There's a Shivering Isles preview on 1UP, checking out the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion expansion pack that Bethesda is working on. Includes a few new screenshots.

New at Action Trip today is this Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles Q&A. Lead designer Mark Nelson is asked about the new content and features found in this expansion pack.

New at FiringSquad this morning is a Q&A on The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles. Lead designer Mark Nelson is asked about the expansion pack's new land, art style, new character creation options, content, Xbox Live Marketplace distribution on the 360, and future Oblivion addons.

Thanks to PC Zone we knew that an expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was on the way, and Bethesda today officially announced Shivering Isles. According to Bethesda, the expansion will add more than 30 hours of new gameplay and allows you explore the realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness.

Within the Realm of Sheogorath, players can explore the two extreme sides of the god's madness – the sublimely creative and the completely psychotic. Something is happening to the Shivering Isles and Sheogorath himself looks to you to be his champion and defend his realm and its inhabitants from destruction. Do you have the strength to survive his trials, tame a realm fraught with paranoia and despair, and wear the mantle of a God? The Shivering Isles features a bizarre landscape split between the two sides - Mania and Dementia - filled with vast, twisting dungeons mirroring the roots of the trees they are buried within. You'll encounter more than a dozen new creatures including hideous insects, Flesh Atronachs, skeletal Shambles, amphibious Grummites. Throughout your adventure, you will discover all new items, ingredients, spells, and more, and have the talented craftsmen of Crucible and Bliss forge new armor and weapons just for you.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles will be released this spring for PC and for Xbox 360 via Xbox Live. Three screenshots can be found here. The press release also mentions that Oblivion has sold a whopping 3 million copies since being released last year.

So far, Bethesda has only been expanding the wildly succesful RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion through small pieces of downloadable content. But according to the latest issue of PC Zone, a full blown expansion called Shivering Isles is on the way.

Revealed in the latest edition of PC Zone magazine, word is that the expansion will offer 30-plus hours of new adventuring, features new quests, monsters, expanded freeform gameplay - quest lines that branch more than before, for example - and a new land "that you can watch change according to your vital life-or-death decisions". Setting the scene, it's explained that an ominous-looking gate has opened in Nibben Bay, the portal leading to a torn realm - the Shivering Isles - ruled by Sheogorath, the god of madness and dementia. Apparently, adventurers will meet the god and "plough through his trials", but it's additionally hinted that ultimately we may well be usurping the deity. A ETA of Q2 2007 has been given.

There's a Knights of the Nine preview on IGN, offering brief impressions of the latest official download for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Includes several new screenshots.

There's a new Oblivion Q&A on Killer Betties today, chatting with Bethesda's Pete Hines about the upcoming Knights of the Nine content.

Bethesda sent out this press release, announcing Knights of the Nine, the latest downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. To be released November 21 for PC and Xbox 360, Knights of the Nine will add a new faction and related quests. There will also be a boxed version in retail stores, serving as a compilation of all the Oblivion downloadable content released so far.

Knights of the Nine features an all-new faction and quests for noble characters and answers many of the questions surrounding the Ayleid ruins found throughout Oblivion. Players can join a new faction and found their own order of holy knights – leading them into battle against a sorcerer-king and his demonic minions while exploring massive dungeons and searching for legendary relics – the holy armor and weapons of the Divine Crusader.

New at FiringSquad today is this MultiTES4 Q&A, asking Martin Loxton about his mod that aims to bring multiplayer support to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

The guys at Bethesda let us know that the fifth official plugin for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will be released this Thursday. Called The Vile Lair, it will add a "multilevel lair for murderous players to find refuge" with specific elements for vampires.

If you want to see some really, really basic Oblivion multiplayer head over to this page where you can find an alpha version of MultiTES 4. Right now, all it supports is 2 people running around in Cyrodiil but the plan is to support 8 player deathmatch at some point. Thanks Blues News.

Bethesda sends along word that the new Mehrunes' Razor plug-in for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will be released this Thursday. It will be on Obliviondownloads.com for PCs, and the Xbox Live marketplace for the 360 version.

As promised, a patch is now available for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion updating it to v1.1.511. The small 1.6mb download offers bug fixes, quest fixes and plugin fixes. Here are some of the bugs that have been taken care of

- Fixed an issue with falling through collision in Fort Wooden Hand.
- Fixed issue with some shadows not lining up.
- Going to jail while equipped with bound armor or weapons no longer crashes the game.
- Fixed issue with bound weapons not dispelling properly after dismounting a horse.
- Fixed issue with player shadow being delayed after fast travel.
- Fixed infinite gold issue on some dead NPCs.
- Fixed issue with disease resistences that made it impossible to contract vampirism under certain circumstances.
- Fixed an issue where occasionally skills would not increase properly after you received an increase in a way other than skill uses like as a quest reward.
- Fixed an issue for LOD art for city was not unloading quickly enough when exiting an interior.

According to this 1UP story, a patch for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is being released next week. Both the PC and the Xbox 360 version will receive this update.

Bethesda's OblivionDownloads.com website now has information on the latest official plugin being released for The Elder Scrolls IV, "Mehrunes' Razor". The $2.99 mini add-on features a new quest where you can earn the Daedric artifact that is Mehrunes Razor, after getting through Cyrodiil's largest dungeon. There are also 17 new magic items, 12 new books/journals and "hidden treasures". Thanks FiringSquad.

The game producer blog GameProducer.net has posted a Q&A with Bethesda's Gavin Carter, who was one of the producers The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Questions focus on his role as producer as well as the game itself.

ATI's website has been updated with a new Chuck patch, allowing Oblivion players to turn on HDR and AA at the same time. The new patch is based on the Catalyst 6.5 code base. Thanks FiringSquad.

New at HardOCP's [H] Consumer corner today is this Q&A with Bethesda's Ken Rolston. Rolston served as the lead designer for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and its two expansions as well as the recently released Oblivion.

Over at Bethesda's OblivionDownloads.com site you can now grab the latest official plugin for the game, titled Thieves Den. The plugin offers 15 new spells, 45 new items, your own pirate lair (with five upgrades), and the ability to hire vendors. Thieves Den is a $1.89 download.

Bethesda has released a beta patch for Oblivion, updating the latest Elder Scrolls installment to v1.1.425. The 1.23mb download offers general bug fixes, quest fixes and plugin fixes. Here are some of the changes

- Fixed an issue with falling through collision in Fort Wooden Hand.
- Fixed issue with remapping controls in French, German, Italian and Spanish versions.
- Fixed issue with crashes on exit.
- Fixed issue with some shadows not lining up.
- Going to jail while equipped with bound armor or weapons no longer crashes the game.
- Fixed issue with bound weapons not dispelling properly after dismounting a horse.
- Fixed issue with player shadow being delayed after fast travel.
- Fixed infinite gold issue on some dead NPCs.
- Fixed issue with disease resistences that made it impossible to contract vampirism under certain circumstances.
- Fixed an issue where occasionally skills would not increase properly after you received an increase in a way other than skill uses like as a quest reward.
- Fixed issue where spells, powers and lesser powers were being improperly resisted when the player cast them on themselves.
- Fixed an issue where creatures and NPCs would not go into combat properly after being hit by a projectile.