I’m Super Concerned About the Rumored Oblivion Remake

Here there be dragons?

Improving these graphics would only further highlight other issues. Yes, I’m holding a torch for no reason. PC screenshot captured by the author.

Bethesda’s 2006 game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is probably my favorite game in that series, despite its many flaws. I know that’s not a popular opinion. Diehard fans tend to love the older titles like Morrowind for their fiddly complexity and general weirdness. Players who came to the series later on usually love Skyrim, with its Viking-inspired world and high-octane dragon fights.

Oblivion is the awkward middle between those two, but it’s also the cornerstone for all of Bethesda’s modern output. It’s the game that established their design template for everything since, both for good and for ill. Without it, we would never have had Fallout 4, or Skyrim, or Starfield.

Time and the mainstream gaming market have both largely forgotten the game. It has languished in a weird dust pile while Skyrim gets re-released over and over again to greater and greater sales, and while the main team carries forth making new stuff. But that all might be about to change. For the last couple of years, ever since the big court battle between Microsoft and the FTC during the Activision merger led to a huge release of internal documents, there have been rumblings of a new remake/remaster of Oblivion.