Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

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Preview at GS with some Screen shots.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/theelderscrollsivoblivion/preview_6111720.html?q=1&tag=gs_hp_topslot_click

Most intresting thing in the interview to me was:

GS: One of the most uniquely enjoyable (and some critics would suggest, unbalanced) aspects of Morrowind was its open-ended character creation and advancement system. Is a similar system planned for the new game?

TH: Yes, and I would agree that parts are unbalanced and that's something we hope to do much better this time. We really like the skill-based system, as it rewards you for role-playing your character class. Now, the number of skills and what they do has been changed again, and you have a huge variety of choices you can make, but hopefully you'll see pretty quickly in the game that we have a better balance between combat, magic, and stealth skills. We've really overhauled each area so that people could play the whole game using one set of those skills. So combat gets much deeper with different attacks you learn as your skills increase. Magic is similar to our past games in how it's used, but now it's more effective to use as your only means of playing the game. And with stealth, we've totally changed how we handle this, thanks to Emil Pagliarulo who joined us from the Thief series of stealth games.

[Spriggan]

Evil Avatar has a great interview here with one of the producers and a game designer.  Some realy cool stuff in it.

On NPCs

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.
The radiant AI system is our world-spanning 24 hr. AI system for NPCs.The "radiant" part just refers to the fact that NPCs will react with their surroundings - so they might examine objects they find interesting, they might go look for food if they get hungry, they'll sit on a bench and read a good book, they'll have conversations with other NPCs about what's going on in the world. The cool thing about it is that it's not scripted at all. It's all governed by rules we can dictate in the editor. We give the NPC goals, and they choose how to complete the goals based on their personality traits - aggressiveness, responsibility, confidence, etc.

When you have NPCs you can schedule for 24 hours, and who actually have the ability to act autonomously, you as a designer really need to be careful. Because let me tell you, some unexpected things can happen. I had a Dark Brotherhood NPC who was sneaking around on her own, and I wasn't sure why. Turns out she was scheduled to eat, but didn't have any food, and because her "responsibility" level was so low, she was skulking around looking for some munchies to steal.

Combat

The melee system has undergone a complete renovation... you attack is [now] based on collision...In Morrowind...if you just whaled on an opponent you'd eventually bring him down. Melee combat, for example, is now much more tactical...like making block a button press, and making characters recoil when they get blocked.

Yeah, and it looks and feels solid. Oh my God, when you see someone get hit with a two-handed war hammer. Ouch.

There's a lot more in the interview but I only listed the things that stood out the most to me.  I haven't been this excited for a game since FFXII.

[Onion of Death]

It looks like it will have some stiff hardware requirements though. I don't know if I'll meet them, and my computer gets ornery if you put anything new in it.

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Ya the Elderscrolls tends to take up lots of pc power, I was never able to run Morrowind at the normal spec until I got my lappy and even then it was a little on the slow side.

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Oblivion Trailor is up in all it's Patrick Steward goodness
http://www.gamespot.com/x360/rpg/theelderscrollsivoblivion/media.html