Sophie's choice, but it's pretty close.  I'm a big PC gamer, but to be honest with the 360 you have the Marketplace and gamerscores and that stuff is really really cool.
TS: So are you saying that pushes it over the top for you?
AC: It really does, I mean we have our own webpage at work and it lists everyones gamertag as well as their gamerscores.  It goes by who has the higher score and we are definitely very competitive.  I'm all about Marketplace, going online, downloading content, and seeing what my buddies are doing.  There is a definite community there that is missing from the PC side that is really marvelous. 
AC: However on the PC side the mod community has been doing some really interesting things with the interface, with leveling, etc.  Right now I'm really interested and looking forward to seeing what they can do now as well as in a year or two when they really start learning our tools.  So again it is a pretty difficult choice.


TS: So are you yourself playing it on the 360 or the PC or both?  Also what would you say is your favorite PC mod right now?
AC: *laughs* Actually I'm not allowed to tell you what my favorite PC mod is.
TS: Oh.. I see.  Well that's fine.
AC: *Interjects* I'm joking actually.
*Everybody including camera man laughs*
TS: Well to be honest sometimes that is the case.  You know with 3rd party mods and all they can sometimes have things that aren't exactly..
AC: *Interrupts* Oh I really don't know what you would be referring to.
*Camera man laughs again*
AC: In any case I'm a big fan of the interface mod actually.  The interface mod really expands the interface and I admit that it is definitely a weakness in the PC side, but it's a concession we had to make for the 360.  Though to be honest with you I love the 360 controller, I love playing the game with that controller. 
TS: So would you say it felt pretty consolecentric on the PC?
AC: Well.. To a certain extent; we develop on the PC primarily and while the 360 is our primary platform for many years during development it didn't exist, so we only had the PC for the longest time.  To answer your question really I am playing it on the 360, I am still playing it after all this time and again it is mostly because of my gamerscore more than anything else.


TS: Okay, now for the big question that everybody is wondering about.  What is your personal opinion on the ESRB's decision?  (note to the readers: the ESRB or Entertainment Software Review Board has recently redesignated the PC version of Oblivion to Mature because of the effects of a third party mod to the game.)
AC: Nice question.  I would have to say that I really don't have much of an opinion, I mean we just make games..
TS: *Interupts* Don't have an opinion or are not allowed to have one?
AC: No no, it's not that really, quite frankly we make games we don't rate them.  So we make them and they rate them, that's their job.  We stand by our game and while we put out a release that goes into more detail all I can say to you is once again "We make games we don't rate them."
TS: Well if I could go into more detail, what do you think about the ESRB re-rating a game based on 3rd party content?
AC: Again we made a press release about that, that goes into more detail and I would have to refer you to that.


TS: I believe that's all of our questions.  We would like to thank very much, we had a great time.  I'd like to take this opportunity to say that us over at WDFnews are big fans of your game and I can honestly think of only one person from the site off the top of my head that really disliked the game.  So I'd have to say that's pretty good right there.
AC: Only one?
TS: Yeah only one.
AC: Aww man, I am so sorry about that, I guess we'll have to try harder next time.
TS: Oh you better..  Thanks again.