Bethesda Softworks, fabled for the genre-redefining Elder Scrolls role playing games, have officially announced that the 4th installment in that series, Oblivion, will be making an appearance on the PlayStation 3 in March next year. Simultaneously a stripped down game called The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion was announced for PSP.

Oblivion was released for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in March 2006, and has managed to become the highest ranked game to date on that platform. Whether Bethesda can expect to repeat that success with the PS3 version remains to be seen: unless they spent the last few months further upgrading the engine and finetuning it for the PS3 architecture, the game will essentially be a year old by the time it is released next year, and those that were really dying for the game will have completed it on PC or 360. This reporter’s guess is that Bethesda did develop all 3 versions simultaneously, and got unpleasantly surprised by the PS3 getting delayed out of their launch window, or they’re just cashing in on an existing success by bringing the PS3 a cheap port. Let’s hope it’s the first and those extra months of development will at least make it the best version for any platform.

For the PSP game, no info whatsoever is given except that it will launch in Spring 2007.