The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered Review – For Better Or Worse

After a series of leaks that stopped just short of actual game copies escaping into the wild, Oblivion Remastered was teased and then dropped within a span of twenty-four hours, and I think it’s fair to say that it met most people’s expectations. Getting dropped right onto Game Pass at the same time as a console launch – with this being the first time Oblivion has been natively playable on a Sony console since the PS3 – blew it up fairly quickly, also starting discourse about the wisdom of surprise-releasing a major remaster only days before another huge RPG being promoted by the same company. Now, a week later, the dust has settled, Expedition 33 didn’t seem to suffer too terribly from the competition, and we can examine the merits of Oblivion Remastered on its own terms…so, what’s the verdict?

Oblivion, an inventory-management sim with RPG elements, was a fairly key game in the history of both Bethesda Softworks, and the gaming landscape as a whole. Fallout 3 was likely the game that solidified Bethesda’s place in the canon of AAA developers, but Oblivion two years before was the foundation for not only what Bethesda would focus on going forward, but a legion of imitators from other studios. An open-world RPG with this scope had simply not been possible on consoles before the seventh generation, and even if it didn’t set the world on fire sales-wise, it did get enough press to capture the imaginations of gamers around the world.

The player gets to create their own Champion of Cyrodiil, and then begin their journey locked up in prison for an unspecified crime when the Emperor himself enters their cell. While his bodyguards try to hurry him through the secret passageway in your wall, he seems fixated on you, saying that it was fate that you were here when the cell was meant to be unused. About half an hour later, you’ve journeyed through a small cavern to catch back up with your new royal benefactor, he gives you a cryptic quest to find his successor and give him an amulet, and he gets taken out by a cult of transforming assassins – and your quest begins.

Oblivion was the game that really popularized the format of “you can go anywhere you want”, and this is probably Bethesda’s strongest opening in that regard. Where basically every game the studio made after this became known for opening sequences that drag on too long, it only takes about forty-five minutes at the most to get put into the full sandbox, and just to emphasize that you don’t have to go right to the next step of the main quest, you’re literally facing an optional dungeon when you climb out of the sewers and are let loose. It’s a smart decision, but it also set the pattern of players spending dozens or hundreds of hours on these titles without ever completing the main quest.

Prior to this, you’ve chosen a class and a few other character details that will inform your progression experience, and this is one thing that was slightly changed in Remastered but still doesn’t feel quite as satisfying as its followup game. You gain character experience by performing (or grinding) levels in individual skills, with ones directly related to your class giving a bigger boost than those that are unrelated. Once you get enough character experience, you just need to sleep in order to bring up the level screen, which just has you adding ability points to your existing scores. Perks are gained automatically by reaching multiple-of-25 thresholds in the separate skills.

This means that, as the company would return to in every game post-Fallout 3, eventually every player character will be able to do basically anything. Some people prefer this approach, but I tend to feel that it homogenizes player characters too much, making every Champion of Cyrodiil feel roughly the same. Unfortunately, this also extends to the role-playing aspects of the game.

While the player will get to make some decisions for themselves regarding what factions to join and the resolution of some quests, the game’s actual conversation system is so barebones that there’s really no way to develop an individual personality. Every choice you make ultimately just becomes about picking out stats and assorted numbers, which is one of the things that makes the game feel like a sandbox first and an RPG second. There is a system for building trust with NPCs, but it’s through a generic minigame that makes the NPCs feel like just another number to be increased, rather than memorable people.

That being said, as a sandbox, Oblivion codified the same format that Bethesda still uses today, so it doesn’t feel as far outdated as much of the rest of the game does. I am a self-professed fan of open-world titles that drop me into a huge map to find my own fun, and this game forms the foundation that would eventually be built into titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas, so this is my favorite part of the game. This is a title with a massive amount of content that I do think easily justifies the asking price, particularly considering the huge scope of the remaster effort.

The region of Cyrodiil may not be as visually interesting as Skyrim – the developers have said that their original plans to depict it as the vast jungle previous games had described it were jettisoned in favor of a more Tolkien-inspired classic fantasy world, since the game began development in 2002 when the films were still coming out. Still, the strongest argument in favor of Oblivion Remastered is that the game world looks even better now than it did in 2006, thanks to Unreal Engine 5, which creates stunning landscapes and details that the Creation Engine simply couldn’t achieve at the time. It may seem a bit generic by today’s standards, but that doesn’t mean it looks unappealing in any way.

Unfortunately, the graphical upgrade is only a half-measure with the game’s character models. Oblivion was known for being hard to take seriously even twenty years ago, as the models were janky and waxy at the time – and while some of them look comparatively better now, the face rigs are notably exactly the same as they were in the original release. Everyone’s expressions are goofy and immersion-breaking, particularly when they open their mouths to reveal what look like cavernous voids. The voice acting has been mostly rerecorded with professional actors, with some of the original takes still preserved for their own sake. However, the entire process of engaging in dialogue is the clearest sign of the game’s age.

Combat has been modernized somewhat, with the HUD being overhauled to replace it with Skyrim‘s much less in-the-way visual indications of health, stamina, and magicka. Still, as weightless as Skyrim’s fights feel, Oblivion Remastered only feels even more so – I played on PS5, where it would have been easy to fix some of this problem with the features of the DualSense, but these go completely unused. Like its sequel, I ultimately recommend ranged combat, as it tends to feel at least somewhat more satisfying; however, combat was not, and still isn’t, this series’ strong suit. It works alright, but that’s about all I can say in its favor.

Regarding more specific aspects of the remaster, the menu system has been updated to a more cohesive format, making navigation of your ever-increasing backpack easier than before. Loading screens that plagued the original are much faster than ever before. The clairvoyance spell has been backported from Skyrim, allowing you to easily figure out what route you’re supposed to be taking beyond the compass that also comes from that title. In general, if you have more experience with the fifth game in this series, expect Oblivion Remastered to feel a lot more like that than it did before – not a bad thing, given how much Skyrim ended up refining over this game initially.

Unfortunately, as this remaster is still essentially a cosmetic update, the game’s underlying Creation Engine issues remain. I would not expect any bugs you may remember from the original Oblivion to be fixed here, aside from item duplication glitches. Additionally, the outdated animation rigs do not really do the updated models justice in general. Everything looks like a downright modern AAA game, but it doesn’t move like one, leading the game as a whole to feel uncanny much of the time.

I would also like to note the shortcomings of the PS5 version of the game. I can’t speak for the other SKUs, but on a base PS5, Oblivion Remastered struggled to maintain 60fps in performance mode, and the environments loading in front of me every time I entered a zone was somewhat bizarre. Obviously, the PS5 version doesn’t support mods, although the PC version doesn’t officially support them either. However, this is still a shame, given the massive amount of fan-created content that already exists and could be imported into the game anyway.

I want to stress that despite all I’ve said, I do still like Oblivion Remastered. This has been a largely middling review because the game is middling by today’s standards, but it’s still a mostly successful remaster. Many of the things I’ve complained about couldn’t reasonably have been fixed without significantly more work, and I can’t ignore them entirely…but they certainly don’t mean that I’m not having fun. Ultimately, I believe that a person’s enjoyment of this remaster will depend more on their nostalgia for the original or desire to experience a foundational title than on the game’s quality in its own right. But I do think that the game has enough merit to be worth the effort – don’t expect it to have entirely stood the test of time.