Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered review – the madness has not faded, thankfully

Irish Independent

08-05-2025

If you know anything about Oblivion, you'll be aware of its fabled foibles, the amusing glitches that accompanied its sweeping medieval fantasy in the land of Tamriel. But perhaps you've only heard of and never played Bethesda's seminal RPG, one of the pinnacles of the Elder Scrolls series before the even more revered Skyrim.
Now's your chance, a scarcely conceivable 19 years after its debut as it gets the Remaster treatment while we wait for Bethesda to put a date on Elder Scrolls VI, the next instalment that's been in the oven for many moons.
We shouldn't be surprised that Oblivion's remakers chose not to sanitise its lunacies too much. Bethesda built a large open world back in 2006 and the Xbox 360 technology of the time couldn't always reliably handle the permutations of underlying systems. Hence the infamous but largely amusing kinks where characters and the world itself behaved unpredictably at times.
Players of the original enjoyed a novel buffet of adventures – wielding magic spells and swords while exploring the Tamriel wilderness, all wrapped in a yarn about an evil sorcerer and portals to hell. Crucially, though, you could ignore the main quest endlessly in favour of swashbuckling exploits in dungeons, forests and cities. Almost as importantly, the bugs in the code could frequently produce a smile on your face for their sheer ridiculousness.
Bethesda went on to even better things with 2011's Skyrim, which built on Oblivion's template, albeit featuring possibly even more glitches. Hopefully that remaster is only just around the corner, nonetheless.
In the meantime, there's plenty to appreciate in Oblivion's 2025 makeover but despite its occasional brilliance it feels a product of its time despite the new coat of paint.
The original voice cast had put in a decent shift – including celebrity performances from the resonant tones of Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean and even Lynda Carter of Wonder Woman fame. But many of the NPCs still look stilted and often a bit freaky.
Tamriel felt like an impressively capacious realm back in the day but, two decades on, its boundaries chafe at your freedom as the game sends you pinballing from one side of the map to the other. The hinterlands may be generously loaded with dungeons but they're very obviously copied and pasted from place to place. How often must you sift the junk loot from the real treasure scattered around every location? The answer is tediously often.
Oblivion Remastered offers an assortment of concessions to 2025, such as the ability to sprint, a breadcrumb trail to your next objective, a graphical upgrade and a smoothing of levelling curve. Yet the weapons and magic combat that fuel the core gameplay remain clunky and imprecise.
It's tricky to disconnect the expectations of the modern gamer from an RPG that was unconventionally innovative back in 2006. Yet Oblivion can still put on an admirable show two decades on and will please many players for whom nostalgia is not the primary motivation.