The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Uriel Sep~TIM
Re-opening the jaws of Oblivion.
Hail and well met weary traveler. Let me borrow your ear and spin you an old yarn about my history with bethesda games. It was AD 2007 year of akatosh or something close to that and I was but a wee shitheal xbox halo/cod gamer. My friends attempted to introduce me to oblivion to little success. I watched them play it and between the load times and weird uncanny generic fantasy atmosphere, I thought it looked boring. When I eventually tried for myself i had found the open world so open that i didn't know how to play it. I was used to linear shooter campaigns where the man on the radio yells at you to blow up and kill everything between you and the other end of the objective marker. My strategy of immediately rushing the main quest of oblivion was a shitty experience. Then much later in 2011 a debatably less insufferable but by my standard still awful college version of me discovered Skyrim. That was the rpg with just enough of the more complex edges sanded off for me to enjoy and begin to understand the appeal. To this day i have done countless partial playthroughs of that game. But after the open world and rpg stuff finally clicked into place, i tried to return to oblivion. And i don't consider myself to be a graphics snob, i love all graphics, but the original oblivion feels like a horror game the way everyone's hideous faces snap zoom to you. I bounced off again. Since then I like most people have had a real love hate relationship with bethesda games. Fallout 3 was pretty alright as my first fallout game, New vegas was peak, fallout 4 was disappointing, and ill be damned if i touch starfield or fallout 76. But since I was introduced to rpgs via skyrim amd spent so much time there, my tastes have changed and I've seen a lot of the flaws. Since playing more well crafted deeper RPGs (Baldur's gate 3, New vegas) i developed a more discerning taste. Skyrim has some kinda lackluster guild quests that put you in too much of a special guy position of power, the vanilla skill tree is a pretty boring linear progression of damage, and you just don't really get to make too many meaningful choices. But this is an oblivion review.
The oblivion remaster shadow dropped out of nowhere and I jumped right into the hype, all the meme videos of uncanny oblivion npc interactions I could experience for myself in a new overall least bad to look at package.
With how oblivion has existed on the internet for the past decade, the jank, weird kinda bad voice acting, and freakazoid looking npcs became part of its identity. They somehow were able to make the world and all the assets and characters look modern and high quality while still being strange uncanny valley freaks. A new next gen ugly has been discovered. This is not a fault, this is pure craftsmanship. It is so hard to force an artist to make something look kinda bad on purpose, so they must have some really tough battles in getting these npcs to still possess the same strange features and proportions but with more detail. They added new voices but still kept most of the original lines, even the ones where the actors do the same take twice. And they improved the combat and leveling system so you bet your ass I jumped back into this shiny new oblivion to try again.
I think the wait was worth it. I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned by bethesda about what made oblivion so popular versus their current titles, but there are definitely some other lessons I'm glad they learned.
Starting with the good. The guild quests are a lot more interesting. You are not the sole special boy coming in to fix a completely incompetent organization of warriors, thieves, wizards, murder cultists, etc. You are just a recruit that is there to rise through the ranks and learn. And the game isn't afraid to gate you from doing quests your character isn't cut out for. I shouldn't be able to ascend the ranks of the mages guild if I can't even cast above a novice. This if anything makes each new playthrough more special.
Another great feature are quests in general. I have found a lot more interesting quests from just talking to town weirdos and regular npcs than i ever found in skyrim. The quests feel a lot more unique when you have to travel the map, talk to people around town and do more than just kill everyone in a bandit camp. There also aren't the new bethesda trademark forever quests. Where you talk to someone and they just send you to a random camp with enemies to kill them all or take a random thing and then kill them all. And your only real reward is wasting your time, you don't get any progress towards a goal or narrative, just some xp and gold.
Let's talk leveling, I still don't fully understand it but I like that you can just make yourself jump higher and run faster. And you can level those skills up by running around and jumping around Cyrodiil like an asshole.
Time for some bad. The dungeons are ass. I'll give it a bit of a pass for being so old and having such ambitious systems elsewhere, but I took skyrim dungeon design for granted. And I don't even think skyrim dungeons are that impressive, just bare minimum for me at this point. So many oblivion dungeons are so samey and hard to navigate cuz everything looks the same. They often just end without any kind of pizzazz. Not even like a slightly stronger enemy or cool loot. You just hit a wall and turn around and walk out. I have heard some unhinged defenders praise this as "realistic", "most caves just end", "there isn't always treasure at the end of a cave", "you are thinking too game designy". To that I say shut the fuck up. This isn't a spelunking simulator. Real caves aren't filled with non stop right angle turns and little ghoulies either. If it was realistic you would have to squeeze your way through a 1 foot wide opening in the rocks then get stuck and suffocate in darkness for days. I didn't exactly get a fantasy role playing game to enjoy the realistic experience of exploring a cave. In oblivion the caves and dungeons are so difficult to know if you are done with them. Often times with no discernable theme. Just like a cave filled with ogres, trolls and minotaurs. I guess the theme of that cave was big monsters or something. Oblivion at least makes up for this with the quests that take you to caves being a bit more interesting.
You just can't play this game like its skyrim and go POI to POI. It's more about talking to people. Which is pretty refreshing as a former rpg casual. I think my ideal game would have the level design of skyrim with the quest design of oblivion. Leveling up in both games needs some work though. Modders have what I'm looking for in that regard. In summary, Oblivion remastered is what I'm looking for in most remasters, a fresh look on an old fave with the core identity, good or bad, still showing through. The game, like skyrim or new vegas, makes me feel and look lobotomized while playing it as it should. And it's 50 bucks, in this economy that's a win.
I give oblivion remastered: