Oblivion remake leaks suggest Skyrim’s cooler sibling is making a comeback, but I’m worried a modern makeover could bulldoze over the weirdness that makes it great

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Recently, my mind has been preoccupied with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion quite a bit. A month-long immersion in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which I consider the first genuine spiritual successor to Oblivion, has sparked this obsession. Not long ago, I finished another journey within the Imperial capital, and with whispers of an Oblivion remake using Unreal Engine 5 at a peak, it’s hard for anything else but Cyrodiil to occupy my RPG-centric thoughts.

I’m not able to verify whether these leaks are accurate or not, but they suggest we might get an Oblivion remake by April. If this turns out to be true, I have some thoughts (unfortunately) about what the re-release could entail for Bethesda’s 2006 classic game. A remake could attract a new generation of players who may not have experienced Skyrim’s precursor, and it makes sense since Oblivion still offers a more compelling RPG experience for old-school RPG fans. However, there’s also a risk that the remake might smooth over the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that make Cyrodiil so endearing.

Sleeping rather soundly

Setting aside any nostalgic bias: The game Oblivion wasn’t flawless. If you were to play it for the first time in 2025, especially after experiencing Skyrim, you might find it less engaging. It’s now challenging (at best) to run on a PC, its combat feels like kicking a flat soccer ball, leveling up is oddly complex, and most dungeons are repetitive.

From a personal perspective, Oblivion’s visuals seem unusual to me. Even if Bethesda were to personally deliver The Elder Scrolls 6 to my doorstep tomorrow, I wouldn’t be swayed – this preference is influenced by the nostalgia and the fact that its graphics were groundbreaking when I first played it. To newcomers, my pixelated characters might just appear as potatoes. This is similar to why I haven’t played Metal Gear Solid 2 yet; I’ll wait until Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater comes out because I missed the original and now find its outdated mechanics too familiar for those who didn’t experience that. If a sleek Unreal Engine 5 update could encourage someone to play Oblivion for the first time instead of passing it by, then that alone makes a remake worthwhile.

Similarly, there are several aspects in certain systems that not even the most devoted enthusiast can defend without reservation. For instance, the repetitive dungeon layouts in Cyrodiil fail to enrich the game’s individuality, and the level-scaling mechanism that overpowers enemies when you casually upgrade your Acrobatics skill is questionable. To compete with contemporary RPGs, a remake of Oblivion should be bold enough to revise these aspects instead of preserving them in a mid-2000s time capsule.

In other words, when Bethesda released Skyrim after Oblivion, they deliberately made certain aspects more straightforward to attract a broader audience. This strategy was successful, as Skyrim remains one of the most popular RPGs today. However, this simplification resulted in a loss of depth, which was noticeable in areas such as spell creation and lockpicking minigames, where fans felt a significant change for the worse.

Improvement isn’t always a given. Just because something appears outdated doesn’t necessarily mean it was a poor design decision from the start. For instance, replacing Oblivion’s unique Speechcraft wheel with traditional skill checks might seem like an easy fix, but you’d be stripping away part of its essence that seems irreplaceable. Removing the persuasion mini-games or the eerie, reptilian gaze of NPCs during games of chance would rob the game of a peculiar charm that I can’t help but find endearing. Granted, my affection for Oblivion may be clouding my judgment – but there’s something undeniably strange and unusual about it that I can’t imagine it lacking.

A remake of Oblivion shouldn’t simply be The Elder Scrolls’ version of the Ship of Theseus, meaning it shouldn’t just replace every part while keeping the original structure, but neither should it merely receive a new coat of paint without any significant changes. If such a project is indeed underway (remember, we haven’t officially heard anything), I’d like to believe that Bethesda will treat Oblivion’s enchanting strangeness with the same care they did originally. I must admit, the idea of altering one of the greatest RPGs ever made gives me pause, but this is born out of a deep affection for the game – and if the remake can instill that same passion in others, then may the blessings of Mystara be upon you, developers!

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2025-03-14 21:55