Lately, I've been thinking about The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion a lot. A month-long obsession with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – in my eyes the first true spiritual successor to Oblivion – will do that to you, but I'm also fresh off another adventure in the Imperial capital. With rumors of an Unreal Engine 5 Oblivion remake at an all-time high, there's little space for anything but Cyrodiil in this RPG-addled brain.
I can't speak to the validity of these leaks, which claim we'll see an Oblivion remake as soon as April. But I do have thoughts (regrettably) on what the re-release could mean for Bethesda's 2006 gem. There's an opportunity to rope in the generations who may have missed Skyrim's predecessor – and good reason to do so, as Oblivion remains the richer choice for older-school RPG sickos – but it also runs the risk of buffing out the quirks and oddities that gives Cyrodiil its charm.
Sleeping rather soundly
Rose-tinted glasses put to one side: Oblivion wasn't perfect. It would be difficult to play it for the first time in 2025, especially if you're coming in off the back of Skyrim. It's now awkward (at best) to run on PC, combat has all the weight of kicking a deflated football, levelling up is bizarrely complicated, and most dungeons are identical.
- "Instant gratification in gaming has become a problem" – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says the RPG is meant to feel like a spiritual successor to Oblivion and Morrowind
- Elder Scrolls co-creator is "super-grateful" for fan remakes, but says their existence is bittersweet: Daggerfall might have been "flaky and weird," but "no one had to recreate Casablanca"
More subjectively, it looks weird. I wouldn't change Oblivion's visuals if Bethesda promised to hand-deliver The Elder Scrolls 6 to my door tomorrow – but that's a bias shaped by the memory and nostalgia of playing when its graphics were cutting-edge. To newcomers, my charming potato people are just potato people. It's the same reason I have no plans to play Metal Gear Solid 2 until Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater arrives – I missed it the first time around, and now can't get past the clunkiness that's second-nature to those who didn't. If a glossy Unreal Engine 5 overhaul is the difference between someone skipping over Oblivion and getting to enjoy it for the first time, that alone justifies a remake.
Likewise, there are a few systems that even the most die-hard fan can't be too precious about. Cyrodiil's repetitive dungeon templates don't add to the game's personality, nor does level-scaling that can juice up enemies beyond your means for the crime of passively levelling Acrobatics. If Oblivion wants to be on par with modern RPGs, its remake needs to have the confidence to change these areas rather than keep them trapped in mid-noughties amber.
That said, there's a real risk of going too far. When Bethesda followed up Oblivion with Skyrim, it made a conscious effort to streamline and simplify certain elements in order to chase a more mainstream audience. It worked – even now, few RPGs can measure against the mass appeal of Skyrim – but came at the cost of depth. Some changes, like platelegs and platebodies being merged into single-entity armor sets, didn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things. But not being able to make your own spells, or swapping Oblivion's wonderful lockpicking minigame for Fallout's? That stung.
Improvement isn't objective. Something feeling dated doesn't automatically invalidate the conscious design choice that brought it to life in the first place. It would be all-too easy to swap out Oblivion's quirky Speechcraft wheel for regular ol' skill checks, but you would lose a chunk of its soul that frankly doesn't feel negotiable. Take away the persuasion pizza, or the unsettling and vaguely reptilian way NPCs stare as you play roulette with their friendship, and you take away a strange yet endearing bit of personality. Admittedly, this could all be the bias seeping – but Oblivion is strange, it is weird, and I can't imagine it existing without that.
An Oblivion remake shouldn't be The Elder Scrolls' own Ship of Theseus, but neither should it be a fresh coat of paint and nothing else. Assuming the project is real (remember – we've not actually heard anything official), I'd like to think Bethesda will be just as precious about Oblivion's fey weirdness. An instinctive part of me will always be prickly at the thought of meddling with one of the best RPGs to ever do it, but that comes from a place of love – and if a remake can inspire that same passion in others, then blessings of Mystara upon ye developers.
The Elder Scrolls fans are celebrating "the unintentional comedy of Oblivion"
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