One of the all time great roleplaying games modernised just enough for today's audience.
I remember distinctly the day my brother and I went into Kmart to pick up our Xbox 360 in 2006, we had saved up our money and split the console price fifty-fifty.
There was really only one game that anyone was buying when picking up Microsoft's successor console, that was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we were big Morrowind fans and the new graphics and open world felt revelatory.
You get a horse! The horse was a massive deal, no longer did you need to mass transit your way around the world jumping from location to location with silt-striders, pick a direction and go. This was before armour was even in the question.
The adventure was formative, it was janky, broken often in completely hilarious ways, the game would crash a lot but hundreds of hours for both of us went by in a moment.
We knew there was a remake in the works when it leaked all over reddit, but now the THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION REMASTERED is here.
It's better than I remembered but also has aged a bit more than I remembered and Virtuos have done a great job reviving a twenty year old title.
I don't expect I need to tell you exactly what a Bethesda roleplaying game is, but it's an open world adventure that rewards you wandering off in any direction. Way before Breath of the Wild, these games were all about getting distracted along the way. The map is absolutely packed with waypoints, hundreds of them.
You're not going to need to find them all and work your way through them though you totally could if you wanted to. Buried in out of the way places are often hidden bits of gear that end up being incredibly powerful.
You can really play any style of character you want but you aren't going to get away from fighting, quite a lot really, so make sure you pick at least one major specialty and lean into that, because each skill used ends up levelling up your abilities.
Shoot a lot of arrows? You get better at shooting arrows. Buy and sell a lot of fantasy doodads? You'll get better at selling and buying. This in turn will level your character up, each skill trained will push up your overall experience bar .
Hit the top and then you need to find a bed to hit the next level, if you don't you'll just be missing out on stat boosts.
Of course like every Elder Scrolls game I went for the classic Stealth Archer™. I found nice an early a Ring which gave me a passive Chameleon ability which helped me blend into my surroundings. Crouch crouch arrow arrow. Rinse and repeat. It's incredibly powerful and the 3x multiplier on damage often means you're taking down enemies before they can accuse you of being weaker than a mudcrab. Amateurs.
It's still such a solid system, it works all these years later. Drop a few points into Strength when you level up and you'll be a crouching loot bag of destruction.
Enemies level along with you so you're always facing appropriate foes, I went directly along the main path to Kvatch the town that first introduces you to the concept of Oblivion gates in the overworld, but didn't complete the quest because I got distracted. When I returned at level 10 there were Flame Atronachs everywhere. Sorry NPCs you aren't making it through this one.
Let me give you a really good example of why you can really just go do wherever you want. I was exploring one of the Oblivion plains mini dungeons and got lost in the labyrinthine tunnels twisting their way through the ground. I was supposed to use the tunnels to ascend a mountain where the final tower was located. At the top was the Sigil stone which held this realm together and when I claimed it, it would collapse and I'd be catapulted back into Cyrodiil.
Except I kept getting lost. I tried hugging the wall, I tried using fallen enemies as breadcrumbs. I just kept searching and never seemed to ascend any higher.
So I said stuff it, lets just jump up this mountain, I could see the tower above me. I turned my back to the cliff face and bounced rapidly up the molten stone and rocky cliffs. I'd been bounding across the land building my Athletics skill so my jump was pretty impressive.
I scaled the outside of this dungeon puzzle just using the environment and the abilities I'd been training the whole time.
I made it to the base of the tower and it was a quick jaunt to the top and I made short work of that Sigil stone collection adventure.
Don't follow the path make your own, want to crawl along the edges of the roof in an Ayleid ruin sniping people from above? Do it!
It's one aspect of this game that still holds up so brilliantly, it's just fun to feel like you're breaking the rules and Oblivion gives you more and more tools to do so as you go along.
There is actually much more opportunity in this game to find your own way, just because it doesn't waypoint your next quest steps nearly as extensively as current games do.
You'll probably spend a bit of time just wandering around looking for the right person or right location and it just made me think how much we've simplified and streamlined games over the last twenty years, for better and for worse.
It wouldn't be fair to not mention how much this game tends to crash. It'd be a familiar feeling for the old school Oblivion players I'm sure. One incredible modern solution has been added though, the game takes just about every single opportunity it can to autosave for you. I distinctly remember losing hours of progress because the game decided to cark it. Luckily this time around you're back in pretty quickly, usually only a single room away from where you were.
This game really is a hybrid of older and newer styles of game design, it feels downright archaic to shoot bows in this game and that's what I chose to do most of time. Bows are incredible slow to draw and seem to have a slight delay on the release as well.
There is no printed manual, so it took me a while to work out how to barter for better prices in the stores, same goes for recharging my magical items.
More than once quest NPCs just bugged entirely stuck in a loop of their dialogue unwilling to move through to the next stage. Sometimes it's easier to just kill them and move on, but that's not always an option and can lock you out of good equipment later.
There is better NPC pathing and AI, but it's still a bit funny. I saw two guards in one town just walking into each other unable to path around. Classic.
Part of me wonders if these little bits and pieces were left in there just for the procedural humour it creates, but they can feel free to remove the crashes in an update.
It's still an incredible game all these years on, the world is packed with so many named NPCs and weirdos, even though most of them share the same voice actors it's almost like you're walking onto stage with a group of thespians taking on different roles as you travel through.
Skyrim will always be the bigger sibling in this series, but so much of the foundation for subsequent Bethesda open world RPGs was set in this game.
If you're playing on PC, as I am, there isn't anything stopping you from loading up the original version of this game. There are even two decades of quality of life and graphic improving mods to make your own modern reimagining.
But if you can't be bothered mucking around with load orders and mod managers, then this version is the one for you, updating just about everything you'd need for your journey back into Cyrodiil.
Do yourself a favour if you have any nostalgia for this particular game and at least try it out on Xbox Game Pass, you might find you lose hours of your life just like my brother and I did way back in 2006.
A copy of THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION REMASTERED on PC was provided to SIFTER for the purpose of this review.
