#Oblivion #Gaming #IGN
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered reviewed by Travis Northup on Xbox Series X, also available on PlayStation 5 and PC. Stick around after the score for an interview with Travis about the review process and his RPG tastes.
"The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is an awesome nostalgic adventure that recaptures most of what I loved about the 2006 original, while sanding down many of its roughest edges. The result is a fantastic open-world RPG that’s aged quite well, with questlines and stories that are better than I remembered, modernizations (like the slightly improved leveling system) that remove some of the friction of the original, and loads of opportunities to make this adventure whatever you want it to be via the plentiful freedom afforded to you. On the other hand, not enough has been done to make this thing significantly less buggy than it notoriously was back in the day, and some design choices – like the enemy scaling and procedural Oblivion levels that become dull fast – have not been improved, which feels like a squandered opportunity. Even so, I never expected to so thoroughly enjoy replaying this uniquely goofy RPG, and I am so, so glad I took this walk down memory lane (now with the option to sprint down it)."
#IGN #Gaming #Oblivion
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered reviewed by Travis Northup on Xbox Series X, also available on PlayStation 5 and PC. Stick around after the score for an interview with Travis about the review process and his RPG tastes.
"The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is an awesome nostalgic adventure that recaptures most of what I loved about the 2006 original, while sanding down many of its roughest edges. The result is a fantastic open-world RPG that’s aged quite well, with questlines and stories that are better than I remembered, modernizations (like the slightly improved leveling system) that remove some of the friction of the original, and loads of opportunities to make this adventure whatever you want it to be via the plentiful freedom afforded to you. On the other hand, not enough has been done to make this thing significantly less buggy than it notoriously was back in the day, and some design choices – like the enemy scaling and procedural Oblivion levels that become dull fast – have not been improved, which feels like a squandered opportunity. Even so, I never expected to so thoroughly enjoy replaying this uniquely goofy RPG, and I am so, so glad I took this walk down memory lane (now with the option to sprint down it)."
#IGN #Gaming #Oblivion
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00Close shut the jaws of Oblivion.
00:03Like a mythic Dawn cultist popping out of a secret room to stab the Emperor in the back,
00:08Stranger, you chose a bad day to take up with the calls of the Septim.
00:14A remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion has shown up out of nowhere,
00:18and it's a dagger I've gladly thrown myself onto for over 100 hours in about a week.
00:24With the original very clear in my mind after recently revisiting it,
00:30the unreal-tinted glasses of this nostalgia trip modestly modernize one of my all-time favorite open-world RPGs.
00:37You saw something in you. Trusted you.
00:40An improved UI, revised leveling system, and graphical overhaul have made this nearly 20-year-old classic massively more playable.
00:49Aye!
00:50That said, I've also seen a disappointingly recognizable amount of jank and poor performance,
00:56and the mostly unchanged enemy scaling apparatus hasn't gotten less irritating with time.
01:02And yet, as someone who considers myself pretty immune to the charms of nostalgia alone when a game hasn't aged well,
01:09I had a fantastic time returning to this adorably weird open-world adventure,
01:14and will likely lose even more hours to it in the coming weeks as I tie up loose ends in the Shivering Isles.
01:20These are the closing days of the third era, and the final hours of my life.
01:29If you've never played the original Oblivion, it's your typical massive open-world fantasy RPG from the folks who would go on to bring us Skyrim,
01:37and more recently Starfield.
01:39It's also from an era where the designers at Bethesda provided fewer guardrails and wrote stronger stories.
01:44Who are you? How did you get this?
01:47You'll level up your character in everything from casting destructive magic to repairing your armor
01:52as you seek stronger loot, complete quests, and steal everything in sight in typical RPG fashion.
01:58Most of the stuff you'll do, like rise up the ranks of the Dark Brotherhood and unravel a plot of murder and betrayal,
02:06is incredibly enjoyable, and has withstood the test of time.
02:10Meanwhile, other aspects, like the procedurally generated Oblivion levels you're subjected to frequently,
02:16have fared less well, and serve as glowing reminders of problems Bethesda never quite figured out how to resolve.
02:22This series of massive, open-world gallivants aren't known for having the most focused, noteworthy stories,
02:32but Oblivion actually surprises in this regard. For my money, it's some of Bethesda's best work,
02:38especially when it comes to the all-important faction questlines.
02:42The Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild stories, in particular,
02:45have lived rent-free in my head for the better part of two decades,
02:48and I was pleasantly surprised to see they've aged like fine wine.
02:52For his silence, now the symphony of death.
02:55The included Shivering Isles expansion area, which throws you into an Alice in Wonderland-like world of madness,
03:02remains one of the best DLCs ever made, with a surprisingly compelling story given to
03:08such a seemingly silly character in the Mad God Sheogorath.
