So the Oblivion delay is official and we won't be seeing the game for another 3 maybe 4 months yet, if not more. Naturally fans are disappointed, more so because the PR surrounding this non-existant announcement has been bloody awful. Obviously the concept of damage control within the Bethesda marketing ranks hasn't quite been established, atleast, not put into practise with the core fans that "loyally" visit the forums each day. I'm disappointed in finding out the announcement from Take-Two and then receiving no official word from Bethesda for days than with the actual news itself. As a fansite of The Elder Scrolls coming in it's 5th year I wouldn't mind receiving an email from Bethesda's PR department regarding the delay, and I'm sure other fansites will feel the same. Maybe Pete's over worked, I don't know, but I really don't know what they're doing over there.

I imagine that what they say in public and on the forum may be quite different from what they feel, or their own frustration at the situation, especially between Bethesda and Take 2. I am sure they feel remorse or wish they could have told us sooner, though I find it frustrating too. It's easy to lose enthusiasm for the game when this happens but I hope they will make it up to us with some new screens or maybe another movie (hint hint)

A four month delay probably means that the game testers have stumbled over some 'huge' bug. And I think Bethesda are rather busy solving the problem right now. This may explain why they didn't send you any mail Dark0ne...

But I don't know anything, it's just a thought...

I think the point is that Bethesda have paid PR staff whose job it is to keep people informed, and to practise damage limitation during situations such as the Take 2 announcement.

It's not the PR department's job to iron out bugs and playtest the game - their job is to inform people that bugs are currently being fixed, issue press releases, keep people informed of progress etc.

When announcements by their co-publishers send the rumour mills spinning, and lead to a flurry of enquiries seeking confirmation or denial of said announcement, then a good PR department should act as quickly as possible to either confirm or deny the announcement, or, if the position is unclear, at least issue a statement saying that they are aware of concerns, can't comment at the moment but will issue further information at such-and-such a date. And that's what hasn't happened in this situation - instead the ES forums were collapsing under the sheer volume of traffic they were experiencing while the official response was silence..


After MEMod, I'm quite acutely aware of bad PR, and I'm afraid Bethesda's prolonged silence last week was bad PR.

In these situations, I tend not to worry about the cogs working the machine.

I cried for a month over MEMod being scrubbed, dunno exactly what happened but that was ( for me ) far more exciting than what I'd read about Oblivion since. (wouldn't have been so bad if someone had realised the potential and actually built the game rather than just stop someone else from doing it.)

I'm not suprised they don't keep key members of the community informed, it's been clear for a while that they don't take notice of what's going on, if they had they'd have added multiplay or better still a server hosted option so players can have their Morrowinds hosted online for others to visit. I've tried to contact them a couple of times with no reply, even Valve reply eventally, Beth have no excuse imo.

Well, not adding multiplayer functionality isn't surprising (and in a sense, a relief, we don't need YaMMO). But their complete lack of PR is.