Oblivion Remastered: The Re-review

I thought of opening with some one-liner with Bethesda re-releasing their games. Twenty years later, it's Oblivion's turn on the trampoline, or something like that. I came at it with apprehensive posturing. It couldn't be done, I thought. It was an attempt at reinvoking a early 2000's time-capsule, a relic excised from very different times, where the equations of innovation in the way-back AAA gaming space feels like a distant fantasy now.

But here's the very basic reason why it does succeed to some capacity: this is a remaster made by people who clearly understand what makes this aging 2006 golden-age Bethesda classic tick. That is, they understood that it's not a good idea to try and "modernize" Oblivion — it's better to just doll it up for the absurdist pageant that ensues.

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You're the Oblivion Remastered from my dreams!

This will go down in the Remaster Hall of Fame in the same row as Diablo 2 Resurrected and the PS4 remake for Shadow of The Colossus.

Like all of these, Virtuos studio's recreation of Oblivion sprinkles era-appropriate technological toppings without uprooting the flavor of the crust. This is an unabashed showboating for what Oblivion has always been, just with a prettier face to front it.

The Visuals

Image via Bethesda Softworks || Nexusmods: saddvik

For the most part, Oblivion Remastered completely hits the goal of bringing Cyrodiil to an impressive visual experience in 2025. If you have played a bunch of Unreal Engine 5 games at this point, the wilderness won't feel all that impressive to you. The misty distance that blends into the horizons, the volumetric lightning, the Lumen-empowered raytracing, it's all standard affair for a UE5 product.

The far more commendable work is done in the civilized quarters of Oblivion Remastered. Every archictectural detail is painstakingly recreated, leaving abosolutely no botched corner for me to nitpick over.

But there is some room for nitpicking in other areas. Oblivion Remastered takes a slight artistic departure in the coloring of its fog and weahers, cutting down on the blues and greens with an excessive amount of red. After years of meddling with weather mods in Skyrim, I am not very impressed by how it uses the environmental tech of UE5.

The skylighting is so dulled down that cloud shadows are impossible to spot, and the dawns and dusks of the original Oblivion paint a far more dramatic and visually rich skyline. Here we are stuck with 3D cloud-generation, a circus stunt that gets tiresome after a while.

The foliage is a reasonable current-gen upgrade over the original's speedtree tech (which, truth be toled, were a visual marvel for a 2006 game). However, I have to yet again nitpick here to say that Unreal Engine 5 does not produce the most immersive of enviroments in any category.

One I can earmark is foliage animation. All the flora, harvestible and non-harvestible, are splendidly reproduced — except their reactivity to the wind is to wobble like jello every few seconds. This same immersion-breaker is also visible in tree animations, where this game doesn't hold a candle to Witcher 3, a ten-year old title now.

I could go on about the inconsistent (atimes monstrous) amalgamation of Screen-Space Reflections and Lumen-powered ray-traced reflections on the water. Instead, let us turn our attention to the good stuff: the character models.

The creatures, being generic fantasy affair with Oblivion, were no doubt easy to remaster. But Virtuos also hits it out of the park with Unrealifying the men and merfolk of fourth-era Tamriel. Oblivion Remastered has the most lifelike and captivating facial animations I have seen in a video game since L.A. Noire.

This also extends to the character creator. The fact that they remaster every asset, let us nevertheless create monstrosities of unimaginable proportions, and make it work just like the original deserves its own laurels.

Before I move on to the non-visual stuff, a small but important aside on the technical state of the game.

I have exclusively played Oblivion Remastered on PC, and tried it on a 3070 and a 4080ti. In both cases, I have noticed some rather frequent frametime drops, regardless of whether I use G-sync or not.

This game is not the best-optimized, and you should expect to face some technical turbulence going in. Let alone those with older rigs, Oblivion Remastered has some issues even with recommended hardware.

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The Non-visuals

Few people like the titular realm (Image via Sportskeeda || Bethesda Softworks)

Oblivion Remastered does a handful of other cosmetic adjustments to make the game more accessible and fun. The biggest one is the animations, all redone form scratch while keeping some parity with the original ones. Truth be told, the movement animations in third-person have some jank, but in first-person (the recommended Elder Scrolls experience), Oblivion feels the best it has felt.

All the new weapon animations are perfectly polished and feel great to use, archery somehow feels better than it did in Skyrim, and the visceral hit feedback on enemies gives it some much-needed oomph on top.

Under the hood, some attempts have also been made to eliminate the biggest complaint: the leveling system. Oblivion's original levelup system has the infamous legacy for potentially making you weaker as you level up, relative to the world. In the Remastered version, you are rid of the most insidious part of it.

