Taking a break from the Japanese-created, turn-based or strategy RPGs for a week it’s time to head west and look at the game that convinced me to buy an XBOX 360 back in the day as well as its visual remaster that I enjoyed dipping into last summer. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a first-person (at least for me it is, third-person is available!) free-roaming RPG that encourages you to go exploring rather than strictly following the main quest, and as with most Bethesda RPGs, that exploration is the heart and the joy of the game. Let’s take a look!
Background:
A nice simple shot of a quiet town to start us off… (XBOX 360)
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released for the XBOX 360 and PC on March 20th 2006 in the US and 24th 2006 in the UK/Europe, with a notoriously shaky PS3 port released March 20th 2007 in the US and April 27th 2007 in the UK/Europe. If they were released at the same time I probably would’ve continued the PS1-PS2 streak and picked the PS3 at my Seventh Gen console of choice, but once my friend showed me freely walking around in this game and the graphics etc I knew I had to play it as soon as possible, so I got a 360 a month or two later (after some serious saving / cashing in some favours).
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on the other hand was released for PS5, XBOX Series and PC on April 22nd 2025, with a Switch 2 port released the following year. It lives up to its “Remaster” tagline as the game feels and often sounds like the original, right down to some classic glitches, but has been given an Unreal Engine 5 makeover, which mostly works wonders, but not all the time which I’ll get into as the review goes on…
Gameplay:
Okay, now the quiet town bit is done, here’s some combat in the Arena! (PS5)
Oblivion has a few quirks but at its core it has a lot of classic RPG systems you know the love. You create a character to start with, which can be either sex and one of 10 races/nationalities each with their own advantages and disadvantages (like higher natural starting stats in areas, or permanent resistance to poison, ability to breathe underwater, that sort of thing) and then you have to pick seven skills out of twenty-one to specialise in that become “Major Skills”, with the rest being “Minor” and vary between things that help with specific weapon and magic types, charisma, crafting, sneaking, that kind of stuff just broken down into three categories of “Combat”, “Magic” and “Stealth”. After you’ve done that you’ll see your character’s attributes, which are basically more simplified set of bars relating to amount of health, amount of stamina, amount of magic, that sort of thing. Every time you use a Skill it can level up, so infamously by running around and jumping a lot your athletics will go up, or by walking around crouched you gain sneak all the time, otherwise you get heavy weapons skill by killing with heavy weapons, heavy armour skill by being hit while wearing heavy armour, Armourer skill by using repair hammers to repair your own equipment, and so on. Once you’ve gain 10 level ups in Skills you then level up yourself, which allows you to put more points into your Attributes. It’s a weird way to do it, but it works… for the most part. The issue is that the enemies in the world level up with you or more powerful enemies will begin appearing instead of the earlier ones, but if you’ve accidentally levelled up a bunch because you’ve walked around a lot or really got into the potion making then you could find yourself in pretty serious trouble when it comes to combat!
So with all that being said it’s definitely a game you can replay with a different skillset and have a different experience, playing as a swordsman is different from playing as a mage who specialises in summoning creatures to fight instead of directly casting spells, though one difference between this and its more famous sequel that I’d forgotten about was that you can duel wield a sword in one hand and a spell in the other, so it’s actually easier to be a “battle mage” as you can then handle close and distant foes. Another thing that didn’t return in Skyrim was the ability to craft your own spells once you reach a certain level in the Mages Guild and it’s easy to see why as you can create some properly game-breaking spells if you know what you’re doing! Good fun mind you… So that’s setting up your character, but how about actual gameplay? Well, as mentioned previously, you can pick between First-Person or Third, but as I didn’t know about this when I started I got far too used to First to ever want to switch and that’s sort of how I’ve stuck with all Bethesda RPGs since. The main method of attack is set to the left and right bumpers / L2 & R2 and you can quickly press them to do quick attacks with melee weapons or hold them for strong strikes, the latter uses more stamina though, likewise with using weak and strong spells and the effect on your “Magicka” meter. If you’re 100% hidden and hit someone with any attack method it counts as a critical hit, and that’s about it, ignoring spells that can weaken your foes, turn you invisible, the previously mentioned summoner abilities and so on. Once you run out of health, you die. Simple as that, you have to reload your previous save or rely on the admittedly good autosave system.
