When The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion launched in 2006, it was a big deal. The new console generation had just been ushered in by the Xbox 360, and the promised new experiences that the hardware enabled were coming out of the gate. Oblivion showed off lush forests like we’d never seen before, and that’s all I needed to know. More importantly, I had just recently been introduced to the series through a late exploration of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Most importantly, I was in college, and a conveniently timed teacher’s strike meant that I had a clear schedule to get lost in Tamriel.

I’ve tried returning to it on a few occasions, but usually with these games, I like to spiff things up a bit with some mods. Nothing fancy. Something to make the trees look nicer, the weather a bit more varied, the bodies a bit more nude, and to fix the fucking faces. Maybe something to replace the stupid level scaling, but we’ll get into that. The point is, I don’t try to overhaul the game; the game isn’t a problem, mostly. I just want it to look better. But despite this, whenever I try to get back into it, one of the mods will inevitably fail to function as intended, which leads me into a bunch of troubleshooting, at the end of which, I usually just drop the game.

So, a remastered version sounds perfect.

LET’S GET THIS ERA OVER WITH

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has one of the dumbest main quests in the entire series. Maybe Arena is worse, but it came out in a different time for fantasy in video games, and a different time for video game narratives in general, so it has plenty of excuses. But to be fair to Oblivion, it has to follow on from Morrowind, one of the most deceptively complex and cerebral storylines I’ve encountered in the fantasy genre.

I don’t know what happened, honestly. I looked to see if I could find a key writer who left or something similar, and part of it may have been Michael Kirkbride. He was responsible for a lot of the lore that shaped the Elder Scrolls going into Morrowind, and he felt that he had lost a lot of creative control with Oblivion. However, as always, saying one person is the reason one thing is good and another is bad is a drastic simplification of the matter. Though, it could be part of the problem.

The biggest issue with Oblivion’s main quest, and something that affects the overall game design, is that it feels like it is desperately trying to be more accessible. That’s not inherently a bad thing. Morrowind was pretty impenetrable. It took me a few laps of it before the pieces began to come together for me in how the world works. It took me taking part in a roleplay guild in Elder Scrolls Online to make things much clearer. Even then, some of the lore is written to be unreliable and conflicting. Just dense.

But Oblivion strains to be less alien. Morrowind dropped you off at a port in a strange land and left you to find your way in the world, with the main quest taking you from confused schmuck to godly figure in an incredibly organic way. Oblivion, you aren’t even the godly figure. You’re present when Emperor Uriel Septim VII get assassinated, and then it’s your job to be everyone’s messenger/courier. It somehow manages to get worse from there.

CLOSE SHUT THE JAWS OF THAT ONE OBLIVION

One of the things that irks me about Oblivion is Oblivion. If you follow the main quest a short ways into it, you get to the point where Oblivion invades. All these gateways to the worst dungeons imaginable open up in the countryside like unsightly scabs. “What is Oblivion?” you may ask if you’ve never played these games. If you go by what Oblivion tells you, you’d probably think it’s literal Hell. Like we’re playing Doom with the sci-fi being swapped with high fantasy.

That’s not what Oblivion is according to the lore. It’s actually a number of alternate, magical planes of existence, each ruled over by deity-like figures. The one that you venture into in The Elder Scrolls IV is actually called Deadlands, ruled over by Mehrunes Dagon. However, I don’t think it’s ever referred to as that name in Oblivion, instead just being called “Oblivion.” Amusingly enough, one of the expansions, Shivering Isles takes you to the titular plane of Oblivion ruled over by Sheogorath. I that expansion, the land only ever gets referred to as “The Shivering Isles,” and the dialogue absolute strains to avoid mentioning that it’s also a plane of Oblivion. So, that’s real dumb.

To summarize my complaints; Oblivion reaches to over-simplify things. Morrowind had a whole political structure, bickering factions, strange religions, conflicting beliefs, and complex history. Oblivion aspires to be no more complicated than clear good versus evil. 