Attributes no longer increase from concealed calculations; instead, you get twelve points every level, and free rein to level up any three Attributes of your choosing. Meanwhile, both Major and Minor skills now contribute to increasing your progress to the next level.

Together, this changes basically takes out all the frantic spreadsheet math and careful min-maxing the original game roped you into, lest you do it wrong all over again. Can you do it wrong in this game, though? Theoretically, yes, but the margin for error there is much, much wider with Oblivion Remastered. More on that later; first let me give all of you old-school Oblivion fans an early leave.

As a faithful remaster, this gets 10/10. The base game purchase of Oblivion Remastered even bundles Knights of The Nine and Shivering Isles for good measure. To the old-timey Oblivion enjoyers — the Remastered is now the definitive way to experience it, provided you can accommodate its optimization woes.

For those of you who will experience Oblivion for the first time through Remastered, this review should instead re-examine the original. Where exactly does Oblivion stand in the current day and age?

The short answer: Oblivion is a high-fructose open-world role-playing game that may fall short of modern demands over a hundred-hour playthrough. The remaster may make it look gorgeously next-gen, but doesn't work out many of its inherent problems.

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Shiny visuals aside, how does Oblivion hold up in 2025?

It holds up for rather offbeat reasons (Image via Bethesda Softworks || Nexusmods: awkwardgardener)

Looking at the catalog of game releases in 2006, and even the year after, Oblivion the original was far ahead of its competitors in the open-world RPG niche. It went on to nab the Golden Joystick Award that year, and sire a pair of critically acclaimed expansions.

In 2024, the Final Fantasy VII remaster won a Golden Joystick award. Would Virtuos/Microsoft's swing at the same thing reclaim that crown in 2025? I highly doubt it, and here's why.

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The unfixable problems of Oblivion, the Remaster

This only looks as good after some Lumen-related ini tweaking (Image via Sportskeeda || Bethesda Softworks)

As you slip out of the mud-caked sewerways, Oblivion starts you off at a windy valley — at the dead center of the overworld map. The placement is highly deliberate. The world stretches out in every direction, and you can go anywhere you want. The choice is yours.

Todd Howard's "See that mountain? you can climb it!" elevator pitch was only popularized by Skyrim's widespread fame. In reality, Oblivion (and later Fallout 3) was the genesis of that principle, now (in)famous as the Bethesda open-world design.

In the opening hour, this may seem like great freedom for a casual romp through these cheery woods. As you keep playing, the tarpaulin of Oblivion's open world is stretched thinner and thinner, till you realize it wasn't covering much at all.

Skyrim sometimes gets lambasted for some of the hyper-streamlining design desicions it makes. Much of that is soft-launched here in the Cyrodiilic heartlands, except these problem points are more ham-fisted and highly outdated even by Bethesda standards.

Getting out of the sewers, your tall order is to reach Weynon Priory to deliver the royal Amulet. The pop-up text for the quest instructs you to fast-travel there. This is Oblivion's cardinal sin, its first big red-flag, and the first tell of its problems.

Its world is large enough in sheer square footage, but a lot of it is barren nowherelands with very few truly unique points of interest. The game's solution to this problem is an over-reliance on the fast travel system. Before you discover anything at all, you can just click on any of Cyrodiil's nine cities to fast travel there.

By comparison, Skyirm makes a far more commendable effort to visually guide you to the next interesting thing without nudging you to use the fast-travel menu to skip twenty minutes of travel-time.

The other side of the coin is what indeed is there to visit between its cities. A Bethesda game's true strength lies in going off the beaten path, an infinite recursion of getting side-tracked over and over again. In this task, Oblivion's civilized territories and townships succeed, but its wilderness and dungeons whiff completely.

Oblivion Remastered makes its caves more photogrammetric, the ancient marbles of its Ayelid ruins more majestic, but in staying a faithful remaster, does not touch the level design. This means you get the barely-different variants of the same caves, mines, ruins, run-down forts over and over again.

The beautifully rendered UE5 infernal realm of Oblivion, the titular centerpiece supposed to be your main-course meal, are infamously its most tedious parts. Even these are just variants of five or six archetypes that get grating after the first few times.

These don't even have the quest objective to point you towards the general direction of the next Whiskey Bar, and while it could have a good roguelite spin, the visual homogenity makes an Oblivion gate something you'll quikcly learn to ingore.

The backdrops stay the same, what changes is the flavor of the enemy, and the gear they wear. Now we come to the third problem of being completely player-centric: the world that tries to mirror you every step of the way.

This, yet again, is a formula that was refined and improved in Skyrim. In Oblivion, you get a levelled set of enemies to one-up you every few level-ups.

The original had a highly questionable character progression system — bordering on punitive. It was all too easy to level you character inefficiently, to the point you completley sabotage that whole playthrough. This was a combination of an obscure set of attribute-leveling mechanics, and a highly aggressive enemy health scaling.

