PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT

THE ELDER SCROLLS ADVANCE: MORROWIND Bethsoft to release new version of TES3

April 1, 2002 (Rockville, MD) - Bethesda Softworks, a ZeniMax Media company, is officially announcing their latest edition to the family of Elder Scrolls games, THE ELDER SCROLLS ADVANCE: MORROWIND.



Project leader Todd Howard begins, I have to do a lot of traveling for various conferences, like GDC, E3, and self-help seminars, so I spend a lot of time at airports or on the plane. And I realized that I wished I could try out Morrowind as a player, not just as a tester with this little bit of free time I have. So bringing our game to a portable gaming device seemed the logical next step. The week after E3 in 2001, Todd gathered together several members of the team to discuss the possibility of bringing TES to a handheld system.



Steve Meister, the programmer responsible for the magic system in the PC and console versions of Morrowind was made programming lead for the endeavor. As soon as Todd brought up the idea, I was immediately very excited. I told him that I wanted to be put in charge of the code for this project, as Ive been an avid portable gamer for over a decade and have a good idea on how to translate the game to a handheld device. Weve been secretly in development for a little less than a year now, and I can say that this is probably the most in-depth portable gaming experience thats ever been imagined.







Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Pete Hines continues, What makes this particular version so amazing is that weve managed to maintain the staggering level of complexity from the PC version. We still have all of the elements that make the PC gaming experience so unique: over 3,000 NPCs (characters with whom the player will interact), hundreds of towns and dungeons to explore, various schools of magic and combat for the player to learn, and countless hours of immersive gameplay.



Steve Meister adds, Weve also made sure to retain all the assets from the original version. We still have every creature, every weapon, every piece of armor, and every object in Morrowind. And this has been an extremely difficult task, as the art department has had to convert each of these things into a sprite-based model. This had to be done because while the hardware were working with for this version is quite powerful, it just cant handle all the real-time 3D data.







The fact that Morrowind for handhelds  unlike the PC and console versions - will not be playable in the 1st person perspective (like many of the popular shooting games out today) is not really a concern for the team. Collision programmer Scott Franke gives some insight. Since everything is basically in two dimensions now, it cuts down dramatically on the programming for myself and others on the project. 2D is much easier to provide collision data for than 3D. Basically, instead of worrying about bounding boxes, clipping angles, intersecting vertices, and a host of other extremely complex issues, I pretty much have to just determine what are the blocked areas with X and Y coordinates only. And a lot of that can be entered in via information I get from the artists.



Matt Carofano, who has been leading the effort for the art conversion adds, I was really happy to find out that the game was only going to be viewed as emulated 3D via 2D art in a 3rd person isometric perspective. This meant that all the assets would only have to be rendered from one viewpoint. As a result, the team and I have been making it a special point to include the level of detail weve had in the other versions. Every 3D object from the PC version was rendered in high-resolution and scaled down to fit in the 240x160 pixel window and look believable. Christiane and TK (two of the animators for creatures and NPCs) did an amazing job of keeping the frame-rate for the creatures and NPCs at a minimum, but without sacrificing their quality. All the moves for combat and magic, as well as the idle animations that give each creature or character their individual style are still present. Its come out much better than we could ever have imagined.



Todd Howard comments, The sword-play in this version is great. I constantly shake my head in disbelief that this is on a handheld!







Graphics havent been the only concern for the team however. All the audio has made it into the handheld version as well. Sound engineer Jason Ruddy remarks Its been quite a daunting task. Todd wanted to make sure that all the voices, sounds, and music made it into the handheld version. I worked with Jeremy Soule (the award winning composer of the music for the PC and console versions) to get all the music converted to MIDI format. He did a great job in helping me tweak out the instruments so they sounded as close to the originals as possible. The sound effects, on the other hand werent so easy. Todd told me that I only had 250k to house all of the sound effects! And that was for all the creatures, weapons, etc! But fortunately, we found a solution...



Todd had asked me to help find a way to bring all of the recorded voices into the portable version of Morrwind after he had heard that I had been working on developing some new audio compression techniques in my spare time, adds Christopher Weaver, Chief Technology Officer for ZeniMax Media. Since I had contributed something substantial to every form of technology, except audio codecs and water purification techniques, I realized that this was simply a matter of right place, right time. While analyzing the methods of audio compression in popular schemes like MPEG, I quickly determined that there were some gross inefficiencies. Through more stream-lined code, I was able to produce a codec (compression-decompression scheme) that would give me a 50:1 compression, with almost no artifacting (audio glitches that are produced from lowering the recording quality of sounds). This newly developed technology, currently called the WEADEC-50 module, will be commercially applied for the first time in the handheld version of Morrowind.







Todd Howard continues, Even with Weavers substantial contribution, and the singular perspective sprite-based assets helping to greatly limit our final file sizes, the amount of information that this version of the game will require is still significantly larger than the average portable game. As a result, the handheld version of Morrowind will span across three cartridges, The first cartridge being the first town and all the exterior environments, and the remaining two cartridges containing all of the interior environments, including all the houses, dungeons, etc. This really shouldnt be a problem for the player, since their character data will be copied from one cartridge to the next during gameplay.



Pete Hines finishes, We are all very excited about this version of Morrowind, as we know that the portability will allow our game to be played virtually anywhere, and become exposed to an even wider audience than we have been in the past.



The Elder Scrolls Advance: Morrowind is about 40% complete and set to ship for the 2002 Holiday season.





