Trivia / The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

• Actor Allusion: Even in the short space of time he has dialogue, the writers still fit in some William Shakespeare lines for Patrick Stewart. And they're all from the play about the famous ruler who got mobbed by assassins in a surprise attack.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Despite how little Uriel appears in the game, Patrick Stewart was thrilled to voice him, not because he was a fan of the franchise, but rather, because of how much character prep he'd been given^note a 90-page booklet containing his history, motivations, and background. He reportedly stated it was the best character prep he had been given, and wished more roles he was cast for did that.
• Acting for Two: Despite its scope, the cast of Oblivion isn't as large as you'd think. Aside from particularly unique characters like Uriel and Martin Septim, the vast majority of the characters in the game are voiced by only a handful of actors, usually sharing the same voice as the rest of their race, and many cast members don't just voice one race alone (e.g. Craig Sechler provides his voice to males of all three elf races, and Jonathan Bryce voices all male Khajiit, Argonians, Nords, and Orcs, etc...). Particular note goes to Wes Johnson, who voices every single Imperial male in the game sans Uriel and Martin, as well as Sheogorath and several Dremora.
• Blooper: A handful of mistakes by the voice actors were accidentally left in the game.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Patrick Stewart as Emperor Uriel Septim, Sean Bean as Martin Septim, and Terence Stamp as Mankar Camoran. There's also Lynda Carter returning as the voice of the female Nords from Morrowind, as well as taking over for Elizabeth Noone as the voice of the female Orcs.
• Development Gag:
  • The whole point of M'aiq the Liar is to discuss various features that were left out of or incorporated into the game.
  • The Arena in the Imperial City is undoubtedly a reference to the original plan for the series to be about gladiatorial combat before it became a fantasy RPG series. There are also posters for the Arena throughout the Imperial City which resemble the cover art for Arena.
• Dummied Out:
  • The Lock spell, mainly so as to not break NPC's scripts and such.
  • A city, Sutch, appeared in early versions of the game's map, but does not appear in the actual game. Fort Sutch, the unmarked "Attack on Fort Sutch" quest, and a handful of leftover text are all that remain of it in the released game. It would have been located just north-west of Kvatch, and likely would have contained the Chapel of Kynareth, which is also absent in the game. But as with much anything, there's a mod that adds Sutch into the game as it was originally planned.
• Genre Turning Point: The release of Oblivion as a mainstream open-world RPG on consoles changed Western developers as a whole by popularizing the Open-World RPG genre and making it a viable investment. Many developers even admitted to have been inspired by Oblivion's format of having a huge open-world with dozens of side-quests and optional mazes/dungeons with some notable examples being Two Worlds, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Dragon's Dogma.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The dogs in the game use the same sound effects as the ones from the first Quake.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: Michael Mack, who voices Baurus and the other Redguards in Oblivion as well as Morrowind, previously appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation with Emperor Uriel Septim's voice actor, Patrick Stewart.
• Killer App: Oblivion was released as a year-long timed exclusive for the Xbox 360, and sold well enough that it influenced Sony to make their own exclusive gritty fantasy RPG in the form of Demon's Souls for the PlayStation 3.
• The Other Darrin: Uriel Septim was previously played by an unnamed local actor in the ending of Arena (CD-ROM version only), and by the late John Gilbert in Daggerfall's opening cutscene. in Oblivion, he is played by Patrick Stewart ^note probably chewing up a chunk of the voice acting budget: there are many, many characters, and few voices.
  • In an odd example occurring in the same game: if you did Sheogorath's quest prior to the release of the Shivering Isles DLC, he would be voiced by Craig Sechler; however, the Shivering Isles DLC not only recasts Wes Johnson in that role, who would go on to become Sheogorath's official voice actor in every subsequent title (sans Online, where he is Darrin'd by JB Blanc), but it also replaces Sechler's lines in the vanilla game's quest.
• The Other Marty:
  • Jeff Baker was slated to voice the male Imperials and Dunmer as he did in Morrowind, before being replaced by Wes Johnson and Craig Sechler, respectively. The male Bretons were also going to be voiced again by Wes Johnson, before Ralph Cosham was cast.
  • Wes Johnson recorded dialogue for Martin Septim, so that Bethesda would have someone to play the character if Sean Bean wasn't available. When Bean was cast, almost all of Johnson's voice files for the character were deleted, though a few still remain buried in the game's data files.
• Similarly Named Works: With the 1994 film, the 2013 film and the fifth book of The Power of Five.
• Throw It In!: According to one Bethesda writer, Mankar Camoran's long speech made when arriving in Paradise was a last minute creation, made randomly one night via an email. This is why said speech mistakenly attributes different Daedric realms to the wrong Daedric Prince. The voice directors liked the speech, and had it used in the game while overlooking the inaccurate details.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Voice lines left in the game reveal there was plans for the player to be able to join the Mythic Dawn, as certain race and gender combinations have altered voice lines during the section where you "join" them in the main quest, and glitching and leaving causes the player to be classified as a member. It was just far enough in development that some voice lines remain, but was cut before all the other player voices were recroded.
  • Originally, there was going to be an arena in every city instead of just the one in the Imperial City. Most of the writing and scripting for this had already been done when the developers realised they instead needed to focus on a single arena and make that one better. As a result, 800 lines of dialogue were cut.
  • The amount of dialogue that had been written for the game was 60,000 to 70,000 lines. However, due to shipping on the Xbox 360 and thus having to fit the game onto a single DVD, this was cut down to 40,000 to 50,000 lines.
  • The original plan was to have one voice actor per race and gender. But again due to disc space limitations, the lines for some races had to be merged. Judging from the early gameplay trailers shown with Jeff Baker voicing both an Imperial and a Dunmer in their Morrowind voice, all of the voice actors from the previous game would reprise their roles for their respective races. Baker since voiced Haskill in the Shivering Isles expansion.
  • Oblivion is known for the awkwardness of its conversations. Some of this may be explained by the fact that – due to technical limitations with Bethesda's systems – the lines of dialogue in the scripts handed to the voice actors were sorted alphabetically instead of on a per-quest basis.
  • The initial descriptions of Cyrodiil in Redguard and Morrowind were much stranger and more fanciful than what ended up in the game, featuring river dragons, singing priests covered in robes made of moths, and living topiaries of the dead emperors that could speak and move their bodies with the help of birds. The retcon was only vaguely alluded to within the byzantine Mythic Dawn Commentaries, though it's more explicit in the more lore-savvy Skyrim, which turns an extracanonical explanation written by the writer who had described much of the original Cyrodiil into a Canon Immigrant.
  • There was going to be a PSP spinoff called The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion, but it was cancelled. An unfinished beta was leaked, however. It was intended to be an episodic side story set in High Rock with a new hero dealing with the invasion in the city of Rhalta. Instead of having a fully developed overworld for the player to explore, Rhalta instead serves as some kind of hub, where each chapter will take place in its own self-contained level, and there isn't much exploration to be done, if the vertical slice demo is to be taken as fact.

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