The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is my secret shame. I played hundreds of hours of Morrowind. A thousand hours of Skyrim. But Oblivion? I skipped it.

I tried restarting it a dozen times over the years. But after Morrowind, Oblivion looked way too vanilla. And after Skyrim, it looked way too soft. I'm realizing now that Oblivion's Plain Jane looks are meant to gloss over the game world’s seedy underbelly. Whether we’re in Morrowind, Skyrim, or Cyrodiil, playing these games is a constant parade of beautiful nonsense.

Oblivion will make you put up with nuisances for the sake of immersion. I’ve been a vampire for almost this entire playthrough. I cannot go out in the sun or I start sizzling. Or rather—I can go out in the sun, but I have to continually cast Heal Minor Wounds while sprinting from one interior to the next. When my vampirism progresses too far, I’m dead before I make it a block down the street.

This is a land where taking an apple off someone’s plate is a capital offense—but you can rob a farm of its entire corn, strawberry, and potato harvest and no one bats an eye.

When talking to people, sometimes all that qualifies as a “rumor” is Wiki page drivel like: “Nibenay is rich in farmland, parklands, and forest.” That’s the best rumor you’ve got? I’m an adventurer. You’re going to hit me with the free visitor center's pamphlet?

Yet this is also a land where you can be guided by the Northern Lights draped over the border with Skyrim. Where deer always seem to gather outside of whatever cave you step out from. And you see the deep footprint of everything in Oblivion that would set up Skyrim for even more success.

The Elder Scrolls can go grimdark with the best of them. Take necromancers, for example. What should they hang above the dining room table, dear? A lovely chandelier? Why, yes: made of perpetually burning corpses, of course.

Oblivion is one for the books. There’s no question it belongs in a post-Dark Souls, post-Skyrim landscape—for every Elder Scrolls stands upon the shoulders of those that came before it.

The great Sir Patrick Stewart opens The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered with a monologue. He wears the crown. But he’s about to die. And instead of leaving us with timeless advice, he gives us some basic math homework: “I was born 87 years ago. For 65 years I’ve ruled as Tamriel’s emperor…”

We don’t care that he was 22 when he took the throne. But it does lend perspective to know that this remastered edition of Oblivion has arrived almost 20 years after the original.

This is more than a remaster—it’s a rediscovery.

Bethesda didn’t just splash Oblivion with a bucket of Skyrim paint. Even within The Elder Scrolls series, a lot has changed in 20 years. Heck, a lot changed in the five short years between the initial releases of Oblivion in 2006 and Skyrim in 2011. Simply giving Oblivion the Skyrim treatment would’ve done a disservice to the 2006 classic. The stilted dialogue, the clunky inventory, the goblins that chase your horse across half the countryside—these are as much a part of Oblivion’s identity as stretchy facial sliders, enemy level scaling, and that iconic moment of stepping out of the sewers into the open world. The color palette has been desaturated. The greens are a little less greenscreen-looking. The blues, a little less Crater Lake. The Oblivion Gates themselves, however, are a lot more tortured orange.

The Elder Scrolls has always been great for slow gaming. You may have Usain Bolt’s stride when you sprint—all knees and elbows—but gently press the thumbstick forward and you slow-walk like a movie star. That’s how I know an environment has its hooks in me: when I can’t help but admire the torchlight across a cavern wall. Or enjoy the walk of shame out of prison and back into civilization. Slow your roll. Oblivion isn’t going anywhere. That said, some folks like to cut to the chase. Fast travel is their friend.

Fast travel has always been there, but originally you had to visit a place first before you could teleport back to it later. No longer. Now, right out of the gate, you can fast travel to all nine of Oblivion’s major cities. That’s not how I’d play it—but you can. It took me a couple dozen hours of gameplay to ride my horse from the Imperial City through the western provinces. Why so long? Because I stopped to knock on the door of every undead fort, iron mine, elven ruin, and bandit camp along the way. I’m just trying to borrow a cup of sugar. I am your neighbor.

When those places don’t take kindly to door-to-door solicitors, a fight usually breaks out. Oblivion Remastered responds with upgraded combat. The three pillars—melee, magic, and stealth—are still the backbone. Hit it with a hammer, hit it with a fireball, hit it from the shadows. But now enemies react more believably. Hit ‘em with a left, they stumble left. Hit ‘em with a right, they stumble right. Kill ‘em on a hill, they ragdoll down like a bag of leaves. That’s part of the Oblivion charm they kept intact.