It doesn’t have to be like this. The Elder Scrolls Online’s main quest tells a similar story of an invasion from Oblivion (in that narrative, it’s from Molag Bal’s realm of Coldharbour, which is actually referred to as Coldharbour), but tells it in a drastically more detailed and unique way. It’s more accessible while also allowing itself to get into the weeds. It knows some people are going to skip the dialogue, so it’s understandable in broad strokes, while still giving something to people who are willing to think. Oblivion doesn’t make such concessions. It would rather reshape the world so folks unwilling to strain a mental muscle will understand it.

OKAY, BUT YEAH

So, with that out of the way, would you believe that I actually like Oblivion? Quite a bit. If I hadn’t planned on writing this review, I would have just ignored the main questline, but otherwise, I was really happy to get back into it.

The Elder Scrolls series just manages to capture a feeling of tangible place and adventure. The worlds are super detailed to the point of peril. They’re invariably glitchy and awkward because they reach for the sun and get their wings burned off. This was the first game in the series with a realistic physics system, and, gosh, it struggles with it. Especially in the remaster where I don’t think I walked into a room once without the books popping off the shelves. Which is funny, because there’s no way Virtuos didn’t see it while working on it. They no doubt analyzed the amount of work it would take to get the physics to play nice with the original item placement and said, “aw, fuck it.”

The graphical overhaul is immense. They crammed every whizbang effect they could into it. At times, it looks almost photorealistic. But underneath all that gloss is the same awkward game that came out in 2006.

There’s this line of thought or debate that the Elder Scrolls games qualify as immersive sims; and they do fit. You’re dropped in an environment with its own rules, and it’s up to you to use the skills you have to achieve your goals. Even small immersive sims tend to have their bizarre, game-y twists on reality, and The Elder Scrolls are big immersive sims. They’re loose. Weird stuff happens. With Oblivion and later Skyrim, that’s actually a big part of the charm.

However, it does get in the way sometimes. The AI in particular is incredibly daft and have extremely simplistic reactions to their environment. To best illustrate this: there’s a quest where you essentially attend a murder mystery party where you’re the murderer. I think you’re suppose to take your time and pick people off while talking your way around suspicion, but really, all you need to do is murder someone, and as long as no one saw the murder happen, you’re free of suspicion. So, like, get them in a room alone, close the door, and then stab them. I killed everyone in rapid succession and was out the door with a big mission complete.

It’s too bad it doesn’t work as intended, but it’s over-ambitious in regard to both what is possible within a virtual environment as well as player patience. It’s still fun, it’s just ridiculous. It’s funny, but in the sort of way where you’re laughing at it and not with it, which is okay because it doesn’t have feelings.

THIS TWISTED WORLD

Yet, when you get past that, it feels like a real world. A twisted one, certainly. One that is full of the daftest people. But it’s one that invites you to inhabit it. And the fact that you’re so intellectually superior to everyone is a powerful feeling.

If there is one high point to the idiotic inhabitants of the world, it’s the so-called “radiant AI” that Bethesda put into place. It’s a fancy word for scripting. The AI follow a schedule; going to work at such a time, going to sleep at night, eating at certain points of the day. It’s not like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask or Chulip where they’re hard-stuck to that route, it’s more that the little people get a goal in mind at specific points in a day and do their best to pathfind to it. You can get to know their routine, if that’s something that interests you. It makes nights feel a lot different than days.

This would make for some pretty dynamic gameplay, but unfortunately, one of the curses inflicted upon The Elder Scrolls by Oblivion is that it is only capable of communicating in waypoints. If arrows didn’t show up on your compass, it would be extraordinarily difficult to know where to go or what to pick up. So, rather than a game where you need to gather information to find your target, you instead just follow the red arrow until it becomes a green arrow, then follow the green arrow to what you’re looking for. It’s something very artificial in what would otherwise be a fairly organic game.

If, instead, you could ask NPCs where so-and-so works and where they live, then you could narrow down where to find them, and that would be interesting. I suppose that is maybe one of the limitations that were introduced when the series went fully voice acted. The sheer number of quests would make this something of a logical impossibility. So, instead, the solution is to just point at where you need to go, I guess.

