Bethesda decides Oblivion Remastered players were right, adds a new difficulty mode to "act as a better bridge between 'Adept' and 'Expert' for players"

If you were among the many Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered players overjoyed to relive the classic RPG but exhausted by its inordinately brutal Expert difficulty, then today is a good day. In the newly (beta) released update 1.2, Bethesda's added a new difficulty setting specifically taking aim at the gulf separating Expert from the rest.

Importantly, "While 1.2 won’t roll out to all other platforms just yet, you will be able to experience this update on our Steam Beta later today," Bethesda clarifies.

In a long Twitter post detailing the patch, which is mostly a laundry list of bug and crash fixes, Bethesda says it has "added additional difficulty settings to allow players to further tune their 'Player Combat Damage' & 'Enemy Combat Damage'."

"Players can now select from 'Novice', 'Apprentice', 'Adept', 'Journeyman', 'Expert', and 'Master' options in the Gameplay menu," Bethesda adds. "We hope the 'Journeyman' setting, specifically, will act as a better bridge between 'Adept' and 'Expert' for players."

This seems to address the key complaint many players had with higher difficulty settings: due to the way health and damage are balanced, not just in Oblivion but arguably in Bethesda games in general, combat can feel like you're either trumping toddlers at football or like you're trying to break through a brick wall with blows from a stiff pillow.

The broad verdict on challenge after Oblivion Remastered launched was that many Adept players would like some more and many Expert players would like some less, so here's hoping Journeyman provides a nice comfy middle ground – like Ultra Violence in the modern Doom games.

A few other lines of patch 1.2 stand out. "Fixed map markers disappearing" – that's a godsend. And this one ought to prevent some confusion: "Fixed stats not updating when equipping enchanted items." A boat-load of crashes have purportedly been addressed, including the nefarious "crashes that could occur during auto saves."

I'm also immensely amused by this line: "Fixed player character height scaling." Here are some other classically Bethesda patch notes:

• Fixed soft lock when a player with a high bounty goes to jail (I have to wonder, was this about the functionally infinite servitude?)
• Fixed NPC beards not following facial animation
• Fixed falling unconscious in water preventing player from getting up
• Fixed the incorrect player stance in the inventory menu after fast travel
• Fixed crashing when killing a paralyzed NPC with an arrow
• Fixed underwater SFX persisting after leaving exiting water (typo preserved because that, too, is classical)

Oblivion Remastered proves I was wrong to give up on the original game 10 years ago, but I worry Bethesda has lost the magic that made Cyrodiil's open world RPG shine.