I’ve been playing a lot of Oblivion Remastered and was hoping on starting a discussion thread about it.
I’ve put in around 12 hours so far and it’s everything I wanted from a remake. Aside from the gorgeous graphics overhaul, they added a lot of more subtle QoL changes that really add up. Having a sprint button is great, and the reworked leveling system is way better than how it used to be. Combat has also been enhanced in lots of subtle ways like significantly better animations and better impact when hitting enemies.
The remaster is very impressive, when news got leaked that this was in development I expected a low effort re-release with a higher resolution, but they managed to make it play like a modern title. The lighting is crazy good and the open world can look breathtaking at times. They also managed to keep all the old Oblivion charm by not messing around with things people loved - the game under the hood still works the same, glitches and hilarious NPCs are still intact. They even kept some goofs from the original.
The only two issues right now for me are:
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Open world performance is just not good. It hovers around 50FPS on my 3060 Ti in the open world on medium settings, which is rough.
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Difficulty settings are wack. Normal is too easy and hard is way too hard. The slider literally goes from 1x/1x damage taken/damage dealt to 3x/0.6! No idea why we can’t get something in the middle, but luckily there’s already a mod that fixes it (I’m now using 2x/0.75 which is the sweet spot).
If those get fixed, it’s basically a perfect remaster. Anyone else here playing right now? How are you enjoying it?
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Can’t run the game because Unreal Engine runs like crap on Arc GPUs… Or in this case, not at all. :/
I’ll have to wait till MESA 25.1 drops later next month to see if it fixes my issues.
Besides that, from the few gameplay videos I’ve seen; I don’t like the Argonians. From the reveal video the developers said they’re using the same lip-sync animations for all races/species, and it’s very easy to tell that the large, blunt faces Argonians have in the remaster are a design decision for this. It still doesn’t look right either because the teeth inside their mouths are animated with the lips.
Other than the Argonians, however, the game looks great. Just wish I could play it. This was my first Bethesda game, and the first open world game of its kind I played.
I’m on AMD 6600RX and mesa 24.x was unplayble and runs almost perfectly on 25 now. So have hope!
How often do you have issues with that arc card? Considered getting one for a spare pc.
Only with Unreal Engine games, it seems. That includes Direct X 12 implementations in Unreal Engine 4 games:
- The Ascent runs at 2 fps on the main menu, where it basically just renders one dude standing on a roof with a completely red background. It’ll also freeze.
- Outer Worlds Spacer’s Choice Edition also runs at 2 - 5 fps in menus, has low framerate in-game, and crashes every 5 to 10 minutes.
- I have Conan Exiles. Not DX12, but still UE4. Should probably give that a try and see how it goes…
- Oblivion Remastered refuses to launch. Says my system doesn’t support DX12.
- Nightingale also refuses to launch. Same error.
- A couple of indie games still in development switched from UE4 to UE5 and now crash immediately after trying to launch.
Works just fine on everything else. My card is the Arc A770:
- Can get a reasonably stable 40 fps with ultra settings (including ray tracing) in Cyberpunk 2077.
- Helldivers 2 is great. Had to use launch commands to force DX11 at first, but after a few numbered updates to MESA that’s no longer a problem.
- Baldur’s Gate 3 is great. Avoid the option to launch the game with Vulkan, though. It is really badly implemented and causes very obvious graphical glitches all the time.
- I get a stable 50 fps on KCD 1 on ultra. Though I have only played it for three hours recently (started a new game).
- Very smooth in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, except for truly massive fights (thanks to the large VRAM size my card actually does a better job at rendering large battles than some of my friends with more powerful cards).
For none game related stuff:
- Great performance in Blender 3D, though it’s finnacky to set up and I think I still didn’t do it right (can’t get One API to work), but despite that it still performs fast in cycles.
That gives me hope. Sounds like it’s just drivers they need to fix. I really just want something for transcoding, which it sounds like they’re great for that. Figure they’ll go up in price once the bugs are ironed out.
Thanks a ton for the detailed response.
