Hey, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered is out now! I’m cautiously optimistic as I wait for the download to finish…

That download is going to take a while. The reveal video would not shut up about the sharpened Unreal Engine graphics with their dynamic shadows and millions of polygons, which I guess explains why a game that originally fit on a physical disc is now going to consume somewhere around 120 GB. Well, that and the expanded, less-recycled voice acting…

Well, I’ve had practice being patient with Scrollslikes, like giving Tainted Grail time to finish and mentally shrugging every time “Elder Scrolls 6” gets mentioned in gaming news. I can wait for a download, even if it does take umpteen hours.

 

The thing I’m most optimistic about at the moment is the mention of gameplay changes, especially to leveling. I played Oblivion back in the day but never finished it; I’ve failed to finish a lot of these sprawling RPGs, but with this one in particular, I bounced off its leveling system pretty hard.¹

The way it worked was you’d gain a character level (and its benefits) when you gained enough levels in your class skills, and then the world would level up with you to keep things challenging. Sounds good so far, right? Well, depending on which class skills you chose, you might get stronger either a bit faster or a lot slower than the world did.

…or both, one after the other. On one playthrough, an early game exploit² let me get Sneak up to 100 while the world and I stayed at low level. But I wasn’t into the build-guide style of gameplay, taking careful notes and making sure not to use my favorite skills too much, so the world caught up to me pretty quickly and then passed me by. My strongest memories of Oblivion are of being able to turn invisible to NPCs at will and then having to climb up a rock to avoid getting mulched by some random encounter I had no chance against in a stand-up fight…

Skyrim, possibly because it dumped the whole “choose your class skills” part of the system, has a lot less of that bullshit, which is one of the reasons I like it the best of the Elder Scrolls games I’ve played. So when I heard that Oblivion Remastered had some unspecified mix of Oblivion’s and Skyrim’s leveling, my ears perked up. I’ll have to see it in action, of course, but it sounds like it’s likely to be an improvement.

 

The thing I’m least optimistic about, though, is the Deluxe upgrade, in which they’re selling horse armor again.

But there’s a quest to go along with the horse armor! … wait, there was a quest for it last time, and not much of one.

But there are a couple of armor and weapon sets! …whee. Give the modders a few days.

But there’s a digital artbook! …whee. I like concept art well enough, but I get more than enough of it elsewhere. Hell, give me a few minutes and I can probably find some Bethesda artists’ portfolios on Artstation or DeviantArt.

But there’s a soundtrack app! …we’ve heard that one before. Except this time it makes even less sense, because Oblivion’s soundtrack is already available through Steam, among other places.

If you tilt your head and squint hard enough, the Deluxe upgrade might look like a bargain: it’s the same price as the soundtrack at the moment, so you could call the horse armor and digital artbook “free” if you consider them to be of noticeable value, and if you trust the “soundtrack app” not to be an utter clusterfuck…

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1. I don’t remember, after this many years, whether I hated Oblivion’s leveling more or less than Morrowind’s, but I didn’t even come close to finishing either game.

2. Sneak advances when you use it near potential hostiles that haven’t spotted you yet. Vilverin, the dungeon that’s right in front of you as you exit the tutorial area, has a room with some skeletons locked in alcoves. You can probably guess how well those two things go together. The “autowalk” control makes this even easier, because you can start crouch-autowalking into a corner of the room and then go get lunch or something…