The original release of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is still very playable on a lot of devices. It is (or, at least, it was) readily available on Game Pass. I haven’t checked that since the release of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered, but I assume it’s been replaced now. Either way, I am inherently wary of remasters for games that are comfortably playable on current hardware, as it often comes across to me as a cynical cash grab.
And given that Elder Scrolls: Oblivion had the horse armour DLC and in many ways pioneered modern crash grab video game capitalism, I was even more disinclined to want to play this. Yet despite myself, I couldn’t resist. As a fan of epic fantasy, I have a very soft spot for the Elder Scrolls series, and while Morrowind is my favourite, I do love Oblivion more than enough itself. Hours later, I was fully immersed in the world and experience again.
One thing that is important to note is that this is not just a graphical update. That’s actually for the best because I found the updates that were made to the game to be really quite disappointing. Yes everything is in much higher resolution now, and rebuilt onto Unreal Engine 5, but the legacy that is in the visual assets means that characters move around with a stiffness and the facial animations border on the farcical. Oblivion does have a gorgeous art direction and the environments look pristine (especially with the weather effects that they now throw in), but the character models remind you that this is a remaster of a 20-year-old game every step of the way.
Thankfully, as I said, there’s more to this remake than just the visual upgrade. Most significantly, levelling has had a substantial overhaul. Oblivion is both famous and infamous for having enemies that scaled as your character levelled up. There were advantages to doing this, especially in a game that was trying to be as open world as possible. It meant that you could feel fairly confident in exploring and taking on quests as you came across them without running into a den of monsters that totally overpowered you from being too high level.
Or at least, that was the theory. In practice, the original Oblivion had a problem: If you levelled the wrong stats (and remember, you’d level stats by using those abilities, so basically if you just did the wrong thing too many times), then the enemies would scale up with your character level and you’d be in a spot of bother against almost anything you came across. To this day I have minor nightmares about the first time I played Oblivion, levelled up non-combat stats, and got so hopelessly overpowered in combat situations that I needed to quit and restart.
Oblivion was actually the sole reason that I hated having games with scaling enemy difficulty for years afterwards, thanks to that. The rebalancing that Bethesda has done has gone a long way to fixing that. It’s still not perfect, in the sense that if you still focus exclusively on non-combat applications you’re going to find yourself on the wrong end of a suddenly super-powerful goblin pointy spear. But if you balance the skills increases more evenly across both combat and non-combat roles, you’ll see yourself locked out of far less this time around.
It sounds like that improvement would only really impact the combat, but there’s so much more to it now. With the knowledge that the game is going to be, overall, more fair to you, suddenly the open world quality of Oblivion feels freer, and that’s transformative to the experience. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I played Oblivion so I had forgotten about many quests (and in the case of some side quests I’m not sure I ever actually took them on), but it has been both immersive and liberating to be able to follow whatever trail of breadcrumbs I felt like, without having to spend too long considering whether I was going to run into a frustrating dead end at the other side of it thanks to the enemies being too powerful. Given that you’re free to fast travel to any of the major communities within the game as soon as you’re done with the tutorial area, this freedom not only matters, it was, blatantly, the original intent of the game.
With that being said, Oblivion does represent a lot of the problems that these big blockbuster games have as they get older: where creative, artsy indie games remain as compelling and interesting today as they were 20 years ago, blockbuster stuff DOES date. For example, Oblivion’s quests are largely of the “go to X, kill Y, collect Z and return to get a bit of narrative to close the loop” structure. For the time this was, of course, how side quests and open world games worked. In a post-Witcher 3 world, there tend to be higher expectations on quest variety. And then there are the annoying minigames like the “persuasion” and lock-picking. Again, modern expectations are higher for these kinds of incidentals.
I have not minded the opportunity to step back into Oblivion at all. It’s a big, beautiful adventure with some truly exceptional, memorable moments. The world of Oblivion alone is a perfect recreation of the Dungeons & Dragons descents into hell from my tabletop days, and I had such a rush of nostalgia playing that through again. It has made me feel old to reflect on the fact that it’s a 20-year-old game and I swear I remember playing it new like it was yesterday, and nostalgia always comes with some rose-tinted glasses, but yes, I haven’t minded having the opportunity and excuse to play this again at all.
Wow, I didn’t expect to see such a high score on this review, both because of what I know (or thought I knew) about your tastes – though notably I didn’t know what you thought of Elder Scrolls games specifically – and because I tend to think Oblivion is slightly bland, both compared to other Elder Scrolls games and a lot of other RPGs in general.
I do plan to give this a look though since it sounds like they’ve at least sorted the level scaling, which was always my biggest issue with it.
Yeah, I have a very soft spot for Elder Scrolls. I am expecting that I’ll be frustrated with VI, just because of the way that blockbusters have spun out (also I hated the Bethesda space one). But these “older” titles were before that time. Now if they could just do something to get Morrowind playable with controllers on modern devices…