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The Oblivion Remaster Is a Pleasant Surprise
A wild and weird mix of old and new
I’ve been a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion since it first came out back in 2006. It carefully blended hardcore and casual RPG design elements in a way that changed video games forever, and brought the series to its largest audience— at least until Skyrim beat it by several orders of magnitude.
After years of leaks, rumors, and speculation, an Oblivion remaster launched this morning for PS5, Xbox, and PC. That’s right, Bethesda finally stopped re-releasing Skyrim and remembered that they used to make other games, too. They’ve re-created this creaky classic with help from support studio Virtuos. I had kinda thought that after almost twenty years of wasting away that it’d never see another shot at relevance, but here it is.
I’ve spent a huge chunk of the day playing the new version, and it’s super weird. Mostly in a good way. It’s much better than the game that first launched all that time ago, but just like the original game tried to make a hardcore RPG more accessible, this new release tries to balance old and new game elements into something that’s almost a full remake, but without costing as much.
It’s a great game for a weird person like me who was already bound to love it, but I think that a bunch of stuff will look…
