What was old is new again as a twenty-year-old role-playing game gets (not so) surprise re-release. I revisit the freshly polished world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

I picked up my copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with my new Xbox 360 at the console’s midnight launch in Auckland on 23 March 2006. I’d waited four months after the December 2005 UK launch as I thought it best to buy the console in New Zealand, where I moved to in January 2006.

I’d previously played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on PC, so I was familiar with The Elder Scrolls. But nothing could prepare me for the fully realised world that I would enter when I first switched on my new Xbox 360.

This was a world so detailed, so real, that I never actually finished playing the story. As the designers suggested, it was another world that you could live in rather than just a game.

Whilst the game’s successor, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, would receive countless ports and remasters, to the point of being a running joke, Oblivion was left to languish, its once cutting-edge visuals left behind by the advances in gaming technology.

Until now.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered takes a twenty-year-old game that was once ahead of its time and injects it into the state-of-the-art Unreal Engine 5. The game porting and remastering experts at Singapore-based Virtuos have also polished up the visuals and tweaked the gameplay for a more modern taste. The result is a new version of the game that can stand head-and-shoulders up against any recent game release.

Oblivion is an open-world role-playing game set in the storied continent of Tamriel, specifically in the Imperial province of Cyrodiil. As is tradition in the series, players start as prisoners, this time in the Imperial dungeons.

Things take a turn when Emperor Uriel Septim VII, needs to use a secret passage in the player’s cell to escape the assassins that have already dispatched the Emperor’s heirs. Septim recognises the player’s character from a dream, with the player joining the aged Emperor as he flees.

Tasked with a mission of utmost importance by the dying Emperor Uriel Septim VII the player exits the sewers of the Imperial City. It is at this point that the vast game world opens up.

If you’ve played Skyrim or Elder Scrolls Online, the way the world of Oblivion works will be familiar to you. The open-world landscape, now remastered full of lush vegetation, is peppered with settlements and arcane dungeons. Whilst your mission goal may lie within settlements, adventure awaits in the many abandoned ruins usually occupied by bandits, or worse.  How you choose to play is up to you. But no matter how you play, you will earn experience points to increase abilities and level up your character.

The game lets you choose your race from various human types as well as elves, orcs, and the catlike Khajiit. You can customise your character’s appearance or pick from a template. Be mindful that you can make a right mess of your character’s face, so be careful. You also choose your character class and the birth sign; this is all done in-game, via conversations with NPCs.

And about those conversations. As with all Bethesda’s RPGs, you spend a lot of time conversing with non-player characters. Whilst these interactions have got better over the years from Skyrim through to Starfield, they can still be a bit janky. For the Oblivion remaster, lip-sync tech has been used, which, along with the benefits of the Unreal 5 engine, makes conversations look a lot better.

Oblivion was a visual feast in 2005, but over the years, whilst the original runs really well on PC, the landscape looks sparse, and the textures tessellate unnaturally. This new version fills the world with high-fidelity foliage and updates the textures. The various models, as well, are all updated and improved. From buildings to characters and enemies, the visuals are polished and modern.

The Unreal Engine 5 used by Oblivion Remastered is a world apart from Bethesda’s aging Creation Engine. That’s why even Bethesda’s recent Starfield looks a bit dated. With UE5 we get stunning lighting and environmental effects, subtle shadows and almost photoreal visuals. It’s the best-looking version of Tamriel yet, trouncing even the visuals of The Elder Scrolls Online.

All that remains of the original Oblivion are the nuts and bolts. Everything else has had a makeover. The user interface is still a bit clunky, as seems to be the norm in Bethesda RPGs, but better than it was. Whilst the gameplay remains much the same, the combat has been modernised and updated with collision effects added to melee skirmishes.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered updates the classic game for a modern audience. It’s so much more than just a remaster. It highlights the technological shift that occurred with the release of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3, which created the blueprint for the open-world games we enjoy today. That a twenty-year-old game can be reissued with cosmetic updates and just a bit of polish to the mechanics reinforces the evergreen appeal of modern games. Hopefully, we will see more such games from the past plucked from obscurity.

Rating: Great