I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.
If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.
Oblivion was the first game I ever put 100+ hours into, but every time I’ve tried to get back into it over the years, it was just too clunky and awkward. Bethesda games always age poorly.
But this remaster is fucking incredible and I very irresponsibly wasted an entire day yesterday playing it. They fixed and polished it so it feels like a modern game again. The only issue I had was poor performance in a lot of areas, like frequent drops down to 40 fps on my powerful PC. I’m hoping a patch will fix that soon.
Admittedly, my opinion is heavily clouded by nostalgia, so temper your expectations in case my comment actually convinces you to buy it. It’s a great game, but it’s smaller and somewhat clunkier than Skyrim.
Can’t play the game. Just like Nightengale before it, it seems like Intel Arc cards still have issues supporting DX12 on Linux.
Game won’t launch because it complains DX12 is unsupported.
That’s unfortunate. Hopefully a driver update comes around soon
Likewise, but I seem to be having major issues with Unreal Engine games in general. UE5 games tend to complain about lack of DX12, and UE4 games run very poorly.
Meanwhile I’m getting pretty good performance on Cyberpunk 2077 with nearly all the settings maxed out.
I’m waiting for skyblivion instead
If you have Game pass give it a go, it kinda plays like a weird hybrid of Skyrim and Oblivion
It plays well on the steam deck day 1 as well, if that matters to anyone here. I played the first 2 hours on my deck from work with no issues.
Shaders took like 10 minutes but the rest of the load times were all fine.
How much fps are you getting? And what are your other settings?
I was getting a stable 30fps on mid settings. Having played at home at much higher resolution, I see you lose a lot, but its still very playable.
I loaded it up on my Deck last night for a few minutes using the default settings (low preset) and was getting what seemed like a stable 30 fps running around in Skingrad. Other people have reported sub-20 FPS when in the open world on the Deck, so it’s probably not the best choice unless they patch it
What exactly has been changed besides the graphics? Sounds like they tweaked the melee combat to more resemble Skyrims.
Imo Oblivions two biggest problems were level scaling and how barren the world was between cities and dungeons.
Edit: I got it after watching more of the gameplay. It still feels like Oblivion, but there’s a lot of little tweaks that improve the experience. Combat and movement has more weight to it, so while the systems all effectively function the same it feels a lot less floaty then the original game. There’s a lot of small tweaks and QOL improvements, like the UI is reminiscent of the original but much more fluid. Cant comment on if they fixed level-scaling or not, as I’m only at level 3.
Make no mistake, this is 100% Oblivion. Its just a lot prettier and with a lot of small improvements. So far it seems like a rare modern Bethesda W.
You can sprint now, so, there’s that.
They changed leveling, locomotion, added new voice lines to make all the races sound more unique, added more feedback to combat (hit animations, blood effects, sparks, and sounds; the actual combat mechanics look entirely unchanged)… And that’s just what they point out in the trailer.
Gender no longer affects your stats either, they added in 2 origins that do that now
Gender had an effect on stats in the original?
Yep, was the case in all TES games before Oblivion as well, typically more strength in starting male characters but more intelligence in female characters varying depending on the character’s race. Only went away in Skyrim as they’d simplified the stats so much that starting stats were more uniform.
All I remember off-hand for what stats are affected in Skyrim is that Khajit start with 5 more points in Hand-to-Hand due to their claws 🤣
I haven’t see how the level scaling works, but I’m assuming it works exactly like OG Oblivion for two reasons. First is that the underlying game logic is OG Oblivion and second, whether you liked it not, the level scaling was very much in the DNA of Oblivion so it kinda has to be there to feel like Oblivion. That said, the new leveling system looks like it might make the level scaling less horrid.
And so far from what I watched others play, the world is still as barren and boring as OG Oblivion. Personally I’m going wait for Skyblivion because the barren world was the main reason I didn’t enjoy Oblivion.
Mods of the era largely fixed the scaling and the modern day best practices largely are based on that. Mortismal did a good video on Oblivion last year-ish where they talked about it but it mostly boils down to:
Just stop leveling in (if memory serves) the mid-late 20s. That more or less is what you will get with 60-70% of your levels coming from combat skills and is around where your DPS levels out. The mods of the time basically just tweak the leveled lists to plateau out similarly.
There was other more stylistic choices (stopping bandits from getting full daedric and glass gear) but that prevented the very common problem of “I didn’t optimize my build and now I can’t clear oblivion gates”
Stoked to try this game, but I’m waiting a few months for a patch to the graphics issues.
… now do it with Morrowind. I dare you. I double dare you!
Morrowind would be a whole different beast to remaster. Not saying I wouldn’t enjoy some better graphics and tweaked systems, but it would be a hard sell to most gamers if they only did that.
