The long-rumoured The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion remaster has been revealed, and it’s out today for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and with ‘day one’ tiers of Xbox Game Pass as well.
So, what do we think of that? While Skyrim is easily the biggest and best-selling entry in the long-running RPG franchise, there’s plenty out there that prefer Morrowind or Oblivion, making these earlier games ripe for a graphical remake treatment. With Oblivion now in a much more modern game engine, the hazy bloom effects that were so popular in the early days of the Xbox 360 have been dropped, and there’s more realistic and nuanced lighting being cast across significantly more detailed, revamped environments.
The game is now graphically running on Unreal Engine 5, but the original Oblivion engine is still running in the background to tell it what to do. According to Virtuos, every single asset has been remade by hand, and there’s a new lighting engine. The gameplay has also been tweaked, there’s updated UI and UX, and a new levelling system inspired by both Oblivion and Skyrim. They have also reworked the third person view and made it more modern, as well as adding sprinting, something that was not present in the original game. Each race has had their audio re-recorded so they all sound different but the mini-games such as lock picking remain unchanged, albeit with new graphics.
Both standard and deluxe editions of the game are available, with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Deluxe Edition including bonuses like extra weapons and horse armour – a nod to the infamous horse armour DLC for the original game. The standard game includes all the expansions including The Shivering Isles.
The game has been developed in collaboration with Bethesda Dallas and Bethesda Rockville working alongside Virtuos. Unfortunately for Bethesda, this external partner was the source of last week’s blowout leak. Sure, this had been reported on ever since it was mentioned in unredacted court documents a few years ago, but last week saw enterprising internet denizens find a batch of Oblivion remake images uploaded publicly to the backend of the Virtuos website. They include screenshots of the game, comparison shots between this version of the game and the 2006 original, and more, and were hastily copied across to other hosting platforms before Virtuos could pull their site offline.
So, who are Virtuos? Originally founded in Shanghai and now headquartered in Singapore, Virtuos is a huge company with thousands of employees and teams dotted around the world. The company has often provided co-development support on major projects, such as art for the Horizon series and co-dev for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, as well as a variety of ports and remaster projects big and small. Oblivion could be their most notable work yet, and with the game so close to being in our hands, it will be fascinating to see how it has come together and how closely it sticks to or diverges from the original.
Source: YouTube
