Thoughts on Oblivion Remastered

I never played Oblivion. The only Elder Scrolls game I played while growing up was Skyrim Special Edition. I think I watched one of Vinesauce Joel's video about Oblivion back in 2018 or so, but I quickly forgot about the game. For me, this game was the simply the "ugly Elder Scrolls game with horrible bloom".

I was reminded that this game existed when I read about the rumors about the remaster on Reddit. Although I have zero nostalgia for the game, I still have some interest in Elder Scrolls in general, so I decided to watch some videos about the remaster as soon as it released.

I could not believe what I saw. This game is the pure incarnation of what I refer as the "generic medieval fantasy signature". It looks like the game was straight up ripped from my imagination. It's like the game was designed to cater to my personal visual tastes. I was flabbergasted.

The music is on point too. It sounds so generic and I adore it. I previously stated that RuneScape was the game that best represented this signature, but I think that Oblivion might be a superior example.

This game perfectly captures the magic of the early 2000s medieval fantasy. As many as pointed out, this game feels like The Lord of the Rings movies and I agree. I presume that's because the game was originally made in 2006 and that the remaster is incredibly faithful.

Oblivion feels like a dream came to life. This is the first time I feel genuine excitement for a game for a long time. Now, I won't buy the remaster as my PC would not be able to run it, but I am certainly contemplating purchasing the original game.

While watching some livestreams about the game, I realized that Oblivion might have influenced me in ways I never noticed before. For example in Dymunia , I made a character whose appearance is a carbon copy of Lucien Lachance. The game was also supposed to have a "Ask about rumors" function that I scrapped back when I planned this game to be open world. It also seems that many locations are inspired by places seen in Oblivion. This is curious, because I thought that RuneScape was the source of this inspiration all this time.

I suppose the reason why there is such a strong aesthetic overlap between RuneScape and Oblivion is because they both are based on subjects found in historical medieval times and barely deviate from that.

Another aspect I like about Oblivion is that it is not afraid to show it's a video game. The broken Radiant AI system and facial interactions are good examples of that. I think that by embracing its identity as a video game, the game paradoxically becomes more immersive.

I can't start to describe how happy the mere existence of this remaster makes me feel like. This game feels like a true celebration of the past. I can't even begin to imagine the joy an Oblivion fan must feel.

Some performance issues aside, the reception of this game has been stellar so far. This is quite refreshing as gaming news always tend to be negative. It seems that everyone aside from an extremely minuscule minority is enjoying this game, that is quite the rare sight.

Bethesda and Virtuos were clever in how they approached this remake. The game still runs on the original engine, but graphics are rendered through Unreal Engine 5. A wise move as they avoided having to recreate the soul of the game completely. I also think that part of the success of remaster is that it shows that older games did something different that is no longer present in modern games. I am honestly not sure what this is exactly myself. Perhaps modern games are overdesigned or something like that.

Written by manpaint on 27 April 2025.