03:11Now, get going before I change my mind, or my mind changes me.
03:18Even the main quest, which has you finding the bastard son of a slain emperor to stop an otherworldly invasion,
03:25is actually much better than I remembered it being, with Sean Bean's Martin having a genuinely touching character arc
03:31that I found myself quite invested in.
03:33I know I would be dead by now if it weren't for you.
03:37Don't get me wrong, there's nothing as meaningful and well-written
03:40as you'd find in a more story-focused RPG like The Witcher 3,
03:44and there are plenty of forgettable characters with stilted dialogue to go around,
03:48but I'd still put it well above the average for this type of game.
03:52It probably goes without saying that the graphical upgrade is Oblivion Remastered's biggest improvement,
04:04and the efforts of the team at developer Virtuous are a sight to behold.
04:08While things definitely don't look anywhere near the normal standards of a big-budget game built from the ground up today,
04:14putting this version side-by-side with its 2006 doppelganger is eye-raisingly impressive.
04:20The entire map is crisp, with a draw distance my teenage self could have only dreamed of.
04:25Lighting, shadows, and character lip-syncing in particular have been overhauled so much that it's actually kind of shocking.
04:33That said, other things bizarrely didn't get the memo.
04:36The NPC's faces, for instance, are almost universally hideous and cartoonish, and have about a 40% chance of being cross-eyed.
04:44Goodness, what can I say?
04:46Although honestly, being horrified by character faces might actually be part of the authentic Oblivion experience.
04:53I'm fellas Sarandas. Don't breathe on me.
04:56On balance, though, it's still a total glow-up.
04:58It's one of those situations where everything looks like I fondly remember it instead of how it actually did,
05:04which speaks to how the spirit and style of the original has been maintained.
05:09Beyond the glossy new look, though, perhaps the thing that has had the biggest impact on gameplay
05:14is the simple inclusion of a sprint button.
05:17If you haven't played Oblivion in over a decade, you might be shocked to hear that, no, there was no sprinting.
05:23And if you never played the original, just understand that you'll never truly know this gift you've been granted from Akatosh himself.
05:30I don't even really mind that I'm now losing stamina by sprinting,
05:34something that usually annoys me in RPGs where you're literally always running around.
05:38It's worth it, even if it does have the odd side effect of making the entire map feel smaller,
05:44especially cities and dungeons that can now be fully explored in about half the time.
05:48This change has also made me care a whole lot more about investing in skills and magical buffs that increase my stamina,
05:55since now I'm using that meter for nearly everything I do.
05:58But despite the extra fiddling that causes, moving through areas I already know like the back of my hand makes for a remarkably less tedious time.
06:09Unfortunately, one of the areas where Oblivion needed the most improvement was its leveling system and how enemies scale with you as you progress.
06:17While some tweaking has been done to make it feel less unfair, it remains deeply flawed.
06:23Previously, you could only level up your character by improving your primary class skills, like destruction for a mage or heavy armor for a warrior.
06:31But if you focused on doing that, enemies would scale with you and beat you to a pulp with their high-level gear,
06:37which are unlikely to be as well-rounded or intentionally statted out as they are.
06:41This made the mid-game a real pain, until you eventually got over that hump and retook your place as a geared-out badass.
06:47In Oblivion Remastered, they've melded that leveling system with Skyrim's version, in which everything you do increases your level,
06:54and that makes for a significantly less frustrating climb against opponents that arbitrarily become more dangerous across the entire game world.
07:02Now I didn't feel punished for focusing on my primary skills first, boosting my level before I was properly powered,
07:11for the more lethal enemies that progression brought with it.
07:14But that core problem of enemies scaling out in the world is still a bummer of a mechanic that has aged like spoiled sweetrolls.
07:21It doesn't exactly feel great to spend 50 hours building up your character,
07:26to then discover that regular-ass bandits out in the world are now rocking full sets of shiny glass armor,
07:32mostly invalidating your hard-earned progress.
07:40This remaster deftly succeeds at maintaining all the things I loved and despised about Oblivion,
07:46in a clear effort to keep it as close to the original vision as possible.
07:50And that's both a good thing, and my biggest critique of the whole undertaking.
07:56A lot of how much you're likely to enjoy a playthrough is going to come down to your personal history and experience with Bethesda's RPGs.
08:04If you've been gaming for a few decades already, and your nostalgia is great enough to help you forgive some pretty clear, outdated game design decisions,
08:11then you're in for an awesome trip.
08:13But if you're new to Oblivion, or simply don't possess a natural fondness for retro-style role-playing,
08:19then you'll probably find yourself less enthused when, for example, you run through the 30th or 40th nearly identical Oblivion gate.
