Shane
What we’ve come to expect from an RPG, and the RPG gameplay sphere itself has evolved epically in the past twenty years, since Bethesda’s pioneering Oblivion.
Originally released in 2006 after Morrowind, an inpiration to any RPG video game that was to come after and now remastered, the adventure awaits once again in a richly detailed current gen remaster on Xbox and PC.
Playable in either first or third person, the story starts as Emperor Uriel Septim (voiced by Patrick Stewart) is killed by assassins, along with all his known heirs. Your goal is to find and protect his son, who has been brought up in secret and knows nothing of his heritage. The story will take you all around the game’s world, a province of Tamriel called Cyrodiil, through to Oblivion.
The pace of play does an excelled job of guiding you from one point to another, with fast travel. You’ll come to rely on this often, if you didn’t play Oblivion back in the Xbox 360 days, the world is too large to go on foot if you need to revisit an area.
Absolutely nothing stops you, once the tutorial sequence is over, you can explore this vast world and take up the plot intermittently as you wish.
Want to climb the ranks of the Fighters Guild or the Dark Brotherhood of Assassins? Go for it, Oblivion is your game.
A huge amount of detail and time has gone into side-quests that most players may not even find nor finish. Wandering around a populated area is likely to turn up something to do at any given moment. Homes to rip off, people to annoy and job offers. Sniffing these out is all part of play. You can absolutely spend hundreds of hours just exploring and completing side quests, almost forgetting your main mission.
The combat system relies more on reactions and timing. Your stats affect your combat performance and you can assign spells or weapons to hot-keys so you do not have to pull up your menus constantly.
Stealth and archery are viable character choices just as much as the more traditional mage or warrior standbys and you can blend these aspects to suit yourself. Even the lock picking mini-game is still among the best of I’ve experienced.
Probably the most impressive part of this title is that ‘real world’ feel. Enter a bar in the evening, and you’ll be greeted by the hustle and bustle of the townsfolk relaxing. Oblivion’s towns are alive with genuine and individualistic activity. Sure we RPG players mostly expect this in any given game of this genre, but you have to realise that this game, although remastered, is two decades old.
Every location, no matter how irrelevant or mundane has books to read, chests to open, or loot to steal. Every little detail in the game feels hand-made.
Visually we are greeted with a 4K masterpiece. A few months back I actually revisited the orginal Oblivion. It had aged, sure, graphically, but gameplay wise it still had the goods. The remastered version is a lot smoother and fluid, no jaggedness or in-game lag here and your distant horizons do not suddenly pop into view.
This is Oblivion how it was originally imagined. Now reimagined, remastered for those of us that loved the original, or for a new generation of Elder Scroll fans.
Released: April 2025
Rating: M
Platform reviewed: Xbox Series X|S, PC
Genre: RPG
Developer: Bethesda
Publisher: Microsoft Studios