So I finally finished the Main Quest of Oblivion a while back and I throughly enjoyed it, however, upon going back to E3 previews, I noticed that many, many promised features seem to be missing from Oblivion. For example, in the starting jail cell, the shadows are very dark and have a noticeable presence. In the final game, on max graphical settings, there aren't really any visible dark shadows... at all, and the rib cage doesn't cast shadows either. So, I'm sure this has all been noticed, perhaps discussed before, but how many campaign promises did Oblivion break? How many E3 features didn't make it into the game, and have there been attempts to restore them?

Seeing tech being partially gutted or scaled down for final releases is not all that uncommon unfortunately. Oblivion was also in development very early during the last console generation, and the engine tech was probably being laid out before the 360 specs were finalized. Seeing developers vastly overestimate what they can initially do with upcoming hardware is a recurring phenomenom in the industry.