Oblivion Remastered captures gaming in 2006 with style

When I saw the trailer for Oblivion Remastered, I got extremely hyped. The modern coat of paint on top of one of Bethesda’s best RPGs is undoubtedly a recipe for success. I think a lot of gamers love the studio’s RPG style, so adding another one to current platforms should help a whole new generation see where gaming came from. It could also lead to a few more remastered Bethesda games if this one is successful.

I was 10 in 2006 when Oblivion was released, and truthfully, I was probably playing Lego Star Wars on my GameCube. I wouldn’t even start to care about the Xbox 360 until a few years later, when I got the console in 2010, and very shortly after saving Earth from the Covenant, I sank a lot of time into the snow-covered hills of Skyrim.

Saving the Throat of the World from the dragon threat was my first experience with a Bethesda RPG, and like a lot of gamers, it hooked me enough that it keeps calling me back every few years. By now, I’ve played it many times on every platform except for the Switch, so having the opportunity to jump into a similar game with a new story got me pretty excited. Throw in some impressive graphics and a few gameplay modernizations, and this all seemed geared towards people like me who missed out on Oblivion the first time and haven’t played a Bethesda game since at least Starfield a couple of years ago.

Dungeon crawling in 4K

Bethesda really knows how to open a game. From Skyrim’s unassuming prisoner wagon to watching the bombs fall in Fallout 4, you can see the seeds of Todd Howard’s cinematic backbone shine through in the opening cutscene of Oblivion: Remastered. It’s exciting and keeps up a good pace for the first hour or two, depending on how quickly you play.

It’s a little more ham-fisted than Skyrim, but it’s fun, full of intrigue and gives you a solid tutorial-esque mission in a sewer system. Then the game pulls back the curtain on the expansive open world, and players are wowed by the landscape since the game uses compression and release tactics of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture.

It’s not green, but it’s still beautiful.

Every still frame could be a painting with realistic lighting cascading across each scene. The moonlight backlights the monsters as they run at you outside, and in dungeons, torches flicker and spill their warm glow across the walls. One of my favourite things is shooting a fireball down a dark hallway and watching it throw some light on the walls. That said, it is more satisfying when the fireballs hit enemies and you see them catch fire and light up a space instead.

The colour palette isn’t the same as the original, but it’s still striking, and quite beautiful. This time around, developer Virtuous decided to give the game a more modern fantasy-genre flair with more magentas and oranges compared to the heavy green of the original. A part of me that would have liked an option to tweak the colours to be more faithful to the 2006 version just for kicks, but all in all, what’s on display here is fantastic.

Sometimes the age peaks through

these are three separate dungeons.

However, when the game starts moving, you can see and feel its true age. Your movement has been modernized to be faster and include a sprint action, but it still feels a little chunky to navigate the world. The combat is typical for a Bethesda fantasy RPG, with a lot of hacking and blocking or straightforward archery. Enemies are the same with outdated AI that can sometimes lead to wacky pathing or other weird behaviour. I’m able to look past most of it since I knew I was walking into an older Bethesda experience, but I do worry it might hinder younger players who are venturing into Tamriel for the first time.

That being said, once you wrap your head around it, there’s something nice about it. It’s comforting to know that old games are still fun, even if some aspects don’t feel as streamlined or realistic as a modern title. Oblivion: Remastered is an excellent trip down memory lane, and as I was playing it, I felt a little bit like a kid again. I don’t need to worry too much about what’s happening, and the freeform nature of an RPG lets me tell my own story and do my own adventures. I can run around, collect loot, slash some monsters and explore, or I can play the main quest and continue trying to secure the next leader of the nation.

This guy would rather attack my horse while I mow him down.

The one aspect that I’ve been having the hardest time getting over is how ‘video-gamey’ the dungeons feel. I guess it was this way in Skyrim and Fallout as well, but there are so many small dungeons and caves that feel almost exactly the same. They look nice on a case-by-case basis with the updated graphics, but the labyrinthine nature makes them feel like a video game level, and less like a real place I’m exploring.

There are times I want that type of gaming experience, but it’s an area when the Bethesda style shows its age. Wandering around in a dark room wondering if you’ve already been through that nondescript door or if you should circle around the room to see if you missed a different door gets old pretty fast. It gave me flashbacks to the Starborn Powers in Starfield. In that game, every power is in the same room with the same mini game. I didn’t love it there, but I am a little more forgiving in Oblivion since the game is almost twenty years old. But all the same it’s hard to get your bearings in a building that blends in with many others.

The classic Bethesda bugs are also present. I only encountered one super annoying one in my time with the game though. For me running from enemy encounters is broken so the combat music never stops and you can’t fast travel until you kill the initial enemies that got the music started. It sounds like a small thing but it really interrupts the flow of the game and the music is pretty overbearing. While it’s not a bug I really thing the company should have retooled the menus a little more. The background colour, what’s selected and what’s equipped are a little confusing and the white background for highlighted items is a little tricky to see.

Ideal nostalgia trip

At the end of the day I’m really happy this game got a fresh coat of paint and I’d love to see similar things happen with the Xbox 360 Fallout games to make all of them more appealing to modern audiences. These kinds of shadow drops are perfect for the Game Pass model, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw at least one of them each year. I can definitely see myself picking this back up the next time I have my itch to play Skyrim.

For gamers who spent a lot of time with an Xbox 360 or a PS3, this is an almost perfect nostalgia trip and the perfect Sunday morning gaming experience. For new gamers who have never played a Bethesda game before, the Game Pass model makes it pretty easy to try this one out to see if it appeals to you. It also supports Xbox Play Anywhere, making it easy to play the same save file on a PC, Xbox or stream it via Game Pass. For now, I’m not sure if I’m going to hop back into Cyrodiil right away, but I know I will many times over the next few years when I’m looking for a comfort RPG. If you want to buy the game, it costs $67.