I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming everyone to lower their expectations for the likely dumpster fire that is The Elder Scrolls VI.
I know its old hat nonsense of a complaint but whatever Bethesda used to be it stopped being that 20 years ago and we’re all just stuck thinking they’ll put out some new masterpiece when in reality all the talent they had back in the day has likely left for other jobs and they are now just a shitty company among countless other shitty companies putting profit over anything else and stifling anyone who might actually have good ideas on how to make good games (how unsurprising).
Then play something else. These are RPGs. You’re supposed to immerse yourself and play the role. Are you a Khajiiti Skooma fiend who the Emperor stumbled upon that then goes on a wacky series of adventures? Did you say screw Jaffre and head straight to Kvatch cuz that’s where your plug lives and end up going into literal hell to save him? Eventually becoming The Hero of Kvatch?
Did you parlay your new found fame into new found money which you used to greatly expand your skooma consumption? Along the way becoming leader of guilds and the avatar of a God?
Or did you mainline the golden path. Decide this is ass and dip because you have no imagination?
You get out of these games what you put in. My favorite skyrim playthrough is one without weapons. I use a mod called “Wandering Thuum Practitioner” and Ordinator. Those two will make you as near as possible a lore accurate user of Shouts. Don’t need weapons. Something attacks you? Burp it to death. Shout it off a mountain. Roast it to ash. Because you were given some training in the Thuum by a former Greybeard who for whatever reason left High Hrothgar long ago. What are the odds that the old man would find The Last Dragonborn potentially decades before they were needed and gave them a boost.
But yes. They have fallen off. Starfield was fine. Once. The whole starborn plot was a waste of time. In my opinion. The shine falls off a multiverse real quick when there’s no difference between the universes. I know what they expected. They gave modders all the room they’d ever need and then some to spread out and build anything they wanted. They expected modders to fill up the game. They got complacent that the modders would always be there to do what people with deadlines and budgets cannot. And I wish they had. I no-lifed Starfield when it came out. Loved it. But by my 2nd trip through the unity I was pretty much done with it. There was nothing else to see. No variation in the multiverse. Outside of The Lodge anyway. And they could have saved it with that first DLC. The potential was there. All they had to do was give us more about who came before us through The Unity. Some info about those who built it or discovered it. Advanced alien civilization or some cosmic god. Something. But no. We got human incompetence run amuck. That shit is boring. And it was boring. There was no grand mystery to solve. No clues to a greater understanding. Just nothing of consequence. So it flopped.
The next remake tho. Fallout 3. Oh that mfer is gonna do NUMBERS. You hear me?! We’ve been begging for a sequel to 3 or a remake for 20 years. Then after that I swear to Robert Edwin House’s ghost they better do New Vegas.
I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s just the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks. And it’s a pretty high-effort remaster at that.
I just think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better, when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible. It’s as good now as it was back then but it’s still a 19-year-old game.
Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.
The remaster was also made externally, so whatever the point being made here is, it’s weird twice over.
Man the negativity. I’m so sick of gamers negativity. It’s not even a new game, it’s a remaster. you knew what the product was going to be. It’s oblivion. We all knew it was oblivion. If you don’t like oblivion, why did you buy it?!
I swear to God if they changed it too much I’d be commenting here on a post about how they had no respect for the original. Then we wonder why “they never listen to gamers”. Because we bitch and moan about everything.
100% agree. Pleasing Gamers™ is a Kafka trap.
Just musing on the fact that Bethesda doesn’t care about making games and instead just cashes in on nostalgia. I also think their finance bros realized their upcoming big IP drop is going to be an objective POS and wanted to prime people’s expectations by re-releasing a 20 year old game with some lipstick on it.
It would be neat if they hired some people who actually had innovative ideas about gameplay, visuals and stories to maybe make a neat new game within an existing or new IP, but they haven’t done that in literal decades so I think its pretty reasonable to not be incredibly excited about anything they are putting out or planning to put out in the future.
Imagine if capital G Gamers actually enjoyed playing games instead of nonstop bitching on online forums.
As someone with no kids and a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy video games, I wonder how much of this vitriol comes from bitter millennials who are mad at the world because they don’t have time to play games anymore.
Nah. The millennials would need to play and beat the game and then come to online forums to bitch. We don’t have that amount of free time.
They are nearly always Zoomers and younger. (Or college kids and teenagers)
Lol 9 times out of 10, they don’t actually play the games they whine about.
the internet would fall silent.
As a long time Bethesda game fan I agree with you on almost everything you’ve said about Bethesda… But the remaster is a terrible example of your points.
The remaster does exactly what it says on the tin and they’ve been very upfront about how it was made and why it was made in the launch video.
It’s hard to criticise them for cashing in on nostalgia when they’ve shown time and time again with Skyrim re-releases that do a fraction of what the Oblivion remaster does still sell like hot cakes.
Nostalgia is at the core of their business model. That’s why they march Skyrim’s corpse out every two years like clockwork; that’s why they picked Fallout for a new franchise after ES; that’s, frankly, likely why Starfield sucks so much.
It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.
The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.
It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.
What do you think “remaster” actually mean?
More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.
With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.
Emm, no. If you build something from the ground up it’s called remake.(Demon Souls, the Resident Evil series) Remastered is taking the old game and put on a fresh paint of coat and give it some modern QOL so it’s much more accessible today.
Skyblivion is closer to remake than remaster.
Also i feels like you misunderstand why people like this game.
If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.
A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.
A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.
I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.
Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.
You’re describing a remake, which isn’t what this remaster is. A remaster is literally what this is, just like Diablo 2 Resurrected a few years ago
Ok.
