The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was an action role-playing game for Sony’s PlayStation Portable that never quite saw the light of day, according to the dedicated historians over at Unseen 64. The game was inspired by Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but developed by a separate team at Climax Group London.
Limited by the PSP’s hardware, the game would have been less open than Oblivion, but nevertheless was to carry over its core mechanics and many of its characters, areas, and plot. Set at the same time as its namesake, Travels aimed to show that the Oblivion crisis was happening all over Tamriel, not just in Cyrodiil. A central hub zone in High Rock would anchor the action, with missions taking the player to locales like Moonguard, Anticlere, and Daggerfall, each with its own corresponding plane of Oblivion.
The developers planned to have over 180 quests, some of which would directly tie to characters and events in Oblivion. For instance, the Dark Brotherhood assassin’s guild quest line would have heavily featured Lucien Lachance, who also played a prominent role in Oblivion’s corresponding Dark Brotherhood plot.
Originally announced for a spring 2007 release, Travels was unceremoniously cancelled without any comment from either Climax or Bethesda. According to Unseen 64’s sources, the original plan did not account for the amount of time and money that the game’s development would realistically require, and even switching engines mid-course to compress work was too little, too late to salvage the process, and so the game was lost.
