TES4's little brother. The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was set to hit Sony's iconic console
Bethesda Softworks has been trying to release its titles on portable consoles from time to time. One of the forgotten projects being developed under its wings was The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion, which was supposed to land on PSP.
Few people today that the Elder Scrolls series had a spin-off subseries titled The Elder Scrolls: Travels, designed for mobiles. This brand never broke through to the mass consciousness of players, as it was only available on smartphones. Perhaps the most famous representative was The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey, released in 2004 for Nokia N-Gage.
However, it could have been made on a much larger scale, like The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion for PlayStation Portable. Let's check if fans of the universe created by Bethesda should regret that the project was never fully realized.
Developers
The story of the pocket Oblivion should start with the fact that this title was being created by Climax Studios. We're talking about a team that, over the years, has specialized in creating projects that are "offshoots" of major brands. It's enough to say that their portfolio includes handheld Shattered Memories, and the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles trilogy.
No wonder that when Bethesda Softworks was looking for a partner to create Oblivion for PlayStation Portable, they chose the crew in question. The team eagerly set to work, trying to do everything possible to make the dream of a mobile Oblivion a reality.
Mobile Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was a title that was meant to impress the world not only with its size, but also with its feeling of being alive. The Climax Studios had access to the pre-release version of Bethesda's early magnum opus, so they knew from the start that, due to the technical limitations of the PSP, they wouldn't be able to port Oblivion to the handheld exactly as it was. For this reason, they decided to change the convention from a sandbox RPG to a kind of dungeon crawler, in which, in addition to the main location serving as a hub, many other places would be waiting for us to visit, to which we could teleport.
A representation of a "living" world would be the changes happening in the main hub due to our actions and decisions, such as the appearance of NPCs and the quests they offer. Moreover, although the game world wouldn't be open, the locations would be crisscrossed with paths, so there wouldn't necessarily be just one way to reach the goal.
The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was not supposed to replay the plot of the "big" Oblivion, but rather take place alongside it. The game would show us how other regions of Tamriel struggle with the Oblivion Crisis and would feature the sinister Zhurl as the main antagonist.
The adventure would mainly take place in the province of High Rock, specifically in places such as the island of Rhalta, the cities of Anticlere and Glenpoint, the village of MoonGuard, and even the ruined Daggerfall. Besides, we would regularly end up in the Abyss, where we would face bosses to close the next gates.
The fact that we are dealing with a game related to Oblivion would be evidenced not only by its plot but also by the beginning of the game (the adventure would start in an underground prison) and the interface, which would look like it was directly taken from the main project.
A smaller scale than in the case of the original Oblivion would not mean, however, that we would get a small project. The devs planned to prepare over 180 quests, 18 skills divided into main and secondary ones, as well as a character development system. The content was planned to be so extensive that there were concerns that the game would have to be split onto two UMD discs.
Issues and inclined plane
Development process on The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion started in 2005. The game initially was based on the proprietary technology of Climax Studios, however, over time, it turned out that it wasn't able to meet the high demands of this project. As a result, the team behind it tried to save the situation by moving the whole game to the Renderware Studio engine, which worked well with the PSP.
Unfortunately, it was already too late to save this project. The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was supposed to be released on the PSP in the spring of 2007 (who knows, maybe it was even planned to be released on March 20, the day of Oblivion's launch on PlayStation 3?), but ultimately, that didn't happen.
For unspecified reasons, Bethesda gave the developers a red light, writing off the entire project as a loss. After everything, both the publisher and Climax Studios officially didn't comment on the reasons why the mobile Oblivion didn't go on sale. We can only assume that the lack of progress and/or technical problems are to blame, and as a result, the inability to meet the high-quality requirements of the project.
Playable prototype and other remnants
The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion is one of the few cancelled titles that we don't necessarily have to just imagine, or possibly ire the few materials showcasing it in action. In 2016, a playable prototype of this project was leaked online, allowing anyone interested to check what they missed. The others, however, can watch video materials from its very early version.
The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion could become the first production under this subsidiary brand, which would have gained a lot of publicity. It remains in the realm of speculation what would have happened to this enterprise if the sub-series of The Elder Scrolls Travels had not become one of Bethesda's highlights and had not been developed in parallel with the mainstream The Elder Scrolls. It would even be desirable because, due to the smaller size of the games representing it, we might be able to play new titles more often than once every few years...
