How does it feel to be developing one of the fore-front Xbox 360 titles?
It’s nice to get that kind of recognition, to be able to show your game to folks and have them tap it as one of the big games they have to have for the new console. We know what we expect of ourselves and this game, and I think if we keep doing what we’re doing it’ll be as great as we expect it to be, and everyone hopes it will.

Do you think we will be seeing much more Xbox 360 titles from you guys?
Definitely. We have a number of things in the works already. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to talk about them.​

The Xbox processor will be multiple core, which at the time of Morrowind (2002) was a nearly unthinkable idea for a gaming PC or console. However, by the release of ES4: Oblivion (now 2006), the Pentium-D and Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors will be even more common place. The Pentium-D EE even features hyperthreading on each core! Will Oblivion be written to make use of these new features on the PC? If so, have you determined how threads will be divided (by class, like AI, physics, etc, or by immediate priority where physics could dominate two threads if little AI is present)?

Oblivion will absolutely benefit from a multi-processor or multi-core PC architecture. These improvements have largely been driven by our optimizations for the Xbox 360 hardware. We have built a dynamic thread management system that manages processor load by our specific direction and by priorities. Portions of physics, AI, loading, audio, and rendering tasks can all be moved to different threads to keep the overall load balanced. The net result for the end user is a smoother experience.​