-no voice acting -outdated gameplay systems -Game map that wasn’t designed with unlimited draw distance, fast travel, or even unlimited running in mind.
Honestly at this point it would be better served by a full remake.
Modern mods fix almost all of those issues.
The game can easily be ‘remastered’.Yes, that’s why you’d make it a remaster; to fix all of those things.
Morrowind has plenty of fast travel. In fact, it has better fast-travel than later Elder Scrolls games because it’s actually integrated into the gameplay.
Sky walking was so much fun. Not always faster, but fun
It was also neat that the game was designed for it (Telvanni towers, secrets in high places, etc.).
Can we just have 6 instead?
No. Oblivion remastered. Then Skyrim Special Oblivion Remastered Anniversary Edition. Then Starfield Remastered.
Then Oblivion Remastered 2 since the current one will be outdated by that time.
There is the Skywind project, but I’m not sure if any progress has been made in the last year
Yeah you’re better off waiting for Skyblivion. I don’t think skywind is ever going to get completed at this point. It’s simply taking too long - looked it up and it’s been almost 13 years.
Looks amazing, definitely gonna pick this up.
Edited to add further thoughts
Having a deluxe edition of a remaster feels bad, though I don’t completely begrudge them. It was still a lot of work, time, and effort to do this.
I kinda love releases like this with no build up. I know that this was leaked but I mean compared to six years of announcement to release, I much prefer this kind of shadow drop.
How much is the horse armor?
$10. I’m not joking. It’s a part of the deluxe edition.
Yes and no. All original dlc is included in the base game, including the infamous horse armour.
The Deluxe Edition adds art book, OST, and some new weapon, armours, and yes horse armours not in the original game.
Included. The Deluxe edition adds some new gear, but all the old content (including the old DLC) is available in the base game.
Included in the game. Deluxe edition adds new horse armours (among a few other things).
A deluxe edition does seem a little lame for a remaster. But at the same time the deluxe edition is still cheaper than Starfield and I’d much rather play this.
If this were a Nintendo game it’d be $80 for the base and $90 for Deluxe.
The Deluxe Edition also offers you nothing that you really need. Stuff like that never bothers me. Especially in a game like oblivion where there’s no online component. The people who buy the extra stuff either want to support the game more or they just really want that shit. More power to them
I was never a huge fan of the base game (after Morrowind, the far more generic fantasy setting was underwhelming and I absolutely hated the Oblivion parts), but I loved the Shivering Isles expansion. Tempted to get it for that alone. The fugly character models needed to be redone BADLY, too.
The fugly character models needed to be redone BADLY, too.
I kinda wonder what the NPCs in that one village part of a quest that mimics Shadow Over Innsmouth look like in the remake… They’re supposed to be fugly 🤣
Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).
The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.
Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind.
Same. It’s easily my favorite Elder Scrolls expansion, period.
mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest
I never knew that. Shame the devs for this didn’t go for it, but I suppose fans would be up in arms about it.
It’s you! The hero of kvatch!
The Oblivion score is so good.
It always reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme
Jeremy Soule did amazing work. Unfortunately it turned out he was a terrible person and he was blacklisted from the industry after multiple allegations were made against him during the #MeToo movement.
Oh that sucks
Yeah that was really disappointing
my steam download speed is so dead right now. rip their servers
Maybe pause and start the download again, or try a different server? I just downloaded it at nearly full gigabit speeds.
I live in Northern Australia in the capital of the Territory and have fiber to my premises, best o can get is 20mbs download.
I hate the Australian government for what they did rolling out our National Broadband Network
Bloody Malcolm Turnbull, classic Libs prioritising money over the public good
I’m definitely trying the unreal engine VR injector the second the game is done downloading to see if that works!
Would love to hear results if you do try it out!
I’ve seen people get pretty good results but i don’t think i had the right settings so i wasn’t able to make it run. I have a 3090 wich is pretty much the minimum for that XD i also tried to run the game in 8K just to see how it would look with no luck. I ended up playing at 4K medium settings for now. I’ll definitely try again tomorrow with someone’s UEVR injector profile.
Did they change anything meaningful, like removing that aweful level scaling?
They did, but to what end we might find out just a few hours from now. Seems like minigame stay the same, but the combat is revamped
Edit: ohh wait i don’t think they mentioned scaling, but just the levelling is changed.
All of the games have scaling of some kind (at least Morrowind and Skyrim do). Just as long as they make suboptimal builds viable rather than punishing, that’s all I need.
It looks great, and it’s AVAILABLE TODAY! The rumors were (unsurprisingly) right on the money, it was a shadowdrop.
Edit: Official 20 minute showcase is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk5cymSWmqo
I’m so happy to have been wrong about the shadow drop! Now I just need to get through the rest of the day at work lol
You and me both, but at least I’ll see first impressions before I get back home.
