About a whole decade ago, back in 2006, Bethesda announced that they were bringing an Elder Scrolls game to the PSP. This game would be called Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion, and it was going to feature locations such as Moonguard, Glenpoint, and Daggerfall. Everyone was excited for the game, but no one knew how it was going to work. After all, how could anyone hope to fit an Elder Scrolls game into a UMD for the PSP?
The PSP didn’t do well in North America, we stopped getting new info about this Oblivion PSP game, and soon enough, the project itself seemed to get cancelled. However, the vigilant folks over at NeoGAF uncovered footage and screenshots of this abandoned project. Granted, it doesn’t look quite as slick as Oblivion on PC and even the PS3 and Xbox 360, but it was neat to actually see an Elder Scrolls game on a portable console. We also got a bit more information about the cancellation of this game over at Unseen64, which is an information archive dedicated to preserving details about unreleased or cancelled games such as this one.
“The designers had planned more than 180 quests, which took on a variety of things from the main quest line to a huge variety of side quests, including quests for the various guilds. The plotline (and side quests) on PSP referenced the Oblivion game and plot line at several points to tie the two products together, and even explained / foretold some of the events of Oblivion – for example, the Dark Brotherhood quest line heavily featured Lucien Lachance (before his demise in the main Oblivion game).
The team developed a few playable levels using Renderware Studio and most of the core gameplay systems was already working or planned, as the combat mechanics (which allowed the player to sub-select parts of an enemy when targeting them, due to only having one analogue stick on the PSP), inventory system, TES character statistics system using Oblivion’s own attributes / skills formula and the conversation system.”
Unfortunately, because of how poorly the PSP was doing, coupled with alleged budget problems, this game never saw the light of day. Still, it’s nice to get a glimpse of what could have been.
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