Oblivion Remastered “Shadow Drops”

[spacepickle]

Summary

Rumors and leaks about an Oblivion remaster have been circling for a the past few days, but yesterday they were all confirmed when Bethesda announced and then promptly released the game. It's out now on Steam in all its glory for $49.99 USD and has reached an all time peak of over 180,000 concurrent players as well as a “Very Positive“ review score. 

source: Google Images

 

 

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“The rumors and the Steam listings were real: Oblivion is back. On Tuesday, Bethesda formally announced a remaster of the 2006 open-world RPG — developed by Dark Souls: Remastered studio Virtuos — and then promptly released it.”

My thoughts 

I have never played the original Oblivion, nor will I be spending money  on this one, but I think it's really interesting seeing this game's launch. First of all it's nothing more than an Unreal Engine 5 version of the game with a couple of quality-of-life improvements. Fundamentally nothing has really changed beyond the visuals, but people are excited to get back into it which I believe shows the climate of gaming on a pretty deep level. Also it's interesting how many leaks and rumors got out about this, it's crazy to me that everything seems to get leaked ages before it dropped. At least the leaks (or at the very least the hype around the leaks) did not exist until days before launch at the end of what was probably a very long development time. I guess they just did an above average job keeping this one under wraps. 

 

Sources

  - https://www.polygon.com/news/562217/the-elder-scrolls-4-oblivion-remastered-released

 

 - https://steamdb.info/app/2623190/charts/

[Holmes108]

Yeah, I'm a couple of hours into it, and it's pretty gorgeous. It feels better too. I think the archery feels a little better than the original as well. I'm not sure if I'm going to be up for a complete play through, but I'm definitely looking forward to exploring for a while longer.

 

Even though I haven't played the original in years, I played it a ton, and still remember all the details, so it's really interesting seeing the new coat of paint. It's also nice getting 120fps!

[GuiltySpark_]

Looking forward to this after AC:S.

 

Already a RenoDX mod to fix HDR so i'm set.

[KeradSnake]

Summary

TES Oblivion launched yesterday for $50 on all platform even PS5, and also available in Game Pass right after the game announced and released at the same time. Includes story expansions, and additional downloadable content included in the remaster. Development apparently started in 2021. The remake, along with visual changes, brought gameplay and leveling mechanics update that are mix of Skyrim and Oblivion itself and even added additional voice lines for some characters, Adoring Fan is still ugly but in glorious 4K, and 20 years later Todd still tryna selling us horse armor. But it's not just that

 

Surprisingly and unexpectedly, modders already playing around with the game file not even 12 hours after the game launched. One user already showcased early prototype of Oblivion Remaster VR mod with motion controls (UEVR), and not long after that, some people at Elder Scroll subreddit found out that you could open the remaster files in the TES Creation Kit from Oblivion day, which dates back to 2006. And it doesn't end there, even the game plugins already cracked, with script extender already been released to modding sites like Nexus. All of this are apparently possible thanks to the fact that the remaster was done with combining Creation Engine with Bethesda' own fork of UE5. That means the game logic is still handled by Creation Engine, while Render is done by UE5.

 

This release doesn't impact community remaster project like Skyblivion. In fact, Bethesda just gave every Skyblivion team member a free Oblivion remastered keys, not long after the release of the game.

 

Quotes

 

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When we started this project in 2021, we aimed to breathe new life into a chapter of The Elder Scrolls that set the path for so many of our games after it. We never wanted to remake it – but remaster it – where the original game was there as you remember playing it, but seen through today’s technology.

We were so fortunate to work with an unbelievable team and partners at Virtuos. Even though we had worked together before, we had never attempted something on this scale. Every piece of art, animation, special effects, and part of the world would be remastered. Some new voices would be recorded, while keeping the originals there as well. Game systems were updated to feel better in your hands. Leveling systems modified for smoother progression and balance. We looked at every part and carefully upgraded it. But most of all, we never wanted to change the core. It’s still a game from a previous era and should feel like one. (Bethesda website)

 

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...It's important to note that this is a remaster, not a remake. This project uses Unreal Engine, but only for the presentation aspects like graphics and audio. Bethesda's proprietary Creation Engine is still there handling the gameplay logic and systems. (Ars Technica)

 

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My thoughts

Oh my God that is probably the most janky and cursed engine mashup I have ever seen in my life. Todd you magnificent madlad, but whyyyy???? 

