I’ve no doubt Bethesda knew there was a significant audience desperate for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and, once again, I find myself purchasing another Elder Scrolls game several times over thanks to a heady dose of nostalgia for time when I had time to “live another life, in another world”. Nothing says “modern gaming” like scrolling through a lengthy EULA first, but when I finally reached the title screen and the “Reign of the Septims” theme kicked in, I felt a warm, comforting sensation of familiarity.

Over 20 hours later, I don’t doubt this is the best way to play Oblivion in 2025. However, there’s a reason they went with “remastered” in the title instead of “remake”, and your history with the game – if any – might flavour your experience. I’ll admit up front that I’m one of the fans that would have preferred The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind received this level of attention, but there’s also no denying Oblivion was instrumental in popularising the IP on consoles and laid the foundations for the success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.



For newcomers who loved Skyrim but missed Oblivion for whatever reason – be that age or evolving tastes – this remaster is going to scratch a lot of familiar itches, so long as you can accept it’s an older game with gameplay systems that feel underdeveloped and even more jank that, I hope, you’ll accept as part of its charm.

Oblivion is, unsurprisingly, set during the “Oblivion Crisis” – an event often mentioned in Skyrim as the catalyst for the rise of the Third Aldmeri Dominion that would go on to fracture the Empire unified under the Septims.

For newcomers who loved Skyrim but missed Oblivion for whatever reason – be that age or evolving tastes – this remaster is going to scratch a lot of familiar itches...

As always, your protagonist is a prisoner – crime unknown – who finds themselves swept up in events, seemingly destined to achieve great things. During a questionably bland cave- and sewer-based tutorial, they witness the assassination of the emperor; they’re tasked with finding his previously unknown heir; and told to help him “close shut the jaws of Oblivion”.



In typical Elder Scrolls fashion, it’s a task you can pursue with vigour or completely ignore for hundreds of hours. Almost two decades on, Oblivion still excels at what Bethesda Game Studios have always done well: presenting the player with a massive world to explore, packed with things to see and do, and the flexibility to tackle it in any way you choose – at least in theory.

After customising your would-be hero, wading through tutorial screens, and picking your starting class, major skills, and star sign, you emerge into the high fantasy-inspired heartland of the Empire, Cyrodill. Your primary quest points to a small priory to the north-west; the Imperial City looms over you; a dank cave entrance and beautiful Ayleid ruin are near at hand; and the map screen reveals a half-dozen other cities you can instantly fast-travel to. It provides a sensation as overwhelming as it is exhilarating.

Prioritising the main quest will have you knee deep in cultists, Oblivion portals, and Daedra as you rush to find the lost Septim heir and fight back against an invasion by the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon. Alternatively, you can join and climb the ranks of the fighters, mage, or thieves guild – each dealing with a mix of external influences and internal succession schemes. You can seek out Daedra shrines to complete a mix of questionable and hilarious quests to gain their favour and unique gear, or you can just travel from city to city, solving local problems that are sometimes what they seem but often come with unexpected twists.



On paper, and for a dozen or so hours, Oblivion really sells that “live another life, in another world” premise. It’s at its best when tackled organically, and I’d neither recommend mainlining the primary quest, nor systematically clearing every location on the map.

The end-of-the-world threat will wait on you, and attempting to do everything all at once just highlights the AI routine limitations and dialogue inconsistencies. If you just go with the flow – spending some time with some simple and weird minigames instead of endless battles – it’s easy to get pleasantly sidetracked for hours at a time and better immerse yourself in its dated but detailed world.

Of course, all open-world games face the same challenge: how do you keep players engaged while maintaining any semblance of pacing for a hundred hours’ worth of questing and dungeon-delving?



Oblivion’s answer was level-scaling. No matter what path you take, you’ll face off against increasingly tough enemies with your new skills, while looting higher-tier gear from their corpses or chests (with tougher locks, of course). It was a noble but inherently flawed effort, and it remains an issue the remaster has tweaked but not resolved.

The end-of-the-world threat will wait on you, and attempting to do everything all at once just highlights the AI routine limitations and dialogue inconsistencies.

The obvious problem with this design is that scaling robs the player of any sense of meaningful progression for much of your playtime. Balancing player progression and the difficulty curve is always an issue, though open-world RPGs tend to reward over-levelled players with an easier time on the critical path, while still providing optional challenging content and rewards to keep them engaged. In Oblivion, you’re constantly improving your skills through use, boosting attributes each level-up, and looting or purchasing better gear and spells, yet every combat encounter and dungeon-delve plays out much the same for upwards of 30 hours.



This sensation is compounded by the fact Oblivion is still more RPG than action game. You hit things with blades, arrows, or spells until they die, and the sense of progression comes from killing things in fewer hits. Further compounding this issue is a simplified sliding difficulty scale that lacks a good mid-point between too easy and too frustrating. It’s only when you unlock the highest skill perks and gear enchantments that outright break the game in your favour that it’ll satisfy the typical RPG power fantasy.

Skyrim had its moments, but I feel most fans would agree it’s that wondrous sense of exploration and the potential to discover something unique(ish) that kept you hooked – not the quest design. Oblivion nails the first part but features even simpler quest scripting, crude set-pieces, and no traditional companions to liven things up. It should also come as no surprise that level-scaling plays hell with what passes for set-pieces.

