The Elder Scrolls Travels is a series you might not have heard of, but for a while was making an impressive amount of headway in mobile gaming. Before the days of Angry Birds, we had sprite-based Java mobile phone Elder Scrolls games, one of which even took us to Skyrim in 3D on the N-Gage a near-decade before the mainline series went to Skyrim itself! They were half-decent games, but none come close to what would’ve been the most wildly ambitious Elder Scrolls handheld game of the 7th generation: The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion.
Climax Studio’s The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was to be a proper Oblivion experience crammed inside a single UMD that would’ve seen players journeying across Cyrodiil and beyond in a sidestory. Your voiceless protagonist is tasked with cleaning up all the other Oblivion gates that the hero and player character of the main game just never got around to. This quest would be more linear in scope, yet vast in locations, even pulling players back to regions from Daggerfall.
All the more incredible - Travels: Oblivion works! It plays astonishingly well, and Bethesda had enough faith in it to announce the project publicly. This isn’t some prototype tucked in a corner that no one speaks of like Star Wars: Battlefront III, but an impressive project that nails the Oblivion experience wonderfully despite the PSP’s more limited controls. Thanks to a great lock-on camera and Oblivion’s already generous hit detection, fighting is a breeze, and everything else plays like regular Oblivion.
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Reports do indicate that the final release would’ve had to scale back from where the leaked milestone builds were at, fine-tuning things for PSP hardware, but the build as it is does run well on actual hardware. The only mechanic seemingly not carried over, or at least implemented at this point, was the persuasion minigame. Otherwise, everything you’d want is here - skills that improve through use, no class system getting in your way, a variety of magic spells and weapons from the main game, and dialogue trees with every non-hostile NPC. The realm of Oblivion is a hellish nightmare, while Cyrodiil’s towns in the demo are gorgeously detailed.
What’s most impressive is how the linearity of things oddly benefits Travels: Oblivion. It feels much more directed without ignoring player agency. Oblivion on PSP would’ve been, by all appearances, a true Elder Scrolls game through and through, so it’s a shame that the genuine article here didn’t make it to store shelves.
As for why it never graced players’ PSPs, the answer is far more exasperating: time and money. It’s not that Climax couldn’t deliver a proper PSP game, as they released Silent Hill: Origins and Shattered Memories across PSP and home consoles with marked success. Instead, reports compiled byUnseen64(with loads of excellent research) paint a picture of unrealistic expectations, technical hurdles, and Bethesda being reluctant to budge from their original contract terms when Climax could’ve salvaged the project with a pinch more breathing room. Travels: Oblivion would be the last portable Elder Scrolls experience until Blades for mobile and Skyrim’s Switch port.
Though it’s relatively easy nowadays to make a portable RPG in the vein of Bethesda’s fantasy franchise, it was practically unheard of when Climax first attempted it. That they struck such a delicate balance in the early days of production speaks to their talented team, and while I’m glad they got to move on to projects that would see the light of day, Travels: Oblivion certainly deserved more time.
This is by far one of the smoothest playing first-person games I’ve found on the PSP, even if the full version would likely have been pared back in some ways to accommodate its impressive scope. I can’t help but imagine a world where more studios took note of the accomplishments made, and iterated on Climax’s ideas. As it stands, at least this glimpse of what could’ve been isn’t lost to history.
