The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025)

I genuinely didn't realize how much I missed that 'Bethesda' feel, its been so long that even they don't know how to pull it off anymore. I thought it was mostly nostalgia, but nuh, they genuinely don't make em like they used to. Returning to the first RPG I ever played genuinely feels like coming home.

I'm going to no-life this game so freaking hard!

Time just flies when I'm playing this game. I've actually hit the hour mark I had when I had unlocked most of the achievements back in the 360 days (around 60 hours) which is crazy to me (and a testament that I really didn't understand how to play this type of game).

I've only just completed the entrance exams to the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild. Martin is still waiting for that deadric artifact. I think I've got a lot more time in this game before I would call it finished.

Oblivion was always my least favorite of the 3 modern-ish Elder Scrolls games. I think my previous feelings for it hold up for Remastered.

I should preface this with saying I like, but don't love Elder Scrolls games. The sandbox approach only holds my attention so long. I think Oblivion remastered will be amazing for folks who have hundreds of hours in Skyrim and want more, that isn't me lol.

Cyrodil, the region in Oblivion, is very vanilla fantasy. Where Morrowind was this amazing alien landscape, and Skyrim these sweeping mountainous areas, Cyrodil is just sort of placid forests, lakes, and a few ruins.

Oblivion's world feels less populated then either of the other games, and the enemy encounters get even more repetitive then either other.

That said, the facelift Remastered gave this game does give some fun to be found. I think the faction structure in Oblivion is a nice middle ground between Skyrim, where your character's progression doesn't effect factions, and Morrowind, that has a bit archaic progression.

The world in Oblivion remastered is absolutely stunning.

I have two complaints for Remastered. One, cloud saves dont transfer between PC and Steam Deck! Super annoying.

Two, the difficulty is completely off. Normal is mind numbing easy, with early enemies dying to single hits. But putting the difficulty up one results in an absolutely unfair power spike with enemies becoming absolute damage sponges and killing the player in a few hits. There isn't any middle ground.

Overall, if you love Elder Scrolls this game is completely worth trying. But if you think they are just fine, there isn't much here for you.

• Playtime: 142 hours (222 quests completed, just a few fetch quests left)

• Played: 2025

Intro

Oblivion Remastered (OR) is a rather faithful update/upgrade of the 2006 which fixes some flaws, keeps many others and introduces new ones. It was unexpectedly released on the 22nd of April, over five weeks ago. There still has been no sign of a patch despite severe performance and stability issues. Honestly, i would definitely wait for a patch if you're interested.

For the unfamiliar, OR is an open-world first/third-person game that followed Morrowind and preceded Skyrim. You explore a medium-sized world, do quests, fight enemies and pick flowers.

The Good

• So many worthwhile quests.
• Goofy NPC conversations still make me laugh.
• Many new voices for NPCs.
• Levelling is immensily improved.
• Vastly improved visuals really add to the enjoyment.
• The music is still wonderful (but Jeremy Soule is a cunt).
• Still wonderfully janky.
• Magic is still ridiculously overpowered.
• Bows aren't as weak because they paralyse much more often.
• Melee combat actually has weight to it now.
• You can now see if a plant is harvested (in most cases).
• Plants are always harvested.
• Sprinting added.
• Clairvoyance spell added (shows path to quest marker/door)
• Stealth icon shows stages instead of only visible/invisible.
• No random staggers.
• Empty container/corpse indicated (usually).
• Various other tweaks and bugfixes.

The Bad

• There are just too many cells/loading screens and nothing was done to improve this. It's actually worse because of longer loading times.
• About a dozen quest items get permanently stuck due to not being "unmarked" when the relevant quest is finished.
• Local map now doesn't show by default when indoors.
• Inventory subcategories were removed.
• They didn't improve the inventory by adding a keychain or categories for e.g. quest items.
• Recharging weapons is an absolute pain. Scroll to find soul gem, click twice, repeat.
• The inventory shows an image of the item but no information by default. Awful.
• Identical soul gems with identical souls don't always stack.
• Soul gems don't show the soul they contain in their name (or even if they're empty).
• There aren't remotely enough hotkeys so you constantly have to use the inventory.
• Items in containers are sometimes hidden because of a bug.
• The rate at which skills level is very unbalanced. Hand-to-hand is especially slow even if taken as class skill.
• Races are so unbalanced it feels like you're being punished for not playing Breton.
• Combat is messy and allies always get in your way.
• Even with the improvements melee combat is still boring.
• No indication you have ever cleared a dungeon or even an Oblivion gate.
• Playing a vampire is too annoying (feed prompt/no fast travel).