Little tip for transcoding:
Friend of mine in the Netherlands has a server at home with Jellyfin. He bought the weakest A series ARC card (forgot the exact model number), because he found out all the ARC cards use the exact same hardware for transcoding. Meaning there’d not be any performance difference between the lowest end card and the highest end card.
Check that info yourself, of course, but me and my group of friends have been using his Jellyfin for watch-parties and it’s been going great.
It feels really good.
It’s kind of crazy how well this 20 year old game is designed. Each NPC has a life. Each house is a real house, and not just a closed box for background setting.
The gameplay feels so good that it’s a bit startling when things are buggy, or just not as modern. Like when you have a fetch quest, but you already have the item: there’s no option to say: here it is! You have to literally walk away to trigger something in the quest engine, and then come back to deliver the item.
Also, the way enemies are not at all aware of each other stands out: 2 bandits standing next to each other. I snipe one of them, and the other doesn’t even react. Must have been the wind…
But overall I’m loving it.
WHO’S THERE!?
Come out of the shadows, you creep!
Where did you go!?
Hmm… Must’ve been the wind…
Proceeds to calmly walk back to idle with an arrow stuck through the face.
Agreed, I’m also surprised how much more alive the NPCs feel. They start conversations with each other and have their own lifes. It’s feels much more dynamic than Skyrim’s dumbed down version of the same system.
For the performance issues: Like many UE games (doesn’t even matter the iteration of UE) this one is not properly configured. There are already several ini tweaks up on the Nexus that address this and actually fix the exterior cell performance.
Well, this is a discussion thread, and I found some shit I need to discuss, although not with the game itself directly, but with “fans” and other G*mers:
This chucklefuck is actually getting some attention and people agree with them. The human race is fucked if the average person thinks like this on a daily basis. I’m not sure what’s worse; the out in the open bigotr, or the fact that they’re apparently okay with the current administration turning the government a completely fascist regime, or let alone they think this administration is “too soft” on perceived entertainment slights.
Like why does reality have to be so shit?
All this text and I still don’t know what he’s complaining about
Yeah, I’m very confused. Maybe his favourite mod got banned or something?
Maybe it was something like a word-swap mod to change “type 1/type 2” to “male/female” that got banned?
No clue. /s
ETA: which, I saw a couple posts in the steam discussions “celebrating” that Nexus put that mod back up. Like how fucking childish do you have to be to actually go out of your way to make a post like that? Saying shit like “I bet all the people who complained about it in the first place are CRYING right now!” It’s literally changing some words in a menu of a fucking video game
People like that are incredibly shallow. I’m probably going to get shit for this, but it also exists on both sides.
Example; Kingdom Come Deliverence 2:
Before the game’s launch it was getting pasted by certain people for “repeating the same mistakes as the first one” in regards to diversity.
Then it turned out the game has one gay romance option, and I think one briefly encountered North African merchant. Now it’s getting pasted by other types of people for being “woke.”
Goes to show that such loud-mouths get greatly effected by the smallest kinds of tokenism. So if course just changing the text in a menu is going to be such a big deal!
That sounds like paranoid schizophrenia
This drama doesn’t deserve to be the top post here. Let those morons have their miserable lives while the rest of the world enjoys a fun video game
The world is steadily running into an authoritarian, economical and climate catastrophe and bro is afraid of “woke videogames”, lmao.
One is specifically tied to the other. These people are being manipulated into being right wing pro-authoritarian voters because of “woke” blah blah blah. It’s always their boogie man because it has been made part of their identity, it’s part of the victim complex they have and they feel like “free speech warriors” when they fight against it… It’s fucking disgusting.
G*mers are so far gone I’m not sure we can save them at this point.
Edit: dude literally believes people are gonna hack into your PC and uninstall certain mods or games if it doesn’t fit with a certain worldview in a couple years. If anything, the only evidence I’ve seen for people to totally censor shit like video games (and other media) is
nazisRepublicans.
Ok but I did lol at pulling of a complete submersion. Also, it’s a little funny that they seem to know at some level that this ideology will piss off their wives/gf (as they wrote), but still advocate doing it. I guess all their wives and gfs must be woke? Or maybe women are too woke and therefore they never had wives and gfs to begin with?
