Of course, there’s a lot more to the magic system than fireballs and lightning bolts. Many of the spells from Morrowind have been given major facelifts, or reworked entirely, in an effort to make the system as exciting and useful as possible. My personal favorite is Detect Life. In Morrowind, this effect placed icons on the minimap indicating where creatures or characters could be found. It was a nice effect but not workable for Oblivion, so now when Detect Life is cast, a magical cloud, which is visible even when the creature is not, will envelop each nearby creature. You can watch these clouds to track potential targets, and usually you can even identify which creature you are looking at by the specific shape and movement of its cloud. This effect is sometimes paired with the new Night Eye – a useful combo in our dark, atmospheric dungeons. More importantly, the spell gives the player extra information without breaking immersion, so when you cast the spell you actually feel like a sneaky wizard spying on your enemies. Score!

Many effects have gotten this treatment. Thanks to Havok physics, Paralysis, in addition to being a crippling tactical nightmare, is now also totally hilarious. Nothing says “step off” like freezing your opponent solid and watching him fall flat on his face!

Some of the cooler effects are only possible because of our graphics engine, which makes heavy use of pixel and vertex shaders to achieve some very images. The Chameleon spell, for instance, uses our awesome refraction special effect to render targets nearly invisible, like a block of clear walking ice or a cloaked Predator. I didn’t work on this one personally, so I feel comfortable bragging that its one of the coolest effects of its kind that I’ve seen – Oblivion is definitely the first Elder Scrolls game that has been able to do Chameleon justice.

Now that you’ve heard a little bit about the gameplay and graphics improvements, I imagine some of you are wondering about the content creation side of things, specifically – what in the magic system is editable? For starters, there are lots of options to tweak on the existing spell effects, such as the sounds, art, and special shader effects, along with the specific items and creatures that are used for the summoning spells. But we know that just tweaking our spells isn’t enough for you guys, so there is one brand new, very special magic effect that we hope will give modders a great deal of creative freedom. It’s called Script Effect, and using it in conjunction with the scripting system, modders will be able to expand the magic system and create spells that do things we at Bethesda haven’t even thought of yet.

You could make a spell that changes the weather, or forces the target NPC to find a bed and go to sleep, or places a special item in the player’s inventory. Just about anything that is possible with the scripting system is possible with Script Effect. In fact, our designers have used Script Effect to implement a number of unique spells that would have otherwise been impossible to create with the generic spell system… Let’s just say that Sheogorath would be proud!

I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about what we’ve been working on lately. At this stage of production we are all very busy tweaking, optimizing, and polishing for release. It’s a harrowing process, but we are able to go through it with the knowledge that someday very soon, you will all be able to take a crack at what we’ve been working on for so long. As a former (and current) diehard Elder Scrolls fan, I can only say that I couldn’t be more excited!