Oh Oblivion, how I've missed you. I say that like I didn't just play my favorite Elder Scrolls game several months ago, but this time it's different. After years of speculation and rumor, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is not only real, but launched on the same day as its reveal. Even better? It feels – and I don't say this lightly – like getting to play Oblivion for the first time again.
I've spent hundreds of hours in the original game, so I was apprehensive about the prospect of any modern touch-up. Oblivion was, I thought, a product of its time: a 2006 RPG brimming with ambition, and if sometimes that ambition sloshed over – with odd-looking characters and their awkward one-dimensional conversations – then that was just another facet of the game's identity. I assumed that a remaster would prune away what the game's executive producer, Todd Howard, looks back on (with an eye roll) as "old charm," and lose something of itself along the way.
That, praise the Nine, is not the case.
Welcome, outlander
Though Oblivion will keep us busy for a long time, The Elder Scrolls 6 is still to come
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered's inherited strangeness doesn't take long to manifest. The character creator – oh god, the character creator – remains a monstrous laboratory, where the only limit is whether you can stomach looking your creation in the eye. Valen Dreth is still shit-talking you from across the prison hall. But there's a second world here, too. I can't stop staring at the way sunbeams drizzle into the cell, or the Seal of Akatosh that now adorns the sewer grate leading to freedom. Oblivion Remastered looks good – really good – and… oh, it crashed when I tried to leave. We are so back.
Beneath the fancy visuals, Oblivion Remastered still feels like Oblivion. There's a cozy familiarity to it all, even if you've never been able to see the stubble on an Imperial Guard's chin in as much detail before. A lot of voice acting has been brought over directly from the original game, complete with crunchy compression. Characters stop to discuss their various mudcrab encounters, and you still get the sense that they're talking at each other rather than having a conversation. These people, might I add, still look weird!
Within an hour of leaving the sewers, I'm at a loose end and free to explore. There's a surrealness to Oblivion's open world, which (at risk of sounding like a broken record) – persists in the remaster. While Skyrim largely follows a semblance of logic – you are being attacked by bandits because they have a camp nearby, for example – adventuring in Oblivion has always been dreamlike and unpredictable. Picking up one of the remaster's new quests sends me on a cult-themed treasure hunt across Cyrodiil, which spirals into a pseudo horror game when I'm chased halfway across the world by three axe-wielding minotaurs.
The minotaurs jealously kill any bandit, wolf, or magician who tries to get in on attacking me, and their reign of terror only comes to an end when I reach Bravil and a city guard hacks them to pieces. Somewhere along the way I've also acquired a rideable unicorn, but we go our separate ways when it rears up and tries to kill the guard who's just saved me. By the time I leave Bravil, the unicorn is gone. The guard, the disappearing unicorn – I can't tell if they're the product of decades-old AI or phantoms from 2006 sent to guide me to safety, but it wouldn't be Oblivion if I could.
Adoring fan
Though a lot of my experience with Oblivion Remastered is fueled by nostalgia, I'm a big fan of the deeper changes it makes. While the original game's mechanics are a tough sell for anyone who plays without the benefit of nostalgia, the remaster makes it all far more palatable. Levelling up is now more straightforward and offers more control over how your character develops, allowing you to put specific points into attributes. Combat isn't miraculously on par with modern RPGs like Avowed and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but it's serviceable; feeling leaps and bounds more textured than it did in 2006. You can sprint!
The only thing I'm not as warm on is the UI overhaul, which looks like a cross between The Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim. It's a little too sleek for me, but that feels like a very small complaint given 24 hours ago I was wondering whether the rumored remaster could be good at all. Even that now feels silly, given how deftly Virtuos has preserved the soul of Oblivion.
Above all, I'm excited for people who have never played Oblivion before. They're about to discover one of the all-time best RPGs for the first time. They'll visit Kvatch for the first time. Jump at the Dark Brotherhood's bedside manner for the first time. Step out of that sewer grate for the first time. This isn't my first time – far from it – but by Azura, it feels like it.
