4 harsh lessons Oblivion Remastered is teaching its newer players

One thing I really respect about the Oblivion: Remastered edition is how it keeps things traditional. Bethesda could have easily gone into the code, made a bunch of revamps and changes to suit the modern-day, Skyrim-based audience, then shipped it as a new take on the game. However, the company doubled down on preserving as much as they could while also giving the game a fresh lick of paint.

​​​​​​This means that all of the warts Oblivion had when it was released in 2006 are back with a fresh coat of polish. And people who have only experienced the Elder Scrolls series through Skyrim and are giving Oblivion Remastered a try are experiencing all of the game’s bumps and lumps for the very first time. And you know what? I’m a little jealous that they are.

4

Vampires are not as cool as they are in Skyrim

The problem is more about staying cool

Vampirism in Skyrim is pretty awesome. Sure, staying out in the sun hampers your regeneration, but if you know how to manage it, you can score some pretty sweet benefits and even become a vampire lord. So, when Skyrim players dove into Oblivion Remastered and learned that vampirism was a thing, they got to getting infected right away.

There’s just one problem. While Skyrim vampires can weather the sun with a little sunscreen, Oblivion vampirism will have you smolder under the sun until you perish. People learned the hard way that, if you tried to dodge the sun damage by using fast travel as a teleportation device, the game would retroactively apply all of the pain your character would have suffered if they walked it manually. This means you’d appear where you wanted to fast travel, immediately take a ton of damage, and fall over dead.

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This new “Scrolls-like” title is currently beating Oblivion: Remastered at its own game

The answer to an Elder Scrolls deluge is more Elder Scrolls, apparently.

3

Oblivion’s level scaling is pretty egregious

It’s not quite as streamlined as Skyrim’s

So, modern-day Elder Scrolls games have level scaling in some way or form. This feature keeps tabs on your level and gives your enemies a little boost to keep up with you. The main benefit is that combat never feels like you’re just mowing down low-level enemies without any challenge, but it also means that some people feel that levels are a little inconsequential as a result.

Both Oblivion and Skyrim have level scaling, but players didn’t have much of an issue with Skyrim’s system compared to the complaints that came in when Oblivion first released. Well, with Oblivion Remastered keeping the old scaling system, people are once again discovering how bad it can really be.

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5 games I want to see remastered after Oblivion

Oblivion is great, these games are what should be next.

2

Custom spells are for life

You can’t just throw them away

Source: Bethesda Softworks

The custom spells feature in Oblivion is pretty fun. I remember getting a ton of amusement making a spell that paralyzed my character, then standing at the top of a mountain, casting it, and watching my poor fella tumble down like some sort of painful pachinko machine.

It seems that other people are also having fun making their own spells, but they’re finding out the hard way that you can’t delete them easily. You have to dig into the game’s console and enter a command to scrub away that spell you regret making. People in a Reddit thread called out for Bethesda to fix this, but I think they should take more pride in their spell creation process.

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Oblivion Remastered was a mess on PC until I made these 6 tweaks

A few simple tweaks to optimize your performance in Oblivion Remastered,

1

Horse armor is still a questionable DLC purchase

Nothing changed there

When discussing what the first-ever game microtransaction was, there’s a lot of discourse over what counts as a “microtransaction,” as your definition naturally shapes what you believe was the first-ever example of it. Oblivion is often cited as the first time a major publisher added a microtransaction to their game, and while people may debate that, I would argue that it was the one that brought the concept of microtransactions to a wider audience and helped set the scene for future monetization methods.

The first microtransaction Bethesda used to test the waters was some horse armor. It cost $2.50 on consoles and $1.99 on PC, and it was purely a cosmetic change. In today’s gaming scene, $2.50 for a cosmetic seems par the course, but back then, people were really unhappy with the idea.

Fast forward today, and Bethesda, of course, added the horse armor DLC to Oblivion Remastered. It’s part of the deluxe edition set, and will cost you $10, albeit it comes with more than horse armor. And much like the days of yore, people are once again taking to forums to debate the worth of a shiny new outfit for your fave mare.

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This is the most downloaded mod for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered so far

Before exploring Cyrodiil, many players are fixing their frame rates with a handy little mod that makes things so much smoother.

Out with the old, in with the new (but still old)

With people rediscovering all the ugly bumps that came with Oblivion, it feels like 2006 again. While a new generation of gamers is getting annoyed with how the game was designed, I, personally, am pleased that Bethesda opted to make the experience as authentic to the original title as possible.