Oblivion Remastered is everything I hoped for, jank and all.
Nearly two decades later — and after sinking thousands of hours into Skyrim — stepping back into Oblivion feels like coming home. Only this time, the old place has a new coat of paint, courtesy of Unreal Engine 5’s shiny visuals and a handful of modern upgrades (we can sprint now!).
But I'm still seeing some cracks.
First off: yes, it looks good. Cyrodiil is all richer and more vivid, thanks to Unreal Engine 5. Characters look amazing, especially the Beastfolk. Even compared to modded(!) Skyrim, NPCs just look that much better.
And the whole of Cyrodiil is much prettier, with many more polygons, and much more... brown. This is the first thing I've realised, but somehow this game is very brown. Thankfully, there are mods, and this reshade brings it closer to the (probably oversaturated) look of the original game.
But holy hell Oblivion, the performance is rough. Even with an RTX 4090, frame dips are frequent, especially out in the open world. Towns and interiors are mostly fine, but the moment you go sprinting across a meadow, the framerate is all over the place. It’s going to need a few patches — or, let’s be honest, community fixes — before it’s properly stable.
It's still Oblivion, jank and all
The gameplay tweaks are smart. Sprinting exists now, the third-person camera is much improved, and the combat has a little more weight behind it. There's even a new character creator that lets you make genuinely horrifying creations. And you can finally properly zoom in on the world map. Cyrodiil's weird shape was always a pain to navigate.
Timo Schmidt
Here's how to dial in Oblivion on the Steam Deck.
But underneath the improvements, it's still pure Oblivion: small open world by today's standards, weird NPC behaviours (they all have a schedule that you can learn by heart), and at times really stupid dialogue by the same 14 or so voice actors.
No, seriously. Oblivion famously only had 14 voice actors voicing... everything, including Sean Bean and Sir Patrick Stewart. For the Remaster, they apparently got back some to voice a bunch of new lines. But it's still Wes Johnson voicing nearly everything, including Sheogorath, Lucien Lachance, the Gray Fox, the Arena Announcer, and what feels like every Imperial male in the game.
But that’s the charm. That's why I love Oblivion so much.
Thank the Nine for modding
Modding is, predictably, both amazing and a mess.
The good news? Some mods from 2008 still work with a little fiddling. There's already a flood of quality-of-life mods popping up, including that aforementioned reshade to bring back the original’s colourful bloom, better HUDs, carry weight removers, and more.
Kevin Wammer
We've passed well over 1000 mods already in a bit over a week.
The bad news? The underlying system is messy as hell. NexusMods broke it down: Oblivion Remastered runs on a bizarre hybrid of the original 2006 engine and Unreal Engine 5, with JSON mappings duct-taping them together. Traditional modding tools don't fully work yet, script extenders are going to take a while, and a real construction set might never come unless Bethesda coughs it up (and it's unclear if they are working on something). Right now, the community is reverse-engineering the whole thing piece by piece, and I suggest you read the linked piece for more info.
For my playthrough, I'm using this mod collection from Nexus, which smooths over the worst bumps. Yes, I'm already playing a modded version. Bethesda games without mods are like calling a hot dog a sandwich — you can call it a sandwich, but you're lying to yourself.
What about Skyblivion?
While Oblivion Remastered gives us a pretty, semi-modern version of the classic, Skyblivion might be the real definitive way to revisit it if you're a Skyrim modding junkie like me. Thankfully, Bethesda isn’t pulling the plug on it. They even gave the Skyblivion team free keys for the remaster and officially said "no plans to shut them down."
Skyblivion is still coming later this year, and it’ll bring Oblivion fully into Skyrim’s engine with all the goodies years of Skyrim modding have to offer. Right now, there's room for both, but I'm wondering if Skyblivion can end up being the de facto way to play a modern Oblivion. I kinda feel it all depends on what game the modding community plans to support.
4 million players can't all be wrong
But as for the remaster, it's clearly a huge success. Bethesda announced that Oblivion Remastered hit 4 million players in its first week. The game also reached over 200,000 concurrent players on Steam. That’s despite being available on Game Pass!
Oblivion's roots run deep, not just for old-school fans like me, but for a whole new generation learning that RPGs don't have to be slick to be special. It's messy. It's broken. It's beautiful. It really needs some bug fixes and performance updates.
And right now, I’m about to dive back into the Shivering Isles, which, in my mind, still holds one of the best questlines in gaming history. Sheogorath awaits. Cheese for everyone.