 

I give credits where it's due, it's also amazing that it's actually relatively painless for modders to play around with, with modders already cracking some game files that are essential for modding. I think the general consensus with UE5 are mostly they are not easy to play around when it comes to actual modding (and not things like performance/ optimization mods, like actual modding). But I can see that changes with Oblivion remastered. I don't think I've seen a large effort in UE modding like this since Fallen Order dismemberment and SH2 Remake.

 

Sources

included in URL markdown and quotes

Edited April 23 by KeradSnake

[KeradSnake]

Damn you are speed, I literally just clicked post topic on my own take and this is the first thing I see lol

 

uh can some staff merge that one? There's interesting stuff about modding and the engine used on the remastered on that one

[Tan3l6]

Good game. Nostalgic, yet improved mechanics and graphics. At least most other mechanics than opening local area map.

Also crashed constantly in some sewer areas, strangely not when exiting sewers nor in open world even once.

 

Edit: still crashes after hour to couple of hours.

[Tan3l6]

 

[spacepickle]

4 minutes ago, KeradSnake said:

Damn you are speed, I literally just clicked post topic on my own take and this is the first thing I see lol

 

uh can some staff merge that one? There's interesting stuff about modding and the engine used on the remastered on that one

Yeah yours is really well done, mine focuses more on pre launch aspects and yours is more post launch so I feel they hit different areas pretty well. 

[Needfuldoer]

[ Thread cleaned ]

 

This is not the place to have a debate about physiology, psychology, and terminology. Keep the discussion about the game itself.

[Stahlmann]

I just really hope that UE5 allows for the same scope in modding as the original. Creation Engine might have some (a lot of) quirks, but it's the closest thing to an actual modding sandbox we have. No other game engine I know has this level of fine control for mod file management, conflict resolution, load orders, etc.

 

With most games, especially if you run multiple mods, you just have to throw the files in and hope they work.

 

With Skyrim, you can throw in thousands of mods, and with a bit of know how, you can make all of them work together flawlessly.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

Can anyone comment on controller support? Didn't see anything about it in the launch video.

[Stahlmann]

3 minutes ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Can anyone comment on controller support? Didn't see anything about it in the launch video.

I've seen videos of people playing the game on a controller, and it looked pretty seamless. The original game also released on consoles, so it'd be surprising if the remake didn't support controllers properly.

[spacepickle]

3 minutes ago, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

Can anyone comment on controller support? Didn't see anything about it in the launch video.

I've heard it's launching on playstation and xbox, so support should be pretty good. 

[Holmes108]

26 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

I've seen videos of people playing the game on a controller, and it looked pretty seamless. The original game also released on consoles, so it'd be surprising if the remake didn't support controllers properly.

 

Yep, steam had it listed as "partial controller support" which seemed odd, but I've been playing (the PC gamepass version) with zero issues. Controller works for all aspects.

[emothxughts]

People are already remaking their old Oblivion memes, call it "remastering" these memes. 

For example: 

 

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

52 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

 

1 hour ago, spacepickle said:

 

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

 

Great to hear! Sounds like this could be my next couch game!

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

I'll wait until it's 20 €, I'm not really paying 55 € for a remaster.

 

Back when I played it I didn't understand sould gems or smithing, so I played with whatever bow I found XD I'm sure I would enjoy another oblivion run.

[RejZoR]

On 4/23/2025 at 7:09 PM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I'll wait until it's 20 €, I'm not really paying 55 € for a remaster.

 

Back when I played it I didn't understand sould gems or smithing, so I played with whatever bow I found XD I'm sure I would enjoy another oblivion run.

Repair hammers allowed you to repair armor and weapons because they degraded with use. With increased skill level you would use hammers more efficiently and at highest level even make weapons beyond their 100% rating and make them way more durable. I forgot weapons actually degraded in this game.

 

Soul Gems, if I remember correctly, you had to perform a Soul Trap spell on self or target, have soul gem of certain grade i your inventory and as you slayed a creature, it captured its soul into the gem. Then you used the gem to enchant weapons with powers, like fire damage from soul captured from Flame Atronach. At first I couldn't understand it either, but it's relatively simple concept when you got it. At first I just hoarded soul gems and sold them as is

[Stahlmann]

After about 15 hours of playtime I have some thoughts:

 

Technical side:

Spoiler

As expected from UE5, the game looks pretty good, but performs like hot garbage. Even at 4K ultra including ray tracing, I'm somehow CPU bound in most scenarios. Even dropping my settings to low, use DLSS performance or even native 1080p, I don't get over 50 fps without taking advantage of frame generation. And that's on a 4080 and 5800X3D. GPU utilization sometimes only sits around 60-70% while getting 50 fps. And as soon as rain starts, it somehow gets even worse.

