Do you need to play Morrowind before Oblivion Remastered? 

If you're new to the TES (The Elder Scrolls) franchise, you may be wondering if you need to play Morrowind before Oblivion Remastered, right? Given that the games are sequential, do you need to play the "prequel" before diving head-first into the "sequel"?

You'll be happy to know that while the games are part of the TES franchise, they are not directly linked. Oblivion is set during the Third Era, which is six years after the events of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (quite a considerable gap in the timeline).

As such, you can play Oblivion Remastered without having played Morrowind or any of the other TES games in the franchise. With the Remastered Edition bringing the game up to speed for next-gen hardware, there's never been a better time to explore Cyrodiil. The real question, however, is whether you should play Morrowind?

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Oblivion Remastered is gorgeous, but what about Morrowind - should you play it?

We already know that Oblivion Remastered launched to roaring success with next to no marketing efforts. There were a few images leaked days before the launch, but other than that, things were kept under wraps. As it stands, the all-time peak reached 190,000 players in less than 48 hours. That's proof enough that the community is beyond hyped.

Circling back to Morrowind, the game released in 2002, four years before the release of the original Oblivion (2006). If you started gaming around the early 2000s, Morrowind would have been quite easily one of the top-five video games on your list. However, fast forward two decades, and things have changed.

By no means was the game bad. In fact, with a Steam score of 95% from over 20,000 players (which is a lot given certain factors), the game was a success. If you make your way over to Nexus, you'll see that mods for the game are still being created to this day. A game released in 2002 is still getting new mods in 2025 speaks volumes. Even the community wants a remastered version.

But having said that, if you've played Oblivion and Skyrim, you may not exactly enjoy Morrowind. It is "unforgiving, strategic, and old-school" as compared to the later installment in the TES franchise. Of course, this is not a bad thing if you're into intense video games, but from a personal perspective, Morrowind is probably something you can skip.

I'm not saying you shouldn't play it, but I am saying that you may not enjoy it, given that the game is two decades old. There's nothing wrong with old-school gaming in the least, but you don't need to play every old-school game. Morrowind can be upscaled using mods; they will enhance a lot of the game's core features, but even that may not be enough to satisfy the "modern gamer."

To be fair, if you've played the original Oblivion and then Skyrim, going back to Morrowind (with mods) is going to feel like a downgrade. Again, I'm not advocating that you shouldn’t give it a shot, but I am saying that you may not enjoy it as much as you think you would. Nevertheless, the choice is all yours.

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Read more Oblivion Remastered articles here:

• Oblivion Remastered: Best Cheats and Console Commands
• Oblivion Remastered: Complete list of achievements and trophies