For many gamers, this week’s release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it’s provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven’t gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.
I’m in that second group. While I’ve played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I’ve never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game’s somewhat janky engine.
Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.
I remember playing it for the first time in 2006 and I had completely forgotten about that guff by the time I got out of the tutorial. My character went on to ignore the main quest for many dozens of hours.
Of course several of those hours were spent struggling to defeat boars that started appearing on the road at level 5. They were insanely tough since I’d accidentally made the most difficult possible custom class. At least the remaster doesn’t have that problem. Instead the combat is very easy — unless you go up one level in difficulty in which case you’ll probably be killed by a mudcrab.