 

Another example that shows just how bad UE5 can be if devs solely rely on Nanites, upscaling, Frame Generation, etc. to deliver playable performance. Also as a side note, even with Nanites, the game still has noticeable pop-in. So contrary to popular belief, Nanites does in fact not magically fix pop-in.

 

Booting up for the first time I had to wait around 20 minutes until the shader compilation was completed. And even after that lengthy compilation, the game still stutters when moving around the open world.

 

Also a bit disappointed that HDR isn't integrated. UE5 natively supports it, but even forcing HDR to work through the .ini files doesn't really result in a satisfying HDR presentation. So SDR it is.

 

Using Frame Generation makes the game almost unplayable with KB+M because the mouse cursor isn't excluded from the frame generation, making it feel floaty and very weird to control.

 

I still like the game itself, because it's just Oblivion, but the technical aspect is very rough. Let's see if the community can fix that. Because we all know Bethesda won't. Imo it's not the definitive way to play Oblivion.

 

If you can forgo the new graphics, add a few mods to the original game and it'll run at hundreds of fps on any halfway modern PC, resulting in an ultimately better experience imo. The underlying game and mechanics are barely different, and I bet some of the changes are already avaiable as mods for the legacy game.

 

So yeah, the underlying game is still Oblivion, so it's still good. But the UE5 graphics layer is rough to say the least. Modding slightly newer models, textures and better LODs to the old game still delivers a better overall experience imo.

 

Gameplay changes I've encountered:

Spoiler

Sprinting:

A welcome addition, but the 3rd person animation is very weird.

 

New animations and weapon movesets:

including limiting weapons to certain combos instead of wildly swinging until the enemy is dead.

 

New level system:

It's a hybrid between Oblivion and Skyrim. You still need a certain amount of skill levelups to trigger the character levelup, and then freely decide how to allocate attributes, instead of the inferior skill grinding system in the legacy game. Still, it feels like with advancing player level, and as a result stronger enemy encounters, you overall still get weaker proportionally to your enemies as you level up.

 

Hitmarker:

Mostly useful for ranged combat, and makes bows much more satisfying to play imo.

 

New enemy AI:

Instead of running at you blindly and just beating you to death, NPCs will now also dodge, block more effectively, and run away if they use ranged weapons against a melee player. This makes some fights just more frustrating imo.

 

I know this sounds like I don't like the game very much, but even with the few changes they made gameplay-wise it's still Oblivion so I still like the game. But I don't like the technical side, mostly meaning performance issues. So in my opinion, as someone who doesn't shy away from using hundreds of mods, the legacy game is still my preferred way of playing Oblivion.

 

The remaster will need a few months worth of mod development before it's likely in a good enough state that I'd call it the definitive way to play the game.

[Stahlmann]

On 4/26/2025 at 10:28 AM, RejZoR said:

Soul Gems, if I remember correctly, you had to perform a Soul Trap spell on self or target, have soul gem of certain grade i your inventory and as you slayed a creature, it captured its soul into the gem. Then you used the gem to enchant weapons with powers, like fire damage from soul captured from Flame Atronach. At first I couldn't understand it either, but it's relatively simple concept when you got it. At first I just hoarded soul gems and sold them as is

The soul trapping part is correct. But you enchant through special items called Sigil Stones you find at the end of Oblivion Gate dungeons. Full soul gems are only used for recharging already enchanted items afaik.

[RejZoR]

8 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

The soul trapping part is correct. But you enchant through special items called Sigil Stones you find at the end of Oblivion Gate dungeons. Full soul gems are only used for recharging already enchanted items afaik.

Oh, right. Sigils enchant the items, soul gems recharge them. It has been a while and even back then I barely used them as I was more warrior oriented. And so am currently, this is probably the first time I actually have skills that I wanted. Back then i didn't understand half of it.

 

Currently I have a blade/bow wizard of destruction with some skills into sneak and lockpicking.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

21 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

Still, it feels like with advancing player level, and as a result stronger enemy encounters, you overall still get weaker proportionally to your enemies as you level up

I remember! I did my whole run back then at like level 4 because if I leveled to much, there would be panthers (?) in the open world instead of wolves and they would shred me during exploration. XD

 

The main quest was really cool, I remember that it ends with the bosses becoming statues in the capital as a permanent feature. I think I liked it more than Skyrim main quest. I completed Skyrim six times, but I never revisited Oblivion. i really should.