I missed somehow slashing ghosts with my sword in Skyrim, it’s oddly satisfying… (XBOX 360)
While you have to do the opening sequence once you’re in the open world it’s up to you to do whatever you want, a kind of freedom that was pretty mind-blowing for me at the time. You can just stumble into caves that have a deadly group of goblins in, steal some loot, go to a nearby town, sell the loot and just do that for a while, earning gold to buy new armour and weapons or just find them in the various dungeons and caverns. Obviously each town has a fair few side quests you can take on as well as follow the main quest line, or you can do my favourite Bethesda RPG thing and put your own marker on a random unexplored part of the map and spend hours walking there and exploring all the things you come across. For those who prefer to skip straight to the plot (do you exist?) once you’ve visited a location once you can fast travel to it by clicking on the location’s icon on the map and, well, clicking “Fast Travel”. You can also come across Oblivion Gates on the map when not only spew demons (or Daedra) at you but you can enter them and close them from within Oblivion by climbing a large tower and removing a sigil stone at the top. Good fun and rather epic… the first few times, there’s a quest line towards the end of the game where four or five people won’t help you until you close a nearby Obilivon Gate and in both my original and Remastered runs boy was I was tired of the experience by then! Other things, like being over-encumbered by items means you can only walk slowly until you drop or use some items (or just can’t move at all in the original, forgot about that until doing a bit of research!), a lock-picking mini-game that I used to find easy but took me a little while to get back into in the remake, and a “Persuasion” mini-game that I didn’t get at all in my original run but once I looked up the knack became rather easy this time (well, easier but I had very little charisma in my build, so…)
The NPCs freely stroll about on their set paths, vocally communicate with each other and you if you engage with them, leading to different choices if you have high charisma. At the time this was another thing that amazed me, being used to NPCs just standing in place with the same dialogue box popping up if clicked on, admittedly now it’s just funny because of the janky facial animations, walk animation cycles and the conversations they have making zero sense and not remotely flowing correctly. Some of the facial animations and voice work was redone for the Remastered version, but even then in the spirit of keeping it close to the original the conversation are still hilariously nonsensical most of the time. Speaking of Remastered changes, there’s isn’t much gameplay-wise, just a new UI that’s closer in look to Skyrim and more modern physics / stamina and health regenerating outside of battle, that sort of thing. A few quest bugs fixes and the like as well I’m sure.
It’s a portal to Oblivion! A rare sight indeed… for your first hour or two of playing… (PS5)
That’s about it for a basic rundown of the gameplay. Again it may sound simple, at least the active fighting part, but even now the open world feels big and full of loads of unique (if not similar looking…) locations to explore. There is definite “stiff and glitchy Bethesda engine” issues all over the original and its remaster, but at this point it’s nostalgic given it’s been so long since the last new Elder Scrolls/Fallout game (you’d hope they’d have moved on from this engine, but looking at footage of Starfield I’m not convinced…)
Graphics and Sound:
Using a screenshot from the “Painted World” mission in the graphics section? It’s somehow extremely fitting and also not a good representation of the graphics from either game. … Hooray? (PS5)
The original graphics were great at the time, good models and amazing lighting effects. The Remastered version is obviously better in terms of technical quality but I will admit the new Unreal Engine 5 lighting is TOO good and kind of takes away the mood a bit due to its realism. For example, in the original whenever I entered a cave or mine I had to either use a torch or the light spell equivalent but in Remastered I didn’t need to do either, ever. The natural light was enough that I could see perfectly fine no matter where I went, which kind of felt like cheating a bit, and did ruin emersion a tad.