This would be carried over to Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. I think, with this belief in the big-budget sphere that everything needs to voice acted, we’ve lost more than we’ve gained.

TRACING RAYS

The actual remaster effort is fine. With all the technical bells and whistles, it looks pretty impressive. As I mentioned earlier, it can, at times, approach photorealism with its advanced ray tracing and Lumens lighting effects.

It runs like shit, though. By that I mean, you need to use DLSS or FSR to run all the effects at an acceptable framerate, and even on top of that, it suggests you use frame generation. However, I found frame generation didn’t even help much, and caused noticeable input lag. It felt really uncomfortable to play until I turned it off. At that point, I’d get around 60FPS indoors and in most cities, but the moment I stepped outside, it became a lot shakier. Not usually unplayable, but it hitches a lot, even at the best of times, and the fps would drop severely at seemingly random moments. There’s a place in The Shivering Isles that the whole thing drops catastophically and turns into an unplayable slideshow. I have no idea why it happens in that specific spot.

So, it plays about the same as the original did on my PC in 2006.

This is off-topic, but ray tracing is such a scam. Okay, that’s not the right word. It probably is the future of video game lighting. I get the appeal, since it’s theoretically easier to implement and can often look great, but the trade-off in performance isn’t worth it. The hardware you need to play games using it is ridiculously expensive and still struggles with it. It seemed like graphical requirements were plateauing, and then ray tracing starts getting pushed, and suddenly you need to upgrade every year again to play the newest games that look only marginally better. I think Ghost of Tsushima is one of the best looking games on the market, and it’s nearly five years older and doesn’t use ray tracing. It really feels like the technology being misused as planned obsolescence for GPUs, and that sucks.

At the very least, the remaster fixes the hideously awful faces that, somehow, looked good to me in 2006. And that’s not only graphical fidelity, it’s also art style. Speaking of which, one concern with remasters is that they’ll compromise the intended art style. However, Oblivion was already going for photorealism, it was just as good as they could do in 2006. On the other hand, the colour grading is noticeably drabber. OG Oblivion was very vibrant, whereas the remaster loses a lot of that. That’s maybe the one place where I think there’s a loss of identity.

Oh. Another thing that bothers me is the grass. The original version has these big patches of thigh-high, billowy grass everywhere. The Remastered version looks like someone mows the forests a few times a month. Really takes away from the undergrowth.

TRASH AMULET

There’s a lot that I could complain about with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. The level scaling is absolutely daft, for example. By the time you’re level 20, even the bandits you encounter on the road are wearing glass armor. You’d think that level of affluence would drive them to more sophisticated crime, but whatever, I guess. 

Some of the quests seem like they crashed against what was possible in the game design, and couldn’t be reworked in a pleasing matter. For example, Mannimarco (a fun name to say) is an antagonist in the Mage’s Guild storyline. Dude’s a legendary necromancer who was once a serious threat to Tamriel. Guy you face off with at the end? Altmer in a bath robe. Goes down like any other chump in the game. The previous Elder Scrolls games had trouble with presenting big bads, as well, but it kind of highlights the awkwardness of the whole production here.

But my main problem is just the main questline. Those Oblivion gates suck. They suck so hard. And the main plot is so vapid, and it never stops being vapid. It waters everything down, making the whole world it presents a lot blander, and it can’t stop undermining its own dramatic moments. I detest the main quest. I’m hoping this is the last time I force myself through it.

There’s still a lot of good in there, and the Remaster got me to play for another 100 hours. However, it’s not a great Elder Scrolls title. I’d maybe take it over Arena and Daggerfall, but I’d much sooner pick up Morrowind, Online, and even Skyrim. Regardless, it’s still an Elder Scrolls game, and it provides the same sort of detailed world that can really suck you in. Just maybe ignore the main story quest. Huck that amulet in the trash and go learn magic or murder some people. The jaws of Oblivion are better off staying shut.

6/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam copy of the game. It was paid for by the author (via kind donors like you).