Keiran McEwen
Keiran McEwenA few years ago, out of curiosity more than anything, I downloaded The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion through Game Pass and almost immediately stopped. The nearly 20-year-old release is not only showing its age by this point. Comparing it to Bethesda’s “Can we release it on cave paintings?” in Skyrim, it is like comparing Fallout 4 to Pong. Remastered almost entirely in secret until Microsoft had a legal case with the FTC, Oblivion Remastered was (reportedly) meant to be released in 2022, but very much didn’t, thankfully. Now, with the help of Unreal Engine 5 for the graphical uplift and the Creation Engine for gameplay, Oblivion looks new but feels like it always has.
Six years after the events of Morrowind, Cyrodiil is under a fantasy game of 24-style politics as Emperor Jean-Luc Picard’s three sons were killed, and he is the next target. You, the ever-changing Khajiit, Imperial, Nord, or so on, are set free from the obligatory prison scene and told to go do Elder Scrolls-based adventures before Uriel Septim VII becomes a robot just like Data. I guess “spoilers” for two terrible seasons of Picard. From there, you are thrown into something that’s the same, but different.
Minus the ugly, “let’s make this look monotonal” filter that Bethesda is insistent on putting on games up to Fallout 3, the world looks lush with life. Well, it almost does. Going into the Imperial City is like walking into a small English village, where the whole twelve people just stare at you boggle-eyed and threaten to break your kneecaps for being an outsider. So the textures have gone up, the population has gone up by maybe two whole people, the plot’s the same, and the gameplay hasn’t changed a bit, for good and bad.
As a remaster, as I’ve said with Tomb Raider and others, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is everything you want it to be. Of course, with it running in Unreal Engine 5, there will be the occasional problems we’ve all had, a crash as you load something here, or textures maybe looking a little plastic there. Gripes with Epic’s engine aside, the teams both at Bethesda and the French studio of developer Virtuos have given Oblivion a much-needed face-lift, not just in textures but also a couple of other things.
The additions are simple, yet effective. New textures, new UI that doesn’t feel like it fell out of the back of the 90s, new character origins, an improved leveling system, a couple of new dialog lines, and praise the Nine, the ability to sprint. I’ve said it before, small additions like this always make the remaster in question feel like it did before, but modern enough to not feel entirely left behind. If you want a quick opinion of Oblivion, that’s it, that’s the quote to take away.
However, I can’t just sit here and praise the remaster unequivocally. Despite releasing in 2006 to cheers, calling it the second coming of RPG Jesus, and rightfully being considered one of the best games of 2006, Oblivion is a bit sparse sometimes. That may not be the word entirely. The opening clip before you create the ungodly creatures of listicle-based nightmares describes the imperial rule of Tamriel in ruin and quickly you are thrown into the dark, dank (the old meaning) cell of having to fight off rats and magicians. Oh no, Penn Jillette!
Kicked out of the sewers and given the quest to find Uriel Septim VII’s illegitimate son, the world feels big. Not just because you are placed next to the Imperial City, with Bethesda’s trademark loading screens between every door. Unlike later RPGs where it feels like you can walk only a few steps and stumble into a new quest, there is an openness to Oblivion that’s both refreshing and dated at the same time. In fact, you can almost B-line to that first set of main quests and miss several others without knowing it.
The trouble is that the main quest is the least interesting part of Oblivion. While Patrick Stewart does his wonderful voiceover as you get your first glimpse of the gates of Oblivion opening, it has this epicness to it that has become standard in fantasy-RPGs over the years. But quickly those ideas of epicness and grand scale fall apart, not because it’s a bad story, but because of how it is told and how you progress. The hero of Kvatch (the man they call Jayne), you are thrust into a battle with monsters from Oblivion and told to enter an Oblivion Gate to save a city.
It’s at this point Oblivion Gates pop up everywhere, and your neck feels like it will give so you can smack your face off of your desk. Another one? Scattered like unopened treats leading to a white panel van, your job in the plot is to be the only one closing these gates before the heat death of the universe, which sadly never comes. Joined alongside this is Patrick’s line which is so prophetic that it might as well be a flashing neon sign telling you exactly what your character will be.
After being Martin’s Shrek, saving Uriel Septim VII’s son from the other end of fire and brimstone, you become his (off-screen) Donkey. You aren’t the hero to save the world, you are the companion. You are nothing more than his pack mule that you drag around in Fallout games to sponge up the damage and carry your heavy stuff.
