Bethesda release Oblivion Remastered for £50
The Elder Scrolls told of its return
Years after it was first leaked, and following weeks of increasingly loud rumours, Bethesda have finally shown off a trailer for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster. It looks very shiny, and has a few new cogs under the hood. More importantly, it's out now.
First of all, here's the trailer.
It's £50 / $50 on Steam, or fans can grab a discount by picking up a Steam key from Fanatical for £41.79 / $41.79, or Green Man Gaming for £41.99 / $41.99.
A showcase of the game that aired alongside the trailer saw various developers talking over some of the biggest changes. This includes the ability to sprint, and a new levelling system described as a blend between Oblivion and Skyrim, which presumably replaces the divisive level scaling of the original.
On top of that there's a new lip-syncing system that lets the funny puppets talk better, and some re-recorded dialogue lines to better fit all the fantasy races like Khajiit and Argonians. There's also a modernied third-person perspective (no more roller-skating up the mountainside). And all the assets have been remade, clearly, with real-time lighting, a heap of fresh VFX, a redesigned user interface, and new sound effects.
Other stuff remains mostly untouched. The lockpicking minigames and speechcraft persuasion has been left alone, we're told, apart from a visual redesign.
The open world fantasy RPG has been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 by Virtuos, a support studio that handles a lot of different production jobs for various companies. They've been working on it alongside Bethesda's own studios. Despite all the assets being totally re-constructed using Unreal, the game is still running on some version of Bethesda's original Creation Gamebyro engine, we're told.
The remaster's existence has been a badly kept secret since 2023, when leaked Microsoft documents were spotted in during a court case, naming the game alongside Dishonored 3 and a possible remake or remaster of Fallout 3. More recently, various leakers and rumourmongers started getting increasingly solid information about the game, such as how its stamina and stealth will be reworked. They also predicted it would be released in tandem with its announcement, you know, as a treat.
We'll be playing to find out just how much of a remaster it truly is. I'm interested to see how much of Oblivion's old-school charm is lost when you refurbish it and strip out what we today see as jank. Does it still crash zoom into a guard's face with alarming alacrity when you are apprehended for stealing an apple? Old games rebuilt can go either way for me. I found the Resident Evil 2 remake a faithful adaptation that played with an old space in both clever and silly ways. But the recent Tomb Raider remasters made both me and Katherine sad with their HD textures and wonky controls.