The only real problem here is the price. It should’ve been more like $30.
Thats a remake, not a remaster. Idiot.
That’s literally what remaster are, a new coat of paint
They literally had a hour long stream explaining what they did, and then you could have watched any of the thousands of twitch streams showing it. There was zero reason that you should have bought this if you thought this. I knew exactly what I was buying, seems like pretty much everyone did.
You are describing a remake. A remaster is a fresh coat of paint. Todd Howard said verbatim “This is not a remake” and then talked about his reasons why. You’re going on like they lied to you when they literally said everything you just complained about, and then you still bought it.
Maybe they’re trying to get potential players of Elder Scrolls VI so hyped that they’ll still play the new game even if it’s sold ‘games as a service’ style
in which case, fuck that
It might be nostalgia speaking, but I think the real issue is that a 20 year old game can actually be this good and popular. How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)? Doesn’t that say that game companies in general have dropped the ball on game design, focusing on graphics and money over content and gameplay? As I said, it might just be me stuck in my wonderfully comforting blanket of nostalgia…
I think it’s almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn’t new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn’t resurface until what? No Man’s Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it’s the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is… a bit of a shock.
Clair Obscur came out the same time and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played, and I’ve played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.
“Why is an old game good?” feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn’t it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn’t an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.
Survivorship bias, essentially.
I can’t belive people play football. That game is old as hell!
It hasn’t been updated since forever, can’t believe even pay to watch others play.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?
Possibly because you’re buying the wrong games? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it’s cool…
But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.
The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven’t played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.
Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something…). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
You’re just buying the wrong games.
Go play Split Fiction, Balatro, and Hades 2.
Maximum dooming for a game that almost everyone likes. lmao
I think the remaster looks awful. Not only did they take out the soul, they decided to copy the aesthetic of ESO from the washed-out colors down to the shitty combat animations.
I really wish the people behind ESO would get fired, but they keep getting rewarded.
I see a lot of people downplaying the remaster as a fresh coat of ue5 paint. I’m playing the game, having disliked the original, and I’m loving it. I’m kind of impressed with what they did with the game, basically remaking the world elements in ue5 and leaving the gameplay as it was with minor tweaks. Fresh coat of paint feels more like rip out the drywall and do it again. Just leave the structure alone. Like, the electrical and plumbing is still there and feels the same but it looks completely different.
Games like this dont come very often, so if anything, this remaster and BG3 should raise the bar on what we should expect from a new TES game.
Lower expectations…?
Bethesda Game Studios has been on the decades-long trend of watering down all their proper RPG elements. Morrowind is significantly more jank in combat and movement than Oblicion. Oblivion significantly more jank than Skyrim.
However, Skyrim is over simplified compared to Oblivion in all of its RPG mechanics, and has removed a number of gameplay features that were previously present (e.g. Spell crafting). In turn Oblivion is itself more mechanically shallow than Morrowind, significantly lacking in such things as speech options.
The Oblivion Remaster is so more a reminder of something we’ll never get anymore; an open world RPG that isn’t as weighed down as Morrowind and not as over-simplified as Skyrim (though honestly complex NPC interactions need to come back from Morrowind).
TES VI will likely have better combat than Skyrim, but still incredibly dated compared to other games, and mechanics that can barely be called “RPG” anymore.
Replacing spell crafting with blacksmithing makes sense for the setting. It would have been nice to have something a bit deeper to replace it though.
You’re not going into depth on how it is half assed. The only thing I can complain about is some performance drops when travelling outside, but I imagine they’ll patch that out at some point. If you’re referring to the classic oblivion stuff like goofy npcs and most of them having the same voice actor tbh I’d be pissed if they changed that
I personally don’t really pre order or set up prior expectations for games these days. No matter the company’s prior track record a game is only judged on its own, not because how good a previous game was. Oblivion is great because it is, In my opinion, better than Skyrim. It is dated by today’s standards. Heck starfield was dated as well. Even when elder scrolls vi comes out I don’t have any high expectations for it.
They needed a quick cash grab before the Trump terroriffs wipe them out.
Amazing how many people are willing to pay full price for a 20 year old game.
Bethesda is a Microsoft company. Don’t think there’s any danger of the tariffs wiping out Microsoft.
Its not a quick cash grab, the remaster was in development starting in 2021. This release had nothing to do with tarifs.
Yeah man they really saw this tariff stuff coming earlier than anyone else when they started developing the remaster 2-3 years ago.
We both know tariffs have little to do with this game, but it was very possible to see them coming 2-3 years ago if you listened to that man speak.
Donald Trump’s views on economics have not changed in decades and his tariffs are in line with what the guy has been publicly saying since the 80s.
But yeah that’s not the point I was making.
All I wanted from the remake was character models that didn’t look like cartoons and a leveling system that didn’t punish suboptimal builds, and by God that’s what they delivered.
People keep clamoring for a Morrowind remake, and I disagree. It’s perfect the way it is. Oblivion NEEDED this.
It’s a remaster. What’s the problem?
I have no idea what’s your complaint are though, and it’s not a remake, it’s a remaster that is significantly better than a lot of other remaster have to offer. They could’ve gave us widescreen support, some lighting change, some new horse armour and call it a day, but they somehow able to snap an UE5 rendering on top of gamebryo, some modern QOL, new character models, modern lipsync, while retaining the charm that spawned an entire genre of meme.
There’s a reason Witcher 1 isn’t getting a remastered but a remake. Gamer these day is so jaded and just can’t seems to satisfied with anything, that a witcher 1 remastered will get hated forever.