The Ugly

• Picking up items is done with Enter instead of E. Just... why?!
• No option to delete spells without a mod. Custom spells are obnoxious to remove with the console.
• Performance is really poor. In the Shivering Isles i had constant crashes until i lowered graphics to Medium and installed Lumen Begone. I already had Ultimate Engine Tweaks too.
• The game crashes quite a lot. I had to stop using bows in the SI because the paralyse effect kept crashing the game.
• Light armor constantly needs to be repaired and there is no "repair all" option. You have to repair each item in health chunks separately. Heavy armor can have dozens of chunks.
• Shield spells and enchantments make items absorb more damage, breaking them even faster.
• Level scaling means you will almost exclusively see the exact same handful of enemies after level 20-ish.
• Still the same repetitive dungeons and extremely repetitive oblivion gates.

Conclusion

The last time i played Oblivion was in 2011. Initially i was really enjoying the Remaster, but at the end i was just done with it. I didn't even bother with generic Ayleid ruins and some other dungeons, because i know they're dull. Oblivion gates were amazing at first because they look great, but at the end i just used console commands to fly to the top of the tower to skip all the loading screens. I only did about 18 out of 60 gates and honestly that was already too much.

The problem with the Remaster is that while it improves the game significantly in some aspects, it doesn't change enough while also making some existing problems worse. The longer loading times make some locations especially obnoxious to navigate, especially guild locations. The inventory is a complete mess which makes repairing and recharging items even more of a pain. You level faster, so level scaling hits harder.

But still. Despite how much better this could have been, it is still a great game. The guild quest lines are just so good. The main quest is weak, but that final cinematic is really cool (i'd never actually finished it). And there are so many other fun quests. The vampire hunters' society, the invisible village, many of the Daedric quests, et cetera. I just love all of the dialogue and voice acting. Sheogorath and Haskill are especially great.

And the jank and wonkiness. Having six NPCs have three different conversations all at the same time. Getting into fights with 3+ parties. Hopping across lava to skip annoying sections in Oblivion. Making ridiculously OP spells that make combat a breeze. Abusing the terrain and the dumb enemy AI. Oblivion is just so entertaining in such a unique way that few games even come close to.

I think everyone should experience this at least once. But you should definitely wait for a patch and/or mods. I can run Horizon Forbidden West at 4K Ultra with zero problems while this struggled at 1K Medium with two mods to improve performance. Wow.

Oblivion just Oblivioned harder for me than i've ever seen;

I was preparing to open the great gate near Bruma. I had talked to the Countess and she was on her way to the Chapel to talk to Martin. I noticed her bodyguard wasn't going with her, and i decided to talk to him.

"Stop right there criminal scum!"

Apparently i had a bounty of 1. I don't even know how you can get that. Anyway, paying the bounty spawned me outside the castle. The countess, local guards and guards from other cities were there. Now a quirk of Oblivion is that certain timeskips can allow enemies to catch up with you. I had been followed by the Bleak Mine Guard for dozens and dozens of hours. They kept randomly showing up even though i had long finished the quest.

For some reason they keep switching between neutral and hostile multiple times per second. If i don't walk away fast enough, they will almost trap me in conversation too - lol.

So not only do these guys show up (sadly, no screenshots of this scene) but also a Miscarcand Lich from the previous main quest?! There was a fight and the Lich was killed, along with some zombies. Then i went to the chapel. The Bleak Mine stalkers spawned there and Martin, Jauffre, Burd, the Countess, the local priest and random guards attacked them. At some point people from the two friendly factions hit each other too many time by accident, which led to a fight between Martin & Jauffre and the rest:

10/10, no notes

Ok. So i've played this for 86 hours in two weeks, it's basically the only game i'm playing. Some negative thoughts so i have notes for a later review:

• This game was not ready for release. Performance is poor and sometimes you get multiple crashes back to back.

• Balance is basically non-existent. Bretons are by far the best race, for instance. They really should've balanced the races more or made it purely cosmetic like they made genders into origins.

• Magic isn't only OP, it's also incredibly easy to level compared to melee/ranged skills.

• At higher levels (25+) light armor breaks so fast it makes the game obnoxious. There is no quick repair option, you have to manually select all items you want to repair and click until they're repaired. You have to do this after every fight, it's awful. Even Kingdom Come wasn't as bad.

• The minimap not showing by default while indoors is just terrible design. It worked properly in the original game, wtf.

• They removed subcategories from the inventory. Another bizarre downgrade.

• They didn't even add a keychain so keys don't clutter up your "misc" tab. Wow.

• They also didn't merge cells or otherwise reduce the amount of loading screens. Especially in some guild houses this is very annoying.

• And, worst of all, the level scaling is the same. Once you approach level 30 or maybe earlier, enemy variation is severely reduced. You almost always fight top-tier versions of enemies, e.g. you won't see any non-summoned clannfear or scamps. Bandits and other enemies of playable races are the worst. They all have glass/daedric equipment. It's so boring. And it really hurts immersion. I ran into Sir Roderic, a noble knight on a pilgrimage to prove himself worthy of the crusader's relics. He was wearing daedric armor. Just. Wow.