 

I would love to do a new run now that I'm better at games. Also with mods to expand the weapon manufacturing like in Skyrim. I remember there there was very little use of dragon bones, instead mods gave you even dragon bone bows and arrows to make use of the hundreds of dragon bones I would end up with.

I don't remember how merchant works in oblivion. In skyrim they have really low gold preventing me to sell all the loot, so I had a mod to give them 15000 gold in reserve. it was so tedious to do a shop run to do every shop in sequence to sell all the loot and make a day pass so the first one would refresh gold by the time you got back to them.

 

I really do hope that this oblivion remaster and starfield taught Bethesda to not use procedural generation like they have so far.

 

Starfield has some amazing quests, like the one with the outpost shifting between two alternate dimensions, but they were interspersed in such a sea of the same ten building over and over and over and over as to make it laughable. Like... How do you make ONE HUNDRED planets, and TEN unique POIs??? I finished the main quest, but I didn't even finish most of the side quests and faction quests. Grinding that star power with new level +++++ sucked the will to play it. I didn't even try the vehicle and DLC.

 

Starfield had the BEST starship designer of any game, ever. And the space combat is among the worst experiences. Space Engineer is more flexible and lets you build bigger ships, but Starfield is still better. Likewise, Starfield has great settlement building, even better than Fallout 4, but it is virtually useless. It feels to me at one point Starfield was a survival game and needed resources to progress deeper into the system, but it was reworked to make crafting useless.

 

Damn, I now remember the persuasion system in Starfield... Every NPC draws from the SAME pools of questions, meaning even for quest persuasions, you say things like: "you know what I mean."...

 

Fallout 4 had the worst main quest and factions, and none of it made sense to me. Like why the institute president made a young clone for himself? But still had the skyrim formula nailed down. I enjoyed exploring the world and making settlement. The timeline too was really weird. Centuries passed since the fall of the bomb, and everyone seemed like they passed the broom once and called it a day.

 

I really hope that for Elder Scroll 6, Bethesda returns to the Oblivion/Skyrim formula. World with huge number of handcrafted quest and NPC, great writing, endless breadcrumbs. Choices that matters. All hopefully more refined with a seamless conversation system and seamless open world like Cyberpunk 2077 does. In Starfield having to lead inside each store to sell was really immersion breaking after playing CP77. In Skyrim I tolerate it a lot more because I can spend a lot of time in overworld exploring, or inside the dungeons.

[Stahlmann]

18 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I remember! I did my whole run back then at like level 4 because if I leveled to much, there would be panthers (?) in the open world instead of wolves and they would shred me during exploration. XD

Yeah and that also applies to every bandit or daedra you encounter. If you level up, you encounter stronger foes. If you don't allocate attributes in an optimal way or don't get better weapons, you will feel weaker with higher levels, which is weird.

 

 

18 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I would love to do a new run now that I'm better at games. Also with mods to expand the weapon manufacturing like in Skyrim. I remember there there was very little use of dragon bones, instead mods gave you even dragon bone bows and arrows to make use of the hundreds of dragon bones I would end up with.

Dragon bones were only used for Dragon-type Armor and Weapons. Afaik you could always craft arrows aswell.

 

18 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I don't remember how merchant works in oblivion. In skyrim they have really low gold preventing me to sell all the loot, so I had a mod to give them 15000 gold in reserve. it was so tedious to do a shop run to do every shop in sequence to sell all the loot and make a day pass so the first one would refresh gold by the time you got back to them.

Merchants have a "maximum budget", meaning they can't spend more than their money on a single item. If you stay under that value though, you can sell infinitely to the same merchant. You can also barter to get better prices. So most traders in the main cities can buy everything you have, since you will rarely have anything to sell that's worth more than 800 gold or so after applying your speechcraft and mercantile skills.

 

18 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I really hope that for Elder Scroll 6, Bethesda returns to the Oblivion/Skyrim formula. World with huge number of handcrafted quest and NPC, great writing, endless breadcrumbs. Choices that matters. All hopefully more refined with a seamless conversation system and seamless open world like Cyberpunk 2077 does. In Starfield having to lead inside each store to sell was really immersion breaking after playing CP77. In Skyrim I tolerate it a lot more because I can spend a lot of time in overworld exploring, or inside the dungeons.

Well, we can hope. So far Bethesda still didn't show us any new games that were good recently. I personally liked Fallout 4, but everything that came after, not really.