The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is officially here and it's available right now across PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and Game Pass, which is great news, but before you get too excited you might want to prepare for a pretty substantial install time. At 125 GB on PC, it's 27 times the size of 2009's Oblivion GOTY edition, according to both games' respective Steam pages.
The situation isn't a whole lot better on other platforms. Oblivion Remastered takes up a whopping 123.2 GB on Xbox Series X and 119.1 GB on PS5.
While I'm framing this as an inconvenience, the remaster being such a gigabyte hog is likely indicative of the size and scope of the improvements Bethesda Game Studios and co-developer Virtuous made to the original game.
As detailed in an Xbox Wire post, the remaster was built in Unreal Engine 5 and boosts the game's resolution up to 4K at 60 frames per second, with "all-new textures, lighting effects, and landscape improvements." Character, spell, and weapon animations have also been updated alongside weather effects and the day/night cycle.
On top of those visual improvements, the remaster includes various quality of life upgrades including HUD, menu and map reworks including "improved UI for systems like Persuasion, Clairvoyance, and more," updates to levelling, encumbrance, non-combat perks, improved enemy scaling, new accessibility features, more autosaves, a "revised first-person and third-person camera," and "much more." Phew.
The remaster costs $50 on all platforms, but again, if you're a Game Pass subscriber, you can download and play it at no additional cost.
The Elder Scrolls 6 director Todd Howard also re-confirmed today that, yes, Bethesda is still "working on the sixth chapter here."
