'So you can keep going doing whatever you want in Oblivion,' explains Hines. And that's basically the only visible change that the Shivering Isles expansion makes to the world of Oblivion: not the deranged individuals, but the portal, which you can pass through whenever you want. Surrounded by a few deranged individuals. Eurogamer's three-hour play-through starts as the expansion starts, with the appearance of a mysterious portal in Niben Bay. It's set up for really interesting characters and stories and things that you can do in the world - not just the main quest, but the miscellaneous stuff, there's some really great off-the-beaten-path stuff there to find that I think folks will really enjoy.'Д«ut perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves. 'You know, you've got this world of madness, this really compelling character Sheogorath, and two sides of his brain, two sides of this world in Mania and Dementia, which are both a stark contrast to Cyrodil and everything that you played in Oblivion as well as a stark contrast to each other. 'Yeah, I definitely think so,' agrees Hines. It packs in ten new creature types (like the Flesh Atronachs and amphibious Grummites), 9,500 new lines of dialogue and two realms: the vibrantly coloured Mania, and the stark desolation of Dementia (embodied by two districts in the capital of the Shivering Isles: Bliss, and Crucible). We had fewer NPCs that we had to deal with, so let's make them all a little deeper, better stories, and really make them all really memorable and interesting.'ДЄnd let's put them in a massive environment called the Shivering Isles - or The Realm of Madness - ruled by a daedric prince called Sheogorath. 'So it's kind of more of the same but it's also completely different - we tried to focus on some of the different types of quest from Oblivion that people really seemed to gravitate towards, ones that had really good character, cool plot twists, that sort of thing. 'We wanted to do an expansion that took the best parts of what people experienced in Oblivion, but give them an entirely new setting that looked and felt very different from anything they did in Oblivion,' says Pete Hines, Bethesda's vice president of PR and marketing. But the three hours that publisher 2K Games recently granted Eurogamer to play the new expansion, Shivering Isles, was never going to be enough to experience everything that developer Bethesda has managed to fit into such a rich and vast world. If you're a publisher, how do you show off a game that's as open-ended and sprawlingly emergent as Elder Scrolls? If the journey's the thing, how do you compress a week-long cruise into a half-hour commute? Well, one way is to let people play it - to experience the trip for themselves.

The shivering isles