Credit where credit's due: Oblivion Remastered mitigates the problem by completely overhauling level-up, attribute increment, and making monster scaling a bit more like Skyrim, i.e. the same, but more refined. But treating is not curing.

To test it out, I specifically did a stub playthrough where I pump a bunch of non-combat Skills to level myself up.

My findings: yes, you can still brick your save if you don't scale at least some form of damage-dealing instrument - Destruction, Blade, or Blunt (hand-to-hand if you're feeling extra masochistic). There's not enough alternative systems in place to make use of a non-combat playstyle properly for all content.

You can probably try whisking people around with Teleportation, or do an Alchemist playthrough with eventually lethal poisons, but the other Oblivion Skills were not balanced around being viable for combat. And non-viable for combat here translates to non-viable for progression, because you can't talk or tiptoe your way around things in many cases.

Meanwhile, rebalancing the monster-scaling does not manage to mitigate the optics of the problem, much less fix it. As you level up, wolf spawns get replaced with bears and minotaurs, and the Daedric grunts with higher-caliber beings.

On the one hand, this creates the problem of Bandits getting an economic stimulus package every few levels. They'll keep buying better and better gear as your character grows in levels.

In fact, you'll never get Ebony or higher gear from vendors; but you do get them by patting down the average highwayman. Given their state of development, it really puts into question whether they chose to be a bandit as a bit.

On the other hand, this causes an even larger functional problem with quests. The do-them-in-any-order quests, which are specifically the reason why Bethesda had opted to go with the player-centric auto-leveling.

Here are two very feasible examples many players are likely to encounter.

If you put the main quest off for too long, the Daedra will grow much stronger in the Oblivion incursions. Instead of Scamp city, you get hulking Daedroths that beat up the Kvatch guards black-and-blue. While the Daedra were out there doing Heroes of Might and Magic tricks to empower its army, the Imperial detachments were waiting for you, stuck permanently with starter-level gear.

In the Arena battles, you fight against opponents that scale to your level. Except for the final combatant you face, who has an unlevelled Unique armor piece.

In other words, if you do the Arena questline in your mid-30 levels, you might possibly get challengers donning Glass and Daedric gear in the last few rounds. Then, you get an anticlimactic final fight where you two-tap the legendary Grand Champion — because he has unique armor that doesn't scale up.

Those I have outlined so far are things you'd need to redesign to fix, while Oblivion Remastered is adamant in staying faithful.

There are also a myriad other gameplay systems that clash: horses are not just borderline useles, but counterproductive because you don't level Athletics when on horseback. Security is just as useless as it was in the original, namely, the lockpicking minigame is so monotone that you just want to bypass it with a Skeleton key or Alteration spells. I could go on with dozens of isolated complaints like this — but thankfully, while these numerous cracks cheapen the Oblivion vase, they can't destroy it.

Now, a glass-half-full way of looking at it is: preserving the original's vision also preserves everything that's great about it.

As long as I have spent side-eyeing the many pitfalls of Oblivion's outdated design ideas, it still cannot overshadow the high points. Regardless of its possible balance consistency issues, the presentation of the Arena and the blood-basin underneath turns a flimsy excuse of a faction into something memorable.

Oblivion Remastered does not have to purely rely on its cutting-edge visuals and impressive character models to sell itself — there are other reasons why it will stand the test of time, much like the original.

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The (niche) brilliance of Oblivion, the original

It's enthralling to experience the quests with a much more dramatic lighting framework (Image via Sportskeeda || Bethesda Softworks)

In 2006, Oblivion was a big departure from its previous Elder Scrolls entry, Morrowind — itself a successful title having sold four million copies.

Doing a 180 from the alien surly swamps of Morrowind, in came Oblivion with its curb appeal of the most generic medieval shire-fantasy highlands you can imagine. From the redesign of the Legion armor to the titular Oblivion gates, there are very clear impressions of Lord of The Rings here; a sensible sales pitch for its time.

What is the reviewer yapping about, you wonder. What is niche about Lord of the Rings, even in 2025? In truth, Oblivion outlives the (speculative) attempt to piggyback on Peter Jackson box-office hits. It mutates into something else altogether, perhaps as a happy accident.

According to pre-Oblivion lore, Cyrodiil was supposed to be a lush tropical jungle. But even with its promotional content, it was obvious how that identity was chucked into the limited region of Blackwood, in favor of the European high-fantasy off-brand LoTR get-up.

This apparent pivot was subject for much debate in some part of the Elder Scrolls community back when Oblivion was released.

Some retroactive lore explanations did the rounds — such as Reman Cyrodiil's deforestation and terraforming mandate with the borrowed powers of a God. Crucially, though, Oblivion grew into its overexposed bloomfest as part of its now fondly remembered identity.

