Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls game and despite the myriad flaws, its weird, seemingly endless open world made me fall in love with the series. When Oblivion was announced I knew I had to play, but I also knew my aging PC (that could barely run Morrowind) would not be able to handle it without extensive and expensive upgrades.
I had been away at college and spending money was essentially non-existent, so I couldn’t see a clear path to playing the game. So I signed up for a student loan check to be used for “living expenses” (something that I didn’t know you could do until my second year of being completely broke at school). I opted to use a chunk of the check to buy an Xbox 360 and the collector’s edition of Oblivion.
Honestly, the 360 + Oblivion combo ended up being a sound investment. Outside of classes and my part-time job, I didn’t leave my apartment. I just stayed home and played Oblivion (and Dead or Alive 4) on my extremely not-HD CRT TV.
While I loved Morrowind’s strange, obtuse world and mechanics, I appreciated Oblivion’s more streamlined approach. It didn’t always look or run great, but it was easily the most immersive single-player RPG I had ever played. So yeah, I love Oblivion. Which brings us to last year’s remaster.
I picked it up on Steam around launch, and while the visual fidelity was impressive, the overworld performance was not. I was excited to revisit Cyrodiil, but I was OK waiting until the performance issues were ironed out.
Spoiler: that still hasn’t happened, but I still ended up putting a decent amount of time into it this week.
First off, the remaster is gorgeous*. The visuals are dense, detailed, and clean. Maybe too clean at times, to the point of looking a bit generic. The original Oblivion had a generally straightforward fantasy look, but the lighting, bloom, and textures made it easily identifiable in a crowd of high fantasy releases. When you see an Oblivion gate, the game has a clear visual identity, but when you’re in a crypt, it feels like it could be any number of games.
But oh boy do I love an Oblivion crypt. Any dungeon, really. These are the real hook for me; I can’t get enough of finding one in the wild and delving in. Something about the Bethesda Game Studios approach to design really works for me every time, despite the predictability.
Unfortunately, back on the overworld, I’m reminded of why I dropped the remaster in the first place. While I get a smooth, solid 200+ fps in dungeons on my PC (32 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7800X3D 8-Core Processor, GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16 GB), when I get above ground anything goes. Fps fluctuates from 160 to the 60s, and not even my monitor or GPU’s best VRR efforts can keep it from being jarring.
There are other nitpicks I have which aren’t dealbreakers, but make me question if I want to fully dive back into the game: texture clipping, longer than expected loading screens when entering buildings, buggy NPCs, etc. None of these are surprising if you’ve played a BGS game, but it would be nice if they would get ironed out.
Overall this is a fine remaster, one that reminds me why I love the original game, with some mostly excellent modern visuals. But after a few hours in, there are enough nagging issues that I believe could get fixed that I’m going to continue to hold out. I mean, I’ve already waited this long.
All screenshots taken by me on Steam.
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