The sentiment here is obviously terrible but at least there can be a laugh at how stupid it is. I mean…its so full of typos how could you ever think this person is trustworthy
Because nobody’s punching bigots in the teeth at every opportunity.
I don’t get it. Is Bethesda preventing people from making sexy body replacer mods for Newblivion? People have been making those since Morrowind. Is that what this guy is on about?
Mods like “replace all black people” get banned from Nexus for obvious reasons.
Everyone gains collective amnesia about all the good times they had playing/modding Bethesda games whenever they’re in the news cycle for some reason. It’s kind of fascinating/frustrating.
Add in the fact that a lot of these people have regressed over the past 10 or so years to the point where they think like 12-13 year olds again, and we get this whole “anti-woke gamer” bullshit.
To be completely fair though, I had to go out of my way to find people shitting on the game for even being “woke” in the first place. I saw the type 1/type 2 body type when I was making my character, but I just figured it was a natural progression since every other game with a character creator in the last 5 years has done away with gendered body types, and Oblivion is such a classic that it might have been overlooked; sadly not. In my head though (also because duh, it’s obvious if you use your eyes) I ascribe each to male or female, and it took me like a second to get through that entire thought process.
I made the mistake of looking at comments on one of the steam news articles.
wtf
Difficulty settings are wack. Normal is too easy and hard is way too hard. The slider literally goes from 1x/1x damage taken/damage dealt to 3x/0.6!
This was my only real complaint, other than them taking the noise cue away from lockpicking! I’ve really been itching for an elderscolls game with modern graphics and QOL so I’m super happy.
As for the lockpicking I learned something recently from a video and now I never break a pick. I can’t believe I never knew this:
Basically when you hit one tumbler there are the 3 drop speeds right? You push it up and it falls either slow, med, or quick. They “switch” between those three speeds when the tumbler falls back to the starting position.
If you hit a tumbler up and HOLD up (I’m on controller), or whatever key is up, then the tumbler will bounce slightly in the fully raised position. When it’s like this it will be remaining in the “fall speed” from when you first triggered it. We want it to be the slow fall speed so basically while it’s bouncing if you see any spring between “bounces” it’s too fast, let it fall to the starting position and try again.
If it’s bouncing and you can barely see any movement at all let alone any spring then it’s in the slow position, that’s what we want. When it’s like that watch the lockpick and when the lockpick is moving upwards trigger the lock with whatever the confim button is for you. It should always work!
other than them taking the noise cue away from lockpicking!
Noooo! I loved Oblivion’s lockpicking system. Got so good at it that one time I tried doing it with my eyes closed and was able to lockpick purely using the sounds. It was so fun and intuitive. Haven’t played the remaster yet but am sad to hear that they took those sounds away, lol.
As for the lockpicking I learned something recently from a video and now I never break a pick.
I noticed this myself today! At first I thought lockpicking was random and I broke almost all my lockpicks, but I noticed a subtle cue for when it’s going to lock in place. From what I understand the middle speed has a chance to work or break your lockpick, but the slowest speed is guaranteed to work.
good to know about performance. I was going to try to play it anyways, even though my Ryzen 1500x and RX580 GB didn’t meet minimum specs, but it just might not be worth it.
Careful! If your card doesn’t support DX12 you’ll not even be able to launch it. UE5 in Oblivion Remastered does not have a DX11 fallback and will refuse to launch.
I think it supports DirectX 12 at least I never considered it. Honestly I have to look that up.
As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.
It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.
I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.
I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.
Also played Oblivion years and years ago, and I can agree and think you put it best. “It turned out as well as it could have”. Because to anyone complaining here, any and all changes anyone here suggests the team obviously thought the same things, but there is obviously a balance. Change it too much and hardcore original fans are pissed. Don’t change it enough and new fans are pissed because it’s too old. No matter what people were going to be unhappy. Gamers are some of the most negative people I’ve met.
I see a decent remaster, I see gameplay and motions have been updated, I see a lot has been updated without changing the core game too much. It turned out as well as it could have.