The "niche" brilliance I'm talking about is a certain sensibility it caters to. Oblivion Remastered will not be the favourite Elder Scrolls for many. It is seemingly uninterested in suspending your disbelif, and instead, is a brazen establishment of its odd mechanics-cocktail.

The lifeblood of Oblivion's identity within the wider context of gaming, if you haven't chanced across the many funny clips, is its radiant AI system. Its characters have far more intricate and complex AI routine than any other Elder Scrolls game, and in fact, most other open-world RPGs I can think of.

Each NPC having a unique life and daily, weekly, and even monthly routines was a jaw-dropping proposition in 2006. Two decades of rapid technological proliferation later, you'd think the system has been tried again since then.

But no, it hasn't — no other game did it better that I can remember. The only exception I can think of is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with its A-Life tech. In Stalker 2, A-Life makes a return, but it's dialled back significantly in how impactful it feels, despite its apparent jump in engine limitation allowance (coincidentally a Unreal Engine 5 game).

Now, as a sales hook it may sounds great, but in effect, how most players will engage with Oblivion's radiant AI has a very separate dimension. If you have seen Oblivion NPC dialogue compilations, you may have an inkling where I'm going with this.

Far more than any other AAA role-playing game, the denizens of Cyrodiil will bump into each other, and engage in small-talk. This ranges from ironically quite lifelike non-sequitur formalities to absolutely nonsensical puerile banter. Human memory working as it does, we only remember the latter, and what a crutch to walk on it is.

The writing also does its part of the job perfectly. Oblivion has a very uncannily jubilant tone about it — with intentionally pedantic diction and mock-Arthurian mores. Coupled with the radiant AI, the sporadic comedy it produces is very Monty Python-esque. Meaning, if you aren't in the mood for middlebrow humor and unintentionally funny shenanigans, Oblivion Remastered might not fit your criteria of a good role-playing game.

Even the quest writing sort of fits into that glove. The Fighter's guild starter quest sends you to deal with a steroetypical rat-problem. Until you go and talk to the client at her house. And now, for something completely different — you're not trying to eliminate the rats, you're looking for what's causing the rats to disappear.

Oblivion pulls this trick out of its quest-writing hat all the time. Most quests take some form of less-predictable turn to keep it spicy. Going with Oblivion's borderline-absurdist nature, the trick almost never falls flat. If you're coming from Skyrim, the average Oblivion sidequest is inifinitely more interesting.

The weakest part of all is its main story, another Bethesda tradition well-kept. But who does the main quest anyway? Instead, you'll be spending hours trying to climb the ranks of the guild factions.

Some of them meander too long before getting to a good setpiece break-points. Yet, the setpieces in question make it count, and thus bails out some very outdated go-here kill-this fetch-that quest design.

Some of the quests try to lean a bit into the immersive-sim nature the radiant AI would imply in a game from any other genre. One of the Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion is an all-time classic for having this immersive-sim approach.

The premise is a simple Hitman level: enter a manor, and kill three participants. The beauty lies in just how many ways you can do this, including a rare full-pacifist route that Oblivion Remastered doesn't often indulge in.

To a seasoned gamer with a balanced gaming diet, this whodunit bottle-episode won't feel like such a big deal; the number of possible permutations and outcomes isn't large enough. Yet, for someone who played Oblivion Remastered for the first time after having gone through Skyrim, this sort of attempt is a breath of fresh air.

In 2025, Oblivion is a big departure from its previous Elder Scrolls entry - let me do that one again - Skyrim Anniversary Edition. We have now come full circle, with a new generation of gamers waking up to why Oblivion Remastered would be worth playing, even if the UE5 visuals did not deliver, or the combat did not have some newfound oomph.

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The Verdict

The average individual after being cast in Oblivion (Image via Bethesda Softworks)

Between the bizarre artistic integrity of Morrowind and the colossal success of Skyrim stands the cult following of Oblivion. Campy, corny, chaotic Oblivion.

Yet, there's a labouious sincerity to its camp. Between the drawn-out posh accent and city-dweller affectations of its characters, infinitely quotable dialogue, and unhinged permutations of its radiant AI routines, Oblivion is a peerless experience.

It's hard to tell whether the cohesion in its unscripted moments of theatrical perfection is intentional, but Oblivion Remastered preserves the jank that makes it possible. The nine gods willing, it will preserve Oblivion's distinct cultural imprint on Elder Scrolls and the wider gaming sphere for twenty more years.

And I haven't even talked about the modding community.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Oblivion Remastered Review (Image via Sportskeeda)

Reviewed On: PC (Key provided by Bethesda Softworks)

Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S

Developer: Virtuos, Bethesda Game Studios

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Release Date: April 22, 2025