The combat system has been overhauled, and has a much more active feel to it now. Basically every combat action your character performs directly translates to a button press. There are two main kinds of melee attack, the standard attack and the power attack, which is a briefly "charged up" version of the regular attack. Blocking is done manually with the right mouse button rather than automatically, and you can always cast your currently selected spell by pressing the cast button, regardless of what other weapons you're holding. Up to eight weapons, spells, items, and so on can be assigned to number keys 1-8. This makes it easy to quickly swap between spells or weapon configurations without having to move your hand much or start worrying about menus in the middle of battle. There are seven skills each in the categories of combat, magic, and stealth. As in Morrowind, skills are improved by actually using them, and as you reach higher levels of mastery with particular skills you will receive special corresponding abilities.

If you're playing the PC version, the left mouse button attacks, while the right mouse button blocks (in the Xbox 360 version, the right trigger attacks, while the left trigger blocks). That's right, blocking is now manually controlled, rather than randomly triggered by your character's skill level. So, Oblivion's melee combat actually seems to resemble that of an action game with first-person combat, like The Chronicles of Riddick or Condemned, in that you'll be able to scoot forwards and backwards and immediately block incoming attacks. Then again, so can your opponent. Apparently, Oblivion no longer uses an abstracted "to-hit" model based on your character's skills, so you won't have the frustrating problem of stabbing your sword right through an enemy's face, yet having that swing register as a "miss." Instead, weapon strikes that look like they hit will always hit; your character's skill points will instead determine to what extent. If you have a low axe skill, you'll do barely any damage with an axe even when you do connect. If you have a high block skill, you'll be able to soak up most of the damage of an incoming blow. If you die, don't worry, because you'll resurrect at the previous autosave point.

I spend the last thirty or so minutes just traveling around. Watching day change to night, the clouds move slowly across the sky, deer hopping through the woods, and simply walking the roads. Exploration is one of the more fascinating assets that Oblivion has to offer. The world is huge and the things to do are overwhelming. In fact, four hours is just a small inkling of time one will need to fully explore and capture every bit of TES IV (which is said to have over 100+ hours of gameplay). Though no release date has been officially announced Pete did say they were in the high 90 percentile of completion

Graphics look like they're still being optimized. The rig they set me up on was a powerhouse--a Dell 3.4GHz packed with an ATI X1900 512MB card. The video settings were set at a modest 1280x768 and anti-aliasing was turned off. There were some occasional stutters, and I could (albeit on rare occasions) see some stitching lines between textures. Performance seemed pretty similar for this machine as it was for the Xbox 360s running Oblivion on the other side of the room

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/691/691326p1.html

Graphics look like they're still being optimized. The rig they set me up on was a powerhouse--a Dell 3.4GHz packed with an ATI X1900 512MB card. The video settings were set at a modest 1280x768 and anti-aliasing was turned off. There were some occasional stutters, and I could (albeit on rare occasions) see some stitching lines between textures. Performance seemed pretty similar for this machine as it was for the Xbox 360s running Oblivion on the other side of the room