The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was probably one of the worst-kept secrets and reveals in the gaming market in recent years. Everybody knew they were going to drop this remake/remaster eventually; it was a matter of when, not if. The only surprising aspect about the game dropping onto PC and consoles earlier this week was the fact it was simply stealth dropped, with no time for preorders or hype building. Bethesda likes to do this with their remasters, and to be honest, I find that to be a good thing. It worked with Doom, Quake, and Quake 2 after all. With the Oblivion remaster now available, it’s time to find out if it was worth the wait, and if it is, indeed, a better way to play the seminal 2006 RPG.

Patrick Stewart flat out refusing to make eye contact with me during his long dialogue sections. Rude.

Nineteen years. Can you believe that Oblivion is nearly twenty years old already? Western role-playing gaming has surely evolved a lot since then. We’ve had Baldur’s Gate 3 revolutionizing electronic RPGs, with its vastly more loyal ties to proper tabletop gaming. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II proved that you could be incredibly immersive and customizable in an environment devoid of monsters and magic. And, of course, there was Skyrim, the game that became so big, and was re-released so many times, it basically became a meme out of itself. Still, people have always clamored for a way to re-experience Oblivion just like how the ten thousand remakes and remasters of Skyrim. So here we are… was it worth the wait?

Well, yes. If you ask me in the most literal sense of the word, “is this better than the original Oblivion“, then of course, this is the near-definitive way to experience this classic. The definitive way would be by playing it with like twenty different quality of life-enhancing mods, but I expect those to be available before I finish writing this review anyway. Now, this is an Elder Scrolls game, so even if it’s running on a different foundation, everything you also don’t like about any of those Bethesda RPGs is present in a very annoying manner. You also need to take into account that, for all intents and purposes, this is a game that’s nearly twenty years old.

You call it a threat, I call it fodder.

The fact it feels like a game from so long ago can occasionally work to its favor, to be honest. After playing so much Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, a simpler and less realistic combat system feels like a breath of fresh air. I built my character to become a tanky brute (with a surprisingly high amount of charisma, mind you), so I was having fun mowing down zombies and skeletons left and right with my axe and katana, without having to think too much about my health and proper positioning. That’s not to say there isn’t room for experimentation, because there’s a lot of it. It’s just simpler, more accessible, less complex than the more modern RPGs out there.

But that also means that Oblivion has aged poorly in some aspects. This is still the same game from many, many years ago, just with a handful of quality of life improvements and a new Unreal Engine 5 coat of paint. Trying to make the characters from that game look convincing in UE5 was a mistake. Everyone looks absolutely hideous, almost plasticine in nature. Their facial expressions are exaggerated, animations are still very janky, and facial hair just refused to look decent on any visual setting whatsoever. The story, as good as it might be, also suffers from ludonarrative dissonance, as well as instances when the cutscenes are hampered by the thing you expect the most from a Bethesda RPG: bugs.

Ma’am, how did you fit into this shirt.

Yep, bugs and glitches are present, as to be expected. In true Bethesda fashion, they aren’t “Cyberpunk 2077 at launch” levels of game-breaking, just a constant handful of little issues here and there that pile up after a while. Again, nothing that “two dozen mods” won’t help further down the line, even though I don’t think that’s exactly worthy of praise. At the end of the day, I was having fun getting lost in the land of Cyrodiil, constantly ignoring the critical path in favor of just picking a random direction, finding a dungeon, and exploring it for the sake of doing so. In terms of just getting lost and immersed in a world full of magic and discovery, Oblivion feels even better than Skyrim. But there’s one big aspect I need to point out that really disappointed me: the framerate.

I have asked three other colleagues playing Oblivion on PC, with various rigs and setups, and they have all mentioned the same issue: when exploring the overworld, the framerate is absolutely schizophrenic. It doesn’t matter if you’re on High, Low, DLSS, FSR, with a 4080 or a 2070: the framerate will constantly fluctuate from 120fps to 20fps, for no apparent reason. It seems like a CPU issue, or some weird kind of Unreal-related bug, not a consequence of my setup. When I’m in a dungeon, or inside a house, there’s no need to worry: the framerate would skyrocket to the most stable numbers possible. But the issue lies when exploring the surface. At times, it would plummet to Nintendo 64 levels of inconsistent.

As always, third person mode is here for you to use for, like, ten seconds at most.

Sure, “use a mod and fix it”. I have actually tried doing so, and that has only helped alleviate like five or six extra frames per second. I don’t like this apologist mentality. I am having a tremendous amount of fun exploring the land that Oblivion has to offer, but not even plummeting the visual quality to last-gen levels, on Performance-oriented setups, fixed that issue. I assume this is something that can be patched up, and I want that to come straight from Bethesda and/or Virtuos (a studio also helping out with the remaster).

But I don’t want to end this review on a sour note. I need to point out that loading times are really quick (they are present, but not an issue), the user interface has been revamped to become, well, user-friendly, the voice acting is absolutely SUBLIME, and everything you have always loved about Oblivion is still present. It is a massive, expansive, immersive world to sink into, a game you will play for hundreds and hundreds of hours, without ever noticing time pass by. As mentioned before in other RPG reviews, when a game makes me want to avoid following the critical path because I want to extend my runtime with it as much as possible, that game is a winner in my books.

How nice of Bethesda to cozy myself up for Doom: The Dark Ages in a few weeks.

That’s the beauty behind the Oblivion remaster. It is still janky, occasionally ugly, and featuring some inexcusable bugs, but the core game is so good, so damn immersive and entertaining, you will keep on playing it for hours on end. It’s an updated and (ever so slightly) improved way to experience a classic RPG that doesn’t feel like it’s already 19 years old. Grab an axe, improve your charisma stats, completely ignore the plot and the urgency behind the main critical path, and immerse yourself in the land of Cyrodiil. You’ll spend hundreds of hours doing so, probably up until Bethesda finally finishes up developing The Elder Scrolls 6… or another version of Skyrim.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was provided by the publisher.