08:30As for me, I find myself somewhere in the middle.
08:33I really love this game, even as I'm well aware and quite incapable of overlooking its many flaws.
08:39Would we have been better served if Bethesda and Virtuous had thrown out the old rulebook and done a proper ground-up remake?
08:46Maybe, maybe not.
08:48But the decision to stick as close as possible to recreating Oblivion as it existed in 2006,
08:54but prettier and slightly less irritating, has certainly put a ceiling on how much this Elder Scrolls redux can really blow me away.
09:04There's another caveat to mention, too.
09:06Although Virtuous did some great work, they're not miracle workers.
09:09This is still a Bethesda game through and through, and that comes with a lot of bugs.
09:14I saw everything from broken quest objectives, to Oblivion gates disappearing before my eyes, and dozens of other issues.
09:21On more than one occasion, I've even found myself stuck underneath a rock in an area where enemies were nearby,
09:27so I wasn't able to fast travel away, meaning I had to choose between praying to Akatosh that the baddies would creep near enough for me to kill them through the environment,
09:36or just give up and reload to a previous checkpoint.
09:39Beyond that, Oblivion Remastered performs increasingly worse the longer you play it,
09:45presumably because I monkeyed with the world enough to cause it trouble trying to keep track of where I left a specific piece of cheese.
09:52My Xbox Series X dropped frames and hitched with regularity, textures loaded right in front of me,
09:58and after about 40 hours, I started encountering hard crashes and game freezes every few hours like clockwork.
10:05Most of the stuff didn't deter me from sinking an ungodly amount of time into blasting Daedro with fireballs,
10:12but it's definitely a bummer to see that two decades wasn't long enough to fix this janky fantasy world.
10:18In some cases, it appears to perform even worse than I remember the Xbox 360 doing, which is almost impressive.
10:26It's you. Hi. Hello. What's going on with you? What's this about?
10:30The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered is an awesome, nostalgic adventure that recaptures most of what I loved about the 2006 original,
10:39while sanding down many of its roughest edges.
10:42The result is a fantastic open-world RPG that's aged quite well, with questlines and stories that are better than I remembered.
10:50It is a doorway. An invitation. Perhaps you will accept it for what it is.
10:55Modernizations, like the slightly improved leveling system that removes some of the friction of the original,
11:01and loads of opportunities to make this adventure whatever you want it to be via the plentiful freedom afforded to you.
11:08On the other hand, not enough has been done to make this thing significantly less buggy than it notoriously was back in the day,
11:15and some design choices, like the enemy scaling and procedural oblivion levels that become dull fast, have not been improved,
11:23which feels like a squandered opportunity.
11:25Even so, I never expected to so thoroughly enjoy replaying this uniquely goofy RPG,
11:31and I am so, so glad I took this walk down memory lane, now with the option to sprint down it.
11:39Executive Reviews Editor Tom Marks here with Travis Northup.
11:42Travis, for people who don't know, you've surely seen Travis around on IGN.
11:46He is IGN's most prolific reviewer, actually. Nobody reviews more games for IGN than Travis.
11:52If you haven't seen his reviews, he has reviewed in the RPG space Avowed, our Fallout 76 re-review in 2024, I believe it was,
12:00Asgard's Wrath in VR, if you've played that one, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but you're also just sort of a jack-of-all-trades.
12:07You touch on a lot of different genres, you also review the Destiny stuff for us, and ARPGs like Diablo, you're everywhere, you're everywhere.
12:14But, specifically, I was really happy that you were able to review Oblivion Remastered for us,
12:21because you are sort of in a self-described Oblivion sicko.
12:25When I asked you to review this, you said,
12:27Yeah, I could beat the entire campaign in three hours, in an afternoon, because you've got the whole thing memorized.
12:32Can you just tell me about, like, your history with this game specifically?
12:36Yeah, yeah. As you put it, Oblivion sicko pretty much sums it up.
12:40Basically, the first game I ever truly became obsessed with was The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind.
12:46I actually, I was in middle school when that game was out on the original Xbox, and I used to carry the map in my backpack to school,
12:54and I would plan what I was gonna do the next day, you know, that evening, after school.
12:59Like, I would take out the map at lunch, because I had no friends.
13:02So that is what we're dealing with in terms of the level of unhinged kind of obsession with Elder Scrolls.
13:08So, Oblivion came out when I was a sophomore in high school, and I spent, like, every minute of my spare time playing that game, man.
13:14I remember the map. I know where all the Daedric shrines are by heart.
13:18Like, I don't have to look stuff up. I just know this game like the back of my hand.
13:22And so, I was very happy to be playing this game again.
13:25Well, so here's the question, then. You know this game really well.
