The critical acclaim and commercial success that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered has enjoyed following its shadow dropped launch last week hasn’t been a surprise, nor has it been without merit. Sure, the fact that it bears the Elder Scrolls name and the fact that it is modernizing what is considered by many to be one of the greatest games ever made to this day was perhaps always going to guarantee a certain level of success for the game, but it’s also fair to say that if Oblivion Remastered wasn’t as good as it was, it wouldn’t be shining this brightly at this moment.
Because it is good. It’s an impressive upgrade over the original in many ways, and surprisingly comprehensive for a game that is technically a remaster, not a remake (at least going by its official name) and was shadow dropped at a cheaper price, which is something you wouldn’t ordinarily expect from a major Elder Scrolls release. It successfully modernizes an undeniably aging classic, almost perfectly toeing the line between making changes where needed and remaining faithful to the original Oblivion release.
And yet, it’s not a perfect experience. In fairness, perfection is nigh on impossible to achieve for any video game, particularly for one that is limited in what it can or cannot do by the things its source material already did back when it first came out. But even when limited yourself to just a tech perspective – which is the one area where you can reasonably hold Oblivion Remastered to a higher standard, given that technical and visual upgrades are very much the chief point here – you can’t help but feel like, for all of its strengths (of which it obviously has several), Oblivion Remastered is still a little rough around the edges.
Is the remastered release as janky or buggy as the original was back in its day close to two decades ago? Probably not, but even in its current form, Oblivion Remastered still has its fair share of technical hiccups. For starters, many of the original game’s bugs and glitches have indeed been brought over in the remastering process. You often see NPCs walking into walls (or each other), nonsensical conversations where one sentence doesn’t really follow from the other in any real way can still be frequently overheard, you’ll still find yourself occasionally getting stuck in the geometry, bugs with the lighting, shadows, the audio, and the UI are still quite common, there’s still plenty of instances of texture pop in and assets taking a little too long to load, draw distances don’t always look as impressive as you would want them to- and that’s not all by any means.
Most frustrating of all are the game’s consistent and significant performance issues. Where most of Oblivion Remastered’s other technical deficiencies are (for the most part) the kind that you could conceivably ignore (or at least make yourself come to terms with, given the game’s strengths in other areas), the performance issues are, in a word, unforgivable. Right from the moment you begin playing, frequent stutters, freezes, and frame rate drops are almost impossible not to notice, and the issue becomes even more prevalent depending on what hardware you are using.
For instance, on several PC builds, the game is downright unplayable. Unintentionally hilarious glitches that are noticeable but don’t really effect the actual moment to moment gameplay are all well and good, since depending on your outlook, they can be either easily overlooked or even become an unexpected source of enjoyment. But when the simple act of, say, engaging in combat, exploring the open world, or even simply moving around can become as problematic as it often does in Oblivion Remastered, that’s when things get troublesome- and boy do the game’s performance issues make it a troublesome experience from time to time.
This also continues to highlight many of the PC audience’s frustrations. PC as a platform has been subject to some of the most shockingly optimized releases over the years, and it’s a problem that has only grown more prominent with that, to the extent where it feels like we get a handful of such releases on PC every single year. Whether or not Oblivion Remastered is going to go down as one of the most flagrant examples of this remains to be seen, but it’s been a rough beginning. Thankfully, we can take solace in the fact that the game has already started making post-launch improvements, while there’s also the fact that as an Elder Scrolls release, it’s going to be expected to have a prolonged shelf life, courtesy of an active and robust modding community.
On one hand, a poorly optimized and technically roughly Elder Scrolls release is a depressingly familiar sight to anyone who has any level of familiarity with the franchise or with Bethesda Game Studios as a developer, but though that does make Oblivion Remastered’s flaws rather predictable, to call them forgivable would perhaps be letting the game and its developers off the hook for kinks and problems that they could and should have addressed during development. Virtuous and Bethesda have obviously put a great deal of effort into significantly upgrading the core Oblivion experience in more ways than one, but at the same time, there are some ways in which the recently released remaster feels disappointingly unwilling to quash lingering problems. Both things can be – and are – true.
Back when Oblivion first launched, the game’s bevy of technical issues were easy to forgive for many for multiple reasons, from the at the time unprecedented scale and ambition of the experience to the plain and simple fact that the general audience’s standards in terms of polish and optimization simply weren’t as high as they are now. It feels, however, like Oblivion Remastered has failed to take expectations into account in this particular area, which feels doubly disappointing because outside of its tech issues, that’s not something that you would say for Oblivion Remastered as a whole.
The hope obviously is that Bethesda Game Studios and Virtuos will continue to plug away at the game behind the scenes and keep releasing patches and updates that continue to further polish the experience and address its biggest lingering issues. At the very least, you would expect that the performance problems – which are easily among the biggest flaws dragging the experience down for many right now (especially depending on what hardware you’re using) – will be addressed at the earliest.
For many, of course, the question remains why the game was pushed out the door in its current state to begin with. Oblivion Remastered was a shadow dropped release, which means there was no officially announced release date that Microsoft or Bethesda were trying to meet as a deadline, while as we have recently also learned, this project was in development for as long as four years. Given all that, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a more polished release. Here’s hoping that the rumoured Fallout 3 remaster is able to successfully avoid these same pitfalls, if it indeed is in the pipeline the way rumours and speculation have repeatedly insisted- because that, too, is a super janky game (to say the very least) that could easily fall prey to those deficiencies with a modernized re-release.