Soundtrack is great in both versions thankfully (there was some worry the music might be changed due to its composer being a knob, but thankfully not!). The ambient music playing when just walking around the overworld lives rent free in my head and has done for the last… man, 20 years. How is something I played in my 20s twenty years ago? Anyway, voice work is, um, wonky to put it nicely, especially in the original as a lot of lines repeated. This isn’t including Terence Stamp, Patrick Stewart or Sean Bean obviously, but the generic NPCs! In Remastered they recorded a bunch of new lines to be put into the mix alongside the old ones for a bit more variety, which is almost a shame really…
Story:
Damn right he is! (PS5)
The story kicks off with your chosen Hero locked behind bars for a crime that’s never actually mentioned, and during a royal assassination plot Emperor Uriel Septim VII is being escorted out of the palace via your cells and he recognises you as someone from his dreams and allows you to follow him. Sadly despite best effort Uriel is still slain but before he dies he entrusts you with the “Amulet of Kings” and tells you to find Jauffre of the “Blades”, his personal royal guard. Due there being no heir a seal that had been in place to stop the hordes of Oblivion from breaking into regular reality begins to fail and portals open up across the continent, but luckily Jauffre reveals Uriel had a secret son called Martin who lives in a small town called Kvatch, and with Martin wearing the Amulet of Kings they can relight the sacred fires and stop the invasion. You make it to Kvatch only to see it in ruins due to an Oblivion Gate opening up outside it, but against all odds you and some locals (including Martin) beat back the hordes and close the gate. You and Martin then head to Jauffre only to find out he and his men came under attack and the Amulet was stolen. While Jauffre hides Martin at “Cloud Ruler Temple”, where the Blades are stationed, you go searching for clues about the group responsible for all this: Mythic Dawn and its leader Mankar Camoran, who worships Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction.
*Spoilers!*
After lots of fetch quests and a great set piece where a “Great Gate” to Oblivion is opened outside of the town of Bruma and everyone chips in to help hold back the hordes while you get a Great Sigil Stone (so, yeah, it’s another fetch quest, but a great sequence to get there!) you enter Cameron’s personal realm of “Paradise” and slay him, retrieving the Amulet and Martin heads off to the Imperial City to get crowned King, only the city begins to be invaded by not only a massive army of Daedra but by Mehrunes Dagon itself as a massive towering figure. Seeing no other choice and using his knowledge of such things Martin intentionally breaks the Amulet and becomes one with the God that blessed it: Akatosh, the Dragon-God of Time. The two Godly avatars do battle and it ends with Dagon being sent back to Oblivion and all the gates closed for good. While the realm is now Kingless as the whole Royal Family has now been wiped out, at least there’s a realm at all…
*Spoilers end here!*
The story starts and ends well, but the middle is a drag of rather dull fetch quests and Oblivion Gate closing missions…
Downloadable Content:
The Flesh Atronachs are some of the least interesting and fun parts about the DLC, but if you’re not aware I can’t take 360 screenshots and this was the best quality screen from the DLC I could find… (Um, XBOX360, obviously!)
Apart from the now-infamously overly expensive Horse Armour incident and some other generic cosmetics there were two big expansions for Oblivion (that are just freely part of the Remastered version) in “Knights of the Nine”, which gives you an extra quest involving collecting holy relics to slay the sorcerer-king Umaril, and “Shivering Isles” which allows you to travel to a the brand new and quite large dimension of the same name and do multiple quests, get new armour / weapons and fight brand new enemies, so it’s definitely the biggest and most substantial of the bunch, and the leader of the realm in Deadric Prince of Madness Sheogorath is a good laugh. If memory serves this was the first game I brought DLC for…? I mean, it was the first 360 game I owned so it would make sense… Either way it was an early example one way or another!
Thoughts Then:
Don’t think I needed to be told what kind of creature this is, to be honest… (XBOX360)
Man I loved me some Oblivion. Couldn’t put it down for weeks and weeks and it contained one of my all-time favourite moments when I legitimately didn’t know about the whole Kvatch thing and didn’t even know you had to go there because I hadn’t talked to Jauffre yet, but I was just having fun looting caves and enemy hideouts and then selling the loot in towns, so I headed to Kvatch to sell my wares only to suddenly find it under siege and then before I knew it I was suddenly the “Hero of Kvatch”. I had accidently created a “zero to hero” backstory for my main character, and it was amazing! Love that memory. Anyway, yeah, I gave it an easy five, you won’t be surprised to hear.
Thoughts Now:
…. What? Is this a spoiler without any context? …. Maybe, but meh. Fitting way to end the review is what I say! (PS5)
Now? It was fine. The Remastered version was nice to look at to start but the lighting issues especially in dark areas took away from the experience a bit, and despite it being so long ago I oddly still remembered a lot of the plot so it naturally didn’t have the same impact. Instead it was something fun to play on for an hour here and there for a month or so, good but no longer the standout, which after 20 years with little changed about it shows how good it was to begin with.
Hogan Reviews 