In Oblivion, you’re constantly improving your skills through use, boosting attributes each level-up, and looting or purchasing better gear and spells...

Quests are typically a variant of “go here”, “fetch this”, or “kill that”. The most memorable are those that offer multiple or unexpected outcomes, but they’re always standalone quests that will, at most, result in a different reward item or trigger a new generic line from townsfolk when you bring up the topic. Oblivion may have introduced the “Radiant AI” system to give its NPCs a simple daily routine that features in some quests, but it doesn’t take long to realise the bulk of scripting boils down to whether an NPC is in possession of an item, at a location, or flagged as dead.



The often-hilarious writing, goofy voice work, and animation jank is entertaining, but the bulk of your time is spent away from settlements, scouring overlong, multi-zoned dungeons or Oblivion planes on your own. Exploiting invulnerable plot-critical NPCs is a must, dragging them along as silent but useful damage sponges before completing their respective quest. In contrast, expendable NPCs that feature if a handful of quests don’t benefit from level-scaling and die almost instantly if you’ve out-levelled them – either in battle or by sheer stupidity – leaving you alone once again to slog through hordes of enemies.

Although The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered does little to address the game’s fundamental issues, it does include some gameplay tweaks to go along with the gorgeous Unreal Engine 5-powered visual overlay.

The most impactful changes are how both major and minor skill gains contribute towards the next player level, and which skills you improve no longer influence how many points you can boost an attribute. You simply earn 12 “virtue points” each level that you can invest across three attributes of your choice. It removes the likelihood of non-combat classes ending up with strength and endurance attributes so low their health pool leads to one-shot deaths at higher levels.



There is also a range of smaller but welcome changes, like more responsive menus, increased movement speed and sprinting, health regeneration outside of combat, more reliable stagger animations based on where you aim, no fatigue penalty for attack damage calculations, recoverable arrows that both fly faster and hit harder, and tweaks to skill perk tiers – some new, some adjusted, and some rearranged so you gain access to more useful perks earlier.

Despite this apparent flexibility, scaling still makes boosting new combat-related skills frustrating if you realise you need a melee or ranged fallback, or maybe some elemental spells. The only viable approach to combat skills is searching for and paying trainers, as low-level weapon skills and damage-dealing spells are laughably ineffective against higher level foes.

The most impactful changes are how both major and minor skill gains contribute towards the next player level, and which skills you improve no longer influence how many points you can boost an attribute.

The most obvious change for returning fans is an impressive visual overhaul that turns Oblivion’s distinctive but dated landscapes and interiors into something akin to a modern release.



Geometric complexity, textures, vegetation, water, weather, environmental details, character models, movement and attack animations, lip-syncing and facial expressions – they all take a generational leap in quality. I’d argue it’s the global illumination system for the sun, moon, and other light sources that is most transformative, bathing the world in more realistic and atmospheric shades of light and dark.

The voice work has been enhanced without altering the weird, wild, and openly bigoted (in-universe) dialogue, especially during hilarious NPC interactions driven by the Radiant AI system. These rarely produce an exchange with logical replies or a consistent tone, yet it excels at antagonistic conversations between NPCs of difference races and wealth. There’s limited new voice acting to better differentiate Tamriel’s many races, while some NPCs that previously had multiple voice actor lines assigned to them have been fixed.



New combat effects and ambience has been added to improve combat and exploration, though general audio and dialogue volume levels feel off – even in comparison to the original. In contrast, the soundtrack needed no tweaking as it still holds up brilliantly, providing memorable orchestral themes for exploration and combat.

All that said, the gameplay tweaks and audiovisual updates can only do so much when the aged Gamebryo engine is presumably chugging away just below the surface. The fragmented and increasingly repetitive nature of Oblivion’s overworld and dungeons is hardest to disguise, particularly when only two dozen quest-related locations feel truly unique in appearance or design (the inclusion of The Shivering Isles expansion mitigates this briefly).



Every asset used to build the world has clearly been overhauled, but it’s not clear if any new assets were created. The bulk of Cyrodiil is rolling, forested hills, while the “dungeons” are crafted using only a handful of tile-sets – think cave, mine, ruin, fort, city, and Oblivion plane – each with a limited number of building blocks. The world also retains its segmented nature, with dungeons, cities, the structures within them, and even each floor within some structures connected by loading screens.

You could argue Oblivion’s dungeons are typically larger and more elaborate than Skyrim’s convenient loops, but very few have memorable puzzle rooms, unique vistas, or anything close to the epic scope of the Blackreach Cavern. It becomes a serious problem when there are well over 200 dungeons to explore and, depending on your approach to tackling the main quest, up to 50 Oblivion portals to close. Is all this content mandatory? No, but even sticking to the primary questline left me frustrated with the environmental repetition.

To wrap up, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered feels like a project targeting fans of the original – yet it retains many flaws that’ll quickly frustrate said fans. The visual overhaul and gameplay tweaks are an improvement – and there’s no denying the power of nostalgia – but it’s unlikely these remastering efforts would push me to complete it again. I feel it’s newcomers to the IP or Skyrim fans that might benefit most, as they’ll find it easier to look past Oblivion’s flaws as they experience the wonder of simply exploring Cyrodiil’s cities, countryside, and dungeons for the first time.