Is Oblivion updated enough for new audiences? If you’re coming from Skyrim, probably. If you’re coming from Morrowind, definitely. Oblivion could’ve been the forgotten middle child of the series. But this remaster leaves a strong impression. So strong, in fact, I’m now hoping 2002’s Morrowind gets the same treatment. This is how you do a remaster: make it palatable for a new generation while preserving everything that made it great for the old. How Bethesda—and especially Virtuos, the third-party studio doing the heavy lifting—pulled this off feels like a modern miracle. They threaded the needle perfectly.

You can practically smell the sewers now. The caves are moist with groundwater seepage. The elven ruins look like blue-lit bomb shelters erupting from the earth like ant hills. They’re built with unnerving symmetry: straight lines, 90-degree angles. Sure, after enough hours, it all gets a little samey. That same arrangement of stalactites. That same collapsed cavern floor. That same loop of white marble and gold filigree. But there’s charm in the repetition.

In an age of dangerous maps—where every step feels like a trap—The Elder Scrolls feels cozy by comparison. Even if it means getting lost again in those labyrinthine dungeons. The remaster stretches out the compass and makes distances easier to read.

The MacGuffin? Find the emperor’s bastard son. He’s the heir. But he’s missing. And if no one in the emperor’s bloodline sits on the throne—bastard or not—then all hell breaks loose.

So here you are. Through fate or coincidence, you're in the right place at the right time when the emperor and all his sons are assassinated. So, whether you create a “vanilla Jesus” Imperial like I did, or a donut-faced freak show like everyone else, your mission is clear: find Todd Howard’s son. (Not really Todd’s son, but it sure feels that way.)

This is his storytelling wheelhouse. In Oblivion, you're looking for the emperor’s son. In Fallout 3, you’re looking for your father. In Fallout 4, you’re looking for your son. Finding family—or risking child endangerment—seems to be Todd Howard’s favorite narrative.

Leveling up is also less punishing. You’re no longer stuck leveling only the “major skills” tied to a class you picked in the sewers. Now, you allocate 13 points across eight abilities: strength, intelligence, willpower, agility, speed, endurance, personality, and luck. Skyrim ditched ability scores entirely, but these are suspiciously close to Fallout’s S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats. The minor skills still level up by doing. Get punched by a troll, your armor skill goes up. Stab the troll, your blade skill goes up. Bunny-hop across Cyrodiil like a lunatic, your acrobatics skill goes up. Nothing is wasted.

I once joked that no game rewards my slow-walking playstyle. But I was wrong. Oblivion rewards it. Not as fast as the bunny-hopping crowd—but slow and steady still wins the race.

Dropping 115 GB of Unreal Engine into Oblivion works visual wonders for Cyrodiil. Meanwhile, the original 5 GB Creation Engine still does the grunt work of making Elder Scrolls feel like Elder Scrolls. The sound effects are preserved, too: Nirnroot’s annoying chime, the click of lockpicks, the hum of healing spells. Plants, animals, castles—they all look lovely now. And the sky? A purple-starred galaxy with two moons hanging above: one red, one white.

But Oblivion still shows its age. And that’s intentional in some ways, unintentional in others. Freezes and crashes aren’t part of the retro charm. Some weirdness persists. My character once lost his luscious hair after fighting four to six bears. I’ve been stuck translucent after scarfing half my alchemy stash. NPCs can hear you through five feet of stone wall because you’re still technically in “hearing range.” And there’s something about the way the health bar operates that never feels entirely honest.

A save and reboot has solved every one of these bugs so far. Just one crash and two freezes in 40 hours of gameplay.

Two decades’ worth of graphics resolution, texture detail, and lighting is here. You’ll still have load times and frame rate struggles if, like me, a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card from 2016 is still your workhorse. Yet I’m enjoying high graphical settings (not ultra) in the neighborhood of 45 frames per second. I am not ashamed.

Bethesda Game Studios blatantly stated that there won’t be mod support coming from them. But if there’s only one thing I know when it comes to the modding community, it’s that modders find a way. The Elder Scrolls series has one of the largest collections of modders in the world. On the first day, over 100 mods were already listed for Oblivion Remastered on the popular NexusMods website.

Oblivion Remastered doesn’t rewrite the past—it hugs it tightly. Rough edges are still there, but now there’s a remarkable layer of polish from modernized visuals, punchier combat, and thoughtful quality-of-life updates. Oblivion isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a time capsule that’s been carefully restored, allowing a new generation to appreciate its oddities and brilliance while giving longtime fans a chance to rediscover it all over again.