I haven't finished the main campaign of this remaster yet, but having played the classic Oblivion before, and put 14 hours into this remaster, I feel like I've got a good enough handle on things to offer a fair review.
[h1]Intro[/h1]
Oblivion is the predecessor to Skyrim and takes place in Cyrodiil. Where Skyrim has a very cold and gray vibe, Oblivion is much more colorful and fantastical. You start the game as a prisoner, like Morrowind before and Skyrim after, and end up going on a quest to save the world from a Daedric invasion that takes place after the Emperor is murdered, which allows the dragon fires to go out, weakening the barriers between Nirn and Oblivion.
Oblivion itself is a great game with an interesting story, interesting characters, lots of side quests and content, and originally coming off Morrowind myself, it was great that it was actually fully voiced, albeit with a limited number of voice actors at the time. Even today I think the classic version's environments have aged pretty well for the most part. The "Shivering Isles" DLC is one of my favorite pieces of add-on content for any game ever.
[h1]The Good[/h1]
This game is a re-”master" where they've changed quite a lot without rebuilding the game entirely. They fixed lots of bugs, layered Unreal Engine 5 on top of the game's original engine to handle the upgraded visuals and lighting, overhauled the combat to make it generally more engaging and less stiff feeling, added new spells and some new quests and more. The user interface has been overhauled and the PC version has native controller support (THANK YOU!) which is handy for those of us on Steam Deck or who otherwise do couch gaming on PC and don’t want to manually make our own Steam input profile. They've even added more sound effects, new and corrected voice lines, etc. One big feature I’ve found useful a couple of times is the new in-game guide. If you have a question, such as how lock picking works, or need a reminder on how some system in the game works, there’s a guide accessible in the in-game menu complete with written explanations and video demonstrations. This is an amazing addition to a game that leans a little harder into the RPG elements and systems than Skyrim does.
While I have noticed and appreciate all the other changes, the biggest upgrade I think is the visuals. I was shook by how much better this game looks with the UE5 upgrade. The game is still running on its Creation Engine under the hood, but playing at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing disabled on my desktop, the game looks absolutely stellar and holds 60 fps ([i]I capped it at 60, I'll get to that later[/i]). Shadows and lighting look much more natural and impressive. Faces were one of the original game's biggest weaknesses. They were far inferior to what appeared in later games. It was blatantly obvious that bodies were kinda generic and just had customized heads stuck on top of them. On the occasion you'd see a shirtless character they often didn't even bother to match the skin tone between the torso and head, making it seem as if the developers used the player-facing character creator to generate many of the characters in the game. The faces in general just looked “bad”. That is no longer the case. Everything I’ve seen so far, from the character creator to environments looks great.
And installed to an M.2 SSD, I’ve encountered none of the stuttering issues on my desktop I heard others complaining about when the game launched.
The game even looks and runs fine on Steam Deck, as long as you keep your expectations in check. If you’re gonna play this on Deck, play it in handheld mode. By default the Deck preset has the game capped at 30fps, “Low” preset with XESS upscaling. This looks fine on my Deck OLED while handheld, but it would probably look pretty crunchy docked to a TV.
[h1]The Bad[/h1]
The UE5 implementation, while gorgeous most of the time, isn’t perfect. Enabling ray tracing on my GPU (9060XT 16 GB) drags the framerate down to the mid 40s (RT low) or 20s (RT ultra) when you’re out in the open world, which means for me the best experience is a combination of the screen space reflections, which can be enabled and disabled on their own, and the software RT which seems to just use pre-calculated rays to generate approximate reflections. I have a feeling this is how most people are going to experience the game. However high or low you put your settings, you’re probably gonna end up using the screen space reflections unless you’re on a high end system, and the screen space reflections can look awful. There are huge dithered looking borders around where screen space reflections begin and end. Panning your camera across the lake around the Imperial city you can literally watch the SSR fade in and out quite some distance away from the edge of your screen. Swimming with a shield in your hand produces this awful looking blurry warp around the shield as it moves thru the water. And I have all upscaling and frame-gen disabled, this is just what SSR looks like at native 1080p 60fps in this iteration of UE5. You can turn off the SSR and just use the “software RT” option, but they can be equally distracting. The “software RT” seems like it uses pre-calculated rays that don’t account for what you’re actually seeing. So for example, with software RT only and no SSR, if it’s morning, but foggy with the sun obscured, you might see a building that looks dark and gray in the fog, but which has a reflection in the water of a clear day where it’s fully lit by the morning sun.
I have also noticed some ghosting on rare occasions, even though I’m holding 60fps on a nice LG television. I’ve seen a similar effect in other UE5 titles, though I’m not sure what causes it.
There has also been at least some amount of reworking of the world’s geometry, but without proper testing. Fairly early into the game I tried to enter the Wawnet Inn in the village of Weye, which is right outside the gate of the Imperial City, which means it’s one of the first settlements you’re likely to encounter. There’s a lantern just inside the door of the inn that is now its own piece of geometry that you can get stuck on. If your agility is high enough you can spam the jump button to unstick yourself, but my first time there I couldn’t so I just had to turn around and leave. I was able to come back later and jump free, but it just feels like this is something they should have spotted. Out of curiosity I installed the GOTY classic version and went to that same inn, and the entrance feels wider, and the lantern is not a separate piece of geometry you can be wedged against. So this change in the game’s interior was intentional, but nobody bothered to test it.
The game still uses its Creation Engine under the hood for physics and such, but I haven’t been able to find any mention of updates made to it for this remaster. This “might” cause issues for some people. Many of these older Creation/Havok based games can start to break down if the frame-rate goes above 60fps, and the higher it goes, the worse it can get. When I first started my play-thru this game was hitting 120+ fps on my desktop before I started turning up settings. If they’ve patched the engine for this remaster, then this may be a non-issue, but I haven’t found any specific mention of them doing so, so I would recommend manually capping the game at 60fps until told otherwise by Bethesda. There is a toggle in the game settings to set this if your OS doesn’t support it.
[h1]Summary[/h1]
There’s a whole lot more good here than bad. They’ve added new content, fixed bugs, reworked several systems, given it a gorgeous visual facelift, added an in-game guide, touched up the voices, etc. The game looks and feels better than ever. This is, in my opinion, the best way to enjoy “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion”.
You can see my screenshots of the game at: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gerowen
