The moment you’ll most feel like an adventurer in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is right before you leave the main menu and its music behind – the majestic fantasy epic that music promises doesn’t really exist. This isn’t Lord Of The Rings. It isn’t even Eragon. It’s David Lynch in a codpiece recreating the frying pan scene from Bottom starring three NPCs having an unscripted punch-up because one of them decided to steal an apple.
Oblivion Remastered is easy on the eyes and familiar to contemporary thumbs, but it works because it’s ultimately a humble, even self-depreciating act of modernisation. It brings Oblivion in off the streets, gives it a haircut, buys it a new suit, but makes no attempt to sober it up. In fact, it flings open the liquor cabinet.
If you’ve played Oblivion before, encountering familiar NPCs has the air of spotting former celebrities who fled the country and got plastic surgery, hoping they’d never be recognised again. Forget the Nine. Nevermind the Daedric princes. The one true cosmic power in Cyrodiil is a chattering, many-faced idiot god named the 2006 Gamebryo Engine; eternal weaver of stupid stories. Oh, look. It’s talking to itself about mud crabs again. The clay-faced uncanniness of each guard and shopkeeper is lent a loving spotlight. Erratic behaviour is not only left alone, but made much funnier in contrast against newly lush environments. Unreal Engine’s fidelity acts here as a comedy straight man, essentially.
If you’ve not played Oblivion before – welcome to the circus, great to have you. Skyrim but with charm, is my personal in-brief here. Skyrim without delusions of grandeur. Occasionally, Skyrim but with quests that make you smile instead of leaving you feeling empty and a little insulted, but I’ll get to that in a bit. This is an open world RPG less about map size or quantity of journal entries (though it is big) and more about its eating, sleeping, nattering idiots. In this, it’s both wonderfully detailed and legendarily inept.
Hey, you. You’re finally awake after preparing shaders for forty five minutes. Do read James’s performance breakdown while you’re waiting. Emperor Patrick Stewart has been dreaming about you, you lucky sod. Depending on how bungo you go with a new character creator powerful enough to spawn its own horror subgenre, this may explain why the emperor is ready to die. Dark forces are coming to the land, many people disagree with this situation, and the ruler believes you’re key to stopping the whole affair. One prison escape and assasination later, you’re standing before the sewer grate to freedom.
Step through, and you can either follow prophetic map markers to story’s end, or pick a direction and start walking. Become a magician and craft your own spells. Become a warrior and seek glory in the capital’s arena. Pick locks. Steal books. Brew potions. Chat up the locals. Go dungeon delving. Join a murder cult. Perform heroic deeds and have every NPC in an infinite mile radius comment on those heroic deeds for the next fifteen hours. Go for a nice stroll in the countryside and murder fifteen rats and twelve goblins before stopping for lunch.
Behold: a ‘don’t walk on the grass’ sign next to a pair of grass-stomping boots in your exact size, and sprawling, bucolic fields just waiting to be stomped over. The soul of Oblivion is defined by the barriers between freedom and transgression. There are places the game invites you to explore freely, and places it still invites you to explore but puts a locked door and a guard in front to make you feel naughty doing it. The citizens of Cyrodiil each have personal space, property, and lives, and all are yours for the disrespecting.
But transgressions – both yours and the engine’s – mean nothing without an established baseline of normal conduct first, and that’s this remaster’s greatest trick. By whacking up the verisimilitude dial, by making you believe that much more in every flickering flame or dancing shadow or rapturous sunrise, everything that actually occurs in Cyrodiil becomes that much stupidier. Indeed, the game’s best questlines incorporate this guilty joy of being somewhere you shouldn’t, doing something destructive. It is pre-empting chaotic player inserts like GTA 5’s Trevor in anticipation of the player’s most chaotic instincts.
If I’ve made Oblivion’s appeal sound entirely like an accident of vomiting systems and code, that’d be doing a disservice to some genuinely great quest design. The game’s sense of humour extends past its existential wobbliness to its writing. While there’s undoubtedly deliberate world building here, Cyrodiil feels more like a sandbox for housing tabletop RPG tropes. It’s far less insistent than Skyrim, for example, in immersing you into a culture or a period in history. It’s more interested in brainstorming wouldn’t-it-be-fun-ifs. Wouldn’t it be fun if an entire village got turned invisible by an idiot wizard? If you had to get yourself arrested to get information out of a prisoner? If you bought a haunted house without knowing? Simple objectives become twists, and sometimes twist again.
The combat is still wank though, although it’s honestly hard to mind too much. There are enough magic weapons and spells, potions and poisons and scrolls and other tricks here to keep it entertaining. Fights are at their best when you force yourself to get creative, at their worse then you’re just sword-and-board wailing on someone, although there’s definitely a little more oomph to melee duels thanks to impact and enemy reaction tweaks. Again, it feels a little besides the point to criticise any individual element of Oblivion in isolation, tasty soup made from expired ingredients that it is. Oblivion doesn’t try to be the star of the show, anyway. That’s your job. The game just dresses the set for you.
So, I think this is basically for two types of people: those who played Oblivion back in the day and think they’ll get a real kick out of the updates, and those who just can’t deal with the way classic Oblivion looks and controls. It’s a game for the curious, for the nostalgic, and for those that want to be part of meme-stuffed zeitgeist moment. It’s that last point I imagine Bethesda are banking on, barging themselves back into cultural relevancy on the back of Virtuos’s hard work like the cheeky gits they are. If you’re hungry for a gorgeous medieval open world to get properly lost in, you’re still much better off with something like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. But if you ever wondered what Skyrim would be like if it was less existentially grey by every metric, there really isn’t a substitute for the undeniable charm that Virtuos have so cannily preserved here.
This review is based on a code provided by the publisher.