The game was originally being created using an inhouse game engine that was being developed alongside the Oblivion PSP game.

The engine used a BSP based renderer and early levels were prototyped using GTK Radiant.

Eventually development moved over to use Renderware Studio following successes found through the engines use in Ghost Rider PSP and Silent Hill PSP (both in different stages of development at other Climax studios at the time).

Because of the Playstation Portable hardware limitations, Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was going to be a more linear game than the original Bethesda Game Studios version.

There was a hub world which contained various vendors, NPCs and story characters, and player would have used a teleportation crystal to go to each of the explorable areas of the game.

The hub world would change and react to the events that went on in each area, for example going on a side mission in a level and rescue an NPC, that NPC may show up in the HUB world as a special vendor or quest giver.

One of the problems faced with Renderware was the use of navigation meshes that lead to NPCs not being able to physically being located above the player in 3D space.

Im not sure if this was limited to just the Oblivion PSP version of Renderware, however this limitation led to the levels that were implemented having no overlapping tiers or level layers (e.g.

NPCs wouldnt find their way up overlapping paths.

This problem wasnt successfully resolved in time to have a positive effect on the designed levels.

If the project progressed its possible that this would have been resolved leading to more complex multi-tiered environments.

In the tech demo, this is why the Oblivion towers had no lifts, or vertical stairwells, and relied on the player walking through doors to load in the next level segment with a separate AI navmesh.

Each area had multiple paths to be explored that were open or closed depending on which quest was active.

Oblivion PSP was designed in a way that would maximize the console limitations, but there was a lot of levels planned and at one point Climax even thought it might have to be split on to two UMDs.

The team at Climax had access to early builds of Oblivion and played it heavily to be able to better get the feel of the main game.

Even Todd Howard was really impressed with the design that the team was able to create for the portable version, that included all of Oblivions main core mechanics, plot, characters and playable areas related to TES4: Oblivions storyline.

The game took place at the same time as Oblivion, but wanted to express that the Oblivion Crisis was happening all over Tamriel, not just in Cyrodiil, so it was set in and around High Rock.

Some of the levels were set in Moonguard, Anticlere, Glenpoint and even Daggerfall, each with their own explorable world areas and plane of Oblivion that was a unique reflection of the level location.

The story was planned to take the player across the northern regions of Tamriel, mainly focusing on High Rock, and be timed to take place as a second storyline during the main story in the main Oblivion game.

The idea was that Oblivion gates were opening all across Tamriel, not just limited to Cyrodiil.

The story was the player basically tracking and following Zhurl through the zones and Oblivion gates with him always being 1 step ahead until the end of the game.

Originally there was due to be 10 levels across 5 regions that would each have its own counterpart Oblivion gate.

The idea was that, because of being linear rather than open world, progression would go from Tamriel to Oblivion for each leg of the game.

Rhalta: the starting location of the game, with the player starting in a prison cell to mirror what happened in the main Oblivion game.

The idea was that the player was experiencing an adventure that was equally as important and the story would be intertwined with references to the events of the main Oblivion game.

Oblivion Psp Iso