13:28Does that make the process of reviewing a remaster harder or easier for you?
13:34Because I imagine it speeds things up, but when you're trying to now look at this new re-release with, you know, somewhat clear eyes,
13:43and thinking about it from the perspective of people who might be coming in completely fresh, like, how do you account for that?
13:50For me, it makes it easier, because the thing about me playing a lot of Oblivion means that I'm not particularly blind to its faults.
13:57If anything, I'm, like, extremely acutely aware of them.
14:01And so, you know, I had things fresh in my mind, like the fact that Oblivion never had a sprint button.
14:06Like, that was something that I think a lot of people forgot.
14:09Like, I was talking to Mitchell Saltzman, and he was like, wait, did it really not have sprint in the original?
14:13I'm like, yeah, dude, it did not, you know?
14:15So, like, being aware of the stuff that it did poorly, and then knowing how the remaster improved on that,
14:20and the areas that it very explicitly did not improve on, like the Oblivion gates all being, like, procedurally generated kind of messes of levels, that sort of stuff.
14:30So, for me, it was more of an asset, but I'm also not somebody who is very forgiving to games, even ones that I love about their shortcomings.
14:41In the pantheon of RPGs, or maybe we'll focus in on sort of this style of RPG, you know, first-person action RPG, like, what do you like in that style specifically?
14:52What appeals to you about it? And then also just sort of generally, like, what do you go to, what do you gravitate towards in an RPG?
14:58Generally speaking, I tend to like games that offer more freedom, even if that means the game is a little jankier, which is why I love Morrowind so much, right?
15:08That is a perfect example of a game that really did not understand how much freedom they were offering the player, and how that was a really bad idea, which is why that game is so niche, right?
15:20But the things you can do in that game are absolutely insane. You can enchant your shoes to make it so that you can jump across the entire map.
15:27You can increase your acrobatics by like a thousand levels and then jump across the map. Of course, you'll then die when you hit the ground from fall damage.
15:33But like, yeah, you can do it. Go for it, right? Have fun. I tend to really like games like that, where you can just kind of go hog wild, they create kind of a parameter for you to exist within, and then you can kind of do your own thing.
15:45Alright, let's shift a little bit back to the remaster remake question and talk about kind of IGN's philosophy around that in general and how you approach it.
15:53Because there's always this eternal question when we go up to a remaster or a remake for a review of, are you reviewing the game that it was, or are you reviewing the improvements and the changes that have been made to that game?
16:07And IGN specifically, like, we try to take it a little bit case by case and also, you know, account for the fact that somebody's going to be returning to this game and know everything like you did, but also this is going to be a lot of people's first times with it.
16:21And you have to factor that in. But I want to hear from you and sort of how you approach that philosophy of reviewing something that has existed, but obviously has a lot of changes alongside that.
16:35I think the answer is both. Obviously, the review and the score is about the game as it stands. It has nothing to do with, like, how it compares to the original. It's just, is the game good or not? Is it worth my time or not?
16:46But I think the context matters, right? What are the specific areas that it improved on versus the original? Why should I think about going back to this if I've already played it or if I haven't played it, is it worth giving this game a try finally?
16:58And so I think the answer is kind of both. But if you have to, if you really pushed me to say one or the other, I would say it's its own review. And that's kind of how I position it. But a lot of what I write about in my review is kind of comparative because that context, I think, matters.
17:16You're saying basically it's its own review. You're treating it as your own thing, but you're not also reviewing it in a vacuum, right?
17:23Correct. Yeah. Like any other game, right? Like if a sequel to a game comes out, you're going to be talking about the other game that maybe they played or maybe they didn't. That doesn't impact the score or your critical assessment of that game.
17:36But it does matter that they improved certain things or didn't improve other things or that it does this thing worse than a competing game that just came out last week, etc. So that comparison can be helpful when you're evaluating a game. But it's not the end all be all of like whether or not it gets to eight or nine or whatever.
17:56Yeah, there's a dance to that for sure where you comparison is very helpful. It's very good shorthand for people who are familiar with a genre or a series. But also there's that temptation to overcompare that we we really do actively try to avoid. It's something I take an eye to in the edit process for sure.
18:12I'm guilty of that, by the way.
18:13I think we all are. I think we all are. Travis, it was lovely talking with you, digging into your Oblivion Remastered review a little bit more. Thank you so much for that.
18:22If you're looking for some other reviews, other reviews from Travis, his last review was Mandragora Whispers of the Witch Tree for a different style of RPG if you want a 2D side-scrolling one.
18:30Another big RPG recently, Claire Obscura Expedition 33, has been blowing up everywhere, so you can check out that review.
18:36And for everything else, stick with IGN.