It's still a 5/5 game though. :-P

Shameful beyond words. Why was this created. If you're having fun with it, that's great, I am glad. For me, the experience has been bad the whole way through. Worst of all are the visuals. This game looks downright awful. It is unpleasant and uninspiring. It's as if the developers truly thought: "hmm Oblivion is known for bright colors and over saturated graphics, let's buck expectation and make the game brown and grey."

Lighting is absolutely non existent here. Gone are the warm and inviting interior spaces and their meticulous attention to detail. No longer is the clutter beautifully arranged to make the world feel lived in. NPCs are not charmingly goofy to look at, they are just unpleasant to look at point blank.

Do yourself a favor and play the original Oblivion (on a CRT screen if you can) -- then play the fantastic overhaul mod "Nehrim" which boasts some of the most beautiful world spaces, intense dungeon diving, and truly rewarding RPG gameplay I have ever seen.

I know Bethesda didn't technically create this remake, but someone in the chain said "OK" to this, and I am shocked. Doubly so that the internet is accepting this as a good product. This is a slap in the face to the franchise, a lazy unpolished re-break. Everything that made Oblivion feel unique and interesting is gone thanks to the extremely distasteful and lazily done "upgrades". UI and new SFX all feel cheap and generic. All of Cyrodil now feels like any generic fantasy world, and it is seriously DIFFICULT to look at it. It's unpleasant.

I've played on a decent PC and on Xbox. It looks awful, I'm not the only one who thinks so: this is the majority of the discourse around the game as far as negative sentiments go.

I am done trusting Bethesda. They will produce some good stuff again, but they've proven that they don't care about how lazy and inept they look. This remake reminds me of Starfield in too many ways. That's not a good thing.

Elder Scrolls might be special to you, and it is to them too, but they are willing to throw you bland garbage and they expect you to clap your hands. It's insulting.

Started this earlier today and i just got to the sewer exit. Overall the game seems identical but prettier. The only bug i've encountered so far is equiped shields being in your face while using a bow. Switching perspective fixes it, but it's annoying. Also not a fan of how they use Enter instead of E to confirm dialogue options.

I have to admit that while i was quite excited to replay this for the first time since 2011 i'm not sure how i feel about it now. I really hope that at least the Oblivion gates aren't as boring.

This long-awaited remaster brings a significant visual overhaul among other changes that make it feel almost like a remake, but play for a while and you’ll see that it’s pretty much the same game under the hood. That's generally a good thing since it was a good game, but the original's ambition definitely brought along imperfections that can be immersion-breaking, confusing, and frustrating. Quest steps and other triggers often won’t activate properly, the game is prone to crashing outright more than I ever remember it doing on Xbox 360, NPCs will loudly talk over each other and behave weirdly, and so on. It’s disappointing that with all the effort put into more marketable updates to the game, it still has these kinds of issues to this degree.

But the original game, flaws and all, was and still is loved for a reason. For me, the main reason is that it’s just a really nice-feeling big fantasy world to be in. Both the towns and the open wilderness can have a great atmosphere that this remaster gets across well, even if the modern coat of paint does feel different. It would be nice if those towns were bigger and more fleshed-out, but each still has its own character, and it's hard to knock this for the overall scale it pulled off. I still love visiting all the different areas, filling out the map, and building up my character's abilities and renown. The game is very easy to get into and take at your own pace, and does a good job introducing many questlines to follow. As a result, it lends itself very well to hours and hours of play if you're up for it, but also is a game where you don't have to put in immense time or finish anything in particular to have a nice little experience.

I first played Oblivion around 15 years ago, and was a big fan, but haven't revisited it or thought about it all that much in the following years. To me, the game rarely feels particularly excellent and absolutely has content I'm happy to skip, but is usually at least "good enough" to remain engaging. Since I didn't touch it much for a while, I don't have a very keen eye for the exact differences between the original and this version, and also don't necessarily have enormous nostalgia for all the original's choices and execution. I definitely like the remaster's look and feel, particularly how the combat feels compared to my memory of prior Elder Scrolls releases. There's also not as much clash as you'd think between that more modern look and the game's goofy and somewhat charming jank.

When it comes to high fantasy games, this is certainly one that is still worth recommending. I think it's much easier for the average person to enjoy today than Morrowind for instance, and personally I find it more generally appealing in setting and storyline than Skyrim. It's also just the way all the content and systems are stitched together I guess that makes it feel like more than the sum of its parts, a nice example of scale, pacing, tone and atmosphere, etc. taking precedence IMO over things like combat and plot. Just think of it less as something that will blow your mind with amazingness, and more something you can just chill in and get a whole lot of baseline-level fun out of, and it should work out pretty well.