“So you’re not a fan of the main plot?” How could you be? For me, it does little to nothing to inspire adventure beyond finding another Oblivion Gate, which acts like a dungeon to go kill some monsters and get some loot. As a plot, the villain set up in those first couple of hours or so is whatever opposes your mindless direction to protect Uriel’s son. Yet by the time you meet Terence Stamp’s Mankar Camoran, his motivations are just to be chaotic. He’s like that one D&D player who has heard of chaotic good, evil, or neutral, and just decides to be chaotic.
The world of Oblivion is beautiful, the gameplay is fun if a little standard 2000s roughness, and when you finally break free to explore a guild that isn’t dull, you can get lost in a few hours of questing and just enjoying the world. That’s also if you can deal with the disconnect from being part of the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild, yet you are effectively the bodyguard to the Lord Protector. That’s like presenting a children’s TV program on the BBC and helping reform mental health institutions while having hundreds of allegations of abuse against you. The less said the better really.
I’m more than happy to separate the main plot from my (emphasis on my) character’s story, I am mad enough to state that I enjoy Fallout 4. However, I’ve no idea what makes this instance of dull main plot fine, but “sleep now, the baby you had has been kidnapped and you’ll wake up some time from now” poor. Both games have a set of gameplay and wider stories that outweigh the main plot which are actually interesting, the difference is, I don’t have that nostalgia for Oblivion’s original release.
Without the nostalgia of playing Oblivion on a PC back in 2006, or PS3 the year after, I can’t lie and say I’d be wasting another whole 200 hours exploring every finely detailed bush or cave system. The age of Oblivion still shows in gameplay and (to a degree) that’s a good thing. Part of me enjoys these simpler times of the 2000s, when everything didn’t need to be 4K for anyone to play it. It just needed some decent stories (The Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild) and gameplay that’s enjoyable, and Oblivion has that in spades.
Part of me still wishes games could occasionally be this rough (in gameplay) and interesting. Saying to hell (or Oblivion) with the rules of physics if you’ve mastered a skill like acrobatics and agility enough similar to Deus Ex, you can jump like Mario. Fantasy Mario, with hundreds of whatever object you choose to steal and horde this time, as you open the console and type “tgm” every time you load a save. Mario nonetheless.
That said, on the technical side of Oblivion Remastered, there are a few notable things. I’m sure unless you have an RTX 5090 with an i7-14700K and 64GB of RAM, you’ll run into a possible frame drop here or there, no matter the graphical settings. I stuck with the recommended benchmarked settings for me, which were the medium of practically everything. Even then, I’d see an occasional dip for some reason or another. However, the mostly 60 FPS with occasional drops to the high 40s for a second wasn’t my technical issue.
As you might guess, I’ll play a bit, tab out, and take a few notes. Write a paragraph or an idea for this review, such as climbing that first tower in the first Oblivion gate and thinking, “This feels a lot like Shrek.” Hard crashes (not Unreal crashes) put an end to that. Thankfully, autosaves are regular enough that you don’t lose everything, and I figured out a better option, but it is no less annoying. So if you tab out to change music as you explore, change a video on a second screen, or whatever, maybe run Oblivion Remastered in fullscreen windowed, because Alt-Tabbing in fullscreen caused a few crashes.
Otherwise, Oblivion Remastered is (repeat with me, children) stunning. This is what I think a lot of people thought it should have looked like originally (minus the filter), and that’s the spirit of remasters, seemingly. Though I think some view its original mastery with rose-tinted spectacles and a little too much praise, at least in comparison to what else the genre had to offer at the time. Now it is sort of left behind by time in a number of ways, but there is a fondness for an RPG that actually takes traits and allows you to improve with weird builds.
I guess the point that I am stumbling around is that Oblivion is not only good, but is a refreshing look at the genre now, as we somewhat “stagnate” on innovation for what the genre does next to improve. However, it is in that weird point between Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the boom of RPGs since the late 2000s; Mass Effect, The Witcher, Disco Elysium, and so much more. If you ask someone the influence X or Y game had on it, more often than not Skyrim will in fact be brought up rather than Oblivion. Oblivion was the groundwork for Skyrim to be ported to everything with a microchip.
Ultimately, there is part of me that enjoys Oblivion for what it is, but I also find it difficult to see the nostalgic “one of the greatest RPGs ever made” some years on. Maintaining what makes a Bethesda game in a remaster is probably a little “cheeky,” as you’ll stumble into a couple of legacy bugs more than you’ll stumble into quests in other games, but Oblivion Remastered is exactly that portal back in time to 2006.
A PC review copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was provided by Bethesda Softworks for this review.
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
$49.99
Pros
- The Dark Brotherhood and The Thieves Guild.
- A "perfect" encapsulation of a 2000s RPG.
- Such a pretty remaster.
Cons
- The main plot is lacking in an exciting direction to push you in.
- Unless you run a supercomputer, performance might not be perfect.
