The Oblivion Remaster Is Releasing Today. This Is Not A Drill.

[Lidgar]

My son started playing this morning, and it looks like a HUGE upgrade. Haven't played it myself yet (will tonight), but I was expecting just a HD upgrade, not a total overhaul, including upgrading the UI.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well we got the former at least from ESO doing his playthrough:

You don't have to do the "efficient leveling" crap anymore. Now you have a set amount of points (called virtues) on each level up that you can simply distribute among three stats each time. Much cleaner system.

EDIT: And also ALL skills contribute to your leveling up, like Skyrim, though Major and Minor skills are still around. An Acrobatics gain got him to his first level-up threshold despite Acrobatics not being a Major skill for his build. Which also puts an end to those silly builds where you picked as Major skills things you never use, while pumping your Minor skills to dominate everything with you and the world staying at level 1 all the way through.

Yeah - I got 12 "Virtues" at L2, and was able to spend up to 5 per stat on three stats. All stats had a 1:1 virtue cost except Luck, which cost 4 virtues to increase.

Presumably as per the original, Major/Minor skills and Specialization just make skills easier to level.

So far I'm so used to Skyrim, not having played Oblivion probably since before that came out that I was quite confused by some stuff, like that spells are a separate key not, a thing you assign to a hand!

The UI upgrades are notably fantastic - the UI is night and day better than anything Bethesda have done before, very much including Starfield. The graphics are obviously a huge upgrade too, running in UE5, but I did quickly come to note how Oblivion is just built on a significantly smaller scale to Skyrim, on like, every level, from how far distances are between places, to how large the interiors of buildings are.

With the character creator it seems to be kind of hard to create a character who doesn't look like a lunatic, let alone who looks good, which I think certainly fits with the original! I imagine mods may be able to fix that (assuming they can mess with UE5).

My only real complaint so far is that when you're facing towards a quest objective or town on your compass, it tells you exactly how many footsteps to get there, and I'd kind of like to turn that off, but it doesn't seem to be an option!

 

[roger semerad]

Yeah they haven't put out the details, but they have revamped the levelling so that it is, in their words "in between Skyrim and Oblivion" in terms of how it works.

I have no idea exactly what means, of course. I've been scouring for details but none yet. If I do manage to find out how the levelling and level scaling actually work I'll post again.

They've done other stuff like keep the original audio whilst adding in a bunch more voice-actors for minor or generic characters so it's less of literally the same five people over and over.

Download is at 64% as we speak.

(As a general bit of advice, if GamePass keeps failing to download it, restart your PC - I know the most basic-ass trick in the book, but it worked for me!)

I'm looking forward to your feedback. It will take a while, but also tell us what the high level experience is like. I felt that high level enemies were absurdly tanky in the original. The only efficient way to take them out was to cast weakness to magic-weakness to element-damage spell, in that order. Any other approach just took forever and was mind numbing. No difficulty, just tedium.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I played a bit more, and kind of fascinating because Oblivion feels like a kind of low-budget, poorly balanced, but weirdly complete/in-depth game, gameplay-wise. Like, whilst the UI is great and the game plays way smoother than it used to, there's like no polish or modernity with, for example, the financial/gear progression or with combat. Everything is pretty sparse/spartan compared to Skyrim, too. The new engine looks great, but there's a distinct lack of clutter and complexity in the dungeons and shops and most buildings. It's not bad but's definitely different.

Also, the colour-grading is just wrong - people pointed this out even in the leak, but it's far "browner" and "darker" in the open world (rather than the dungeons) than the weirdly bright/light/green original Oblivion was. A fairly easy fix with ReShade if you're willing to use that of course (already multiple presets up for it)!

Bethesda's official stance is that mods don't work with/aren't supported for the remaster, but, in actual fact, they do, so long as they don't modify any visual elements (and modders are working on that), because it really is just a slightly modernized old Oblivion under the hood.

I'm looking forward to your feedback. It will take a while, but also tell us what the high level experience is like. I felt that high level enemies were absurdly tanky in the original. The only efficient way to take them out was to cast weakness to magic-weakness to element-damage spell, in that order. Any other approach just took forever and was mind numbing. No difficulty, just tedium.

Yeah my guess is that's going to be just as painful as before, based on the early game. Apparently I was so traumatized by one specific hard-to-kill archer in the first set of ruins you go into in Oblivion that I remembered him across like 15+ years, and he was still absolutely just as obnoxious of a damage sponge as I remembered!

Also wow it's way harder to level spells than I remember! I probably originally did something like speed-ran around the map until I could get into the Mage's Guild proper and design spells. I guess I'll probably do that again!

I have one other "modernization complaint" to add to the thing telling you the exact distances - you can immediately fast travel to any city on the map, and it kind of seems like you can fast travel to places you haven't visited! I've resisted the urge to use this so far, but it seems like new players who don't even know it didn't work this way (and it didn't, right? Or am I forgetting?) will probably have a pretty different experience because of this.

 

[Gladius Legis]

I have one other "modernization complaint" to add to the thing telling you the exact distances - you can immediately fast travel to any city on the map, and it kind of seems like you can fast travel to places you haven't visited!

At least for cities you could do this in the OG Oblivion too, as I recall.

Skyrim made it so you had to visit the cities first. (Which wasn't hard, just take a few carriage rides, almost made it a meaningless middle man they introduced.)

 

[Ryujin]

 

[Ruin Explorer]

View attachment 403294

Shriek laughed at this, incredible. Denethor memes always rock. I think I might find LotR memes a bit funnier than most people!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So I have already started modding Oblivion Remastered. So far I have a mod that caps the level scaling, and a mod that makes the achievements still work when you have mods. I don't know if they work, but we shall see soon!

Level scaling mod: Balanced NPC Level Cap - Remastered

Achievements mod: Universal Achievement Unblocker

Maybe will add a less/no item reward scaling (of a balanced kind) mod at some point.

@Gladius Legis - So we now know re: level scaling, it's the same as original Oblivion except the HP calculation is a little less extreme (but still pretty sponge-y), i.e. eventually you get bandits in full glass and so on. So the above mod fixes that, because honestly I had that mod in 2005 too and it's part of what made Oblivion playable and fun!

It is a real pity Bethesda themselves didn't put something similar in.

 

[Gladius Legis]

@Gladius Legis - So we now know re: level scaling, it's the same as original Oblivion except the HP calculation is a little less extreme (but still pretty sponge-y), i.e. eventually you get bandits in full glass and so on. So the above mod fixes that, because honestly I had that mod in 2005 too and it's part of what made Oblivion playable and fun!

It is a real pity Bethesda themselves didn't put something similar in.

Yeah, I saw as much on the Skyblivion subreddit. Bit of a shame there, though at least they fixed the player-side leveling which IMO was the more important part of that equation to fix.

 

[Reynard]

So I have already started modding Oblivion Remastered. So far I have a mod that caps the level scaling, and a mod that makes the achievements still work when you have mods. I don't know if they work, but we shall see soon!

Level scaling mod: Balanced NPC Level Cap - Remastered

Achievements mod: Universal Achievement Unblocker

Maybe will add a less/no item reward scaling (of a balanced kind) mod at some point.

@Gladius Legis - So we now know re: level scaling, it's the same as original Oblivion except the HP calculation is a little less extreme (but still pretty sponge-y), i.e. eventually you get bandits in full glass and so on. So the above mod fixes that, because honestly I had that mod in 2005 too and it's part of what made Oblivion playable and fun!

It is a real pity Bethesda themselves didn't put something similar in.

I'm assuming that graphics mods won't work but systems one should, since they layered Unreal on top, right?