I played oblivion when it first came out but I put a lot more hours in to skyrim. I do think they could have improved the game a bit more. I’ve only been in the capital yet but it felt brutally empty, with all the npcs having the same path/walking speed and so few of them.
I think a bit of decorations and a few new npcs would have gone a long way. I wished they would have worked on the AI a bit more. Taverns don’t have bards and little ambiance, walking into one is disappointing and ends up with all the npcs in a clump moving at a snails pace because all their walking paths overlap at the same time when they spawn it. It was the same in the original but it’s also 2025.
The waterfront could have really used a bit more shacks. The arena posters just slapped onto walls bother me as well.
Thankfully, I imagine mods will fix all this so I’m optimistic overall.
It’s normal for a Bethesda game to have every town’s NPC be a named character with routines. So to do that in Oblivion would require programming a whole bunch of additional named NPCs that don’t exist in the original game.
Perhaps a crowd system could’ve been implemented… But… I can’t think of any Bethesda Game Studios game that ever used crowd systems.
Extra named NPCs was what I was hoping for. I understand why they didn’t because it would of been a huge change and I’m sure some of the fan base would have been very vocal about it.
I would have loved if they shipped it with mod support and maybe a oblivion+ version with official mods built by their teams like added npcs and other extras.
Oooh modders will find a way. Nexus has already been slowly populating with smaller, simpler mods. It’s only a matter of time before more complex mods come around.
The only thing I don’t like is the performance: It stutters ever so often and crashes like once every hour after a loading screen.
Weird thing is that it ran way better at the beginning and then got worse, now even the menu is laggy.
I’m disappointed that they apparently didn’t do any bug fixes. I find that embarrassing and not charming at all. I’m also not crazy about the UI, and the performance could be better.
Otherwise, pretty happy with it. Looks amazing, really breathes new life into it, honestly couldn’t be happier in regards to the visuals. I’m stunned that people cared so deeply about the saturated color pallete of the old game though, I mean they’re literally talking about the exact shade of the grass. Never in a thousand years would I have imagined this would be such a problem, I really have nothing nice to say about that lol
Yeah honestly ridiculous that the same quest bugs from the original seem to exist.
Still really like the game a lot tho
Hopefully the same mod can be updated to fix it in Oblivion Remastered.
They literally used the same logic from the OG. The .esm and .esp files are exactly the same as the latest version of the original Oblivion. They did absolutely nothing to the original scripts and quests other than replace the dialogue for certain characters to a new recording.
I think it’s dumb, but also funny that Todd definitely knows that the “charm” of his games are how fucked up they are.
Seriously. The bugginess of Bethesda games has always been one of their top criticisms, people used to call them “BUGthesda” for crying out loud. Granted, the bugs never bothered me all that much, but you’re telling me they had an opportunity to correct some of that infamy in a remaster, and still didn’t do it? Get the fuck outta here.
Regardless, yeah. It’s great, can’t deny it. Gotta find time to play it alongside Clair Obscur now.
Love it but have generally the same criticisms as you. Luckily there are mods that help both of these issues:
this one helps slightly with performance: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivionremastered/mods/35
and this one with difficulty: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivionremastered/mods/58
Also playing on steam deck I can’t tell if aim assist is helping at all. Can be difficult to look at each gold to pick it up with a controller.
That’s the difficulty mod I’m using. Do the performance tweak mods actually make a difference? Every time I tried one of these it ends up being placebo.
Yeah performance is my absolute biggest issue rn. I’m getting like…70-80fps on med on a 2080ti. Other than that, I’m very happy with it, although I’m only about 4 hours in
I’ve not yet touched it. But since you mentioned it: How does leveling now work? And more importantly, how does enemy scaling work?
If I remember correctly, in the original, I felt strongest when I got Umbra at Lv 1 and just never levelled up.
Furthermore, how are the character animations? I saw the Emperor in the Remake and while the model was quite nice, in combination with his facial animations, I actually preferred the original. What I assume to be the original animations paird with updated models seemed too uncanny. However, that problem could be specific to him.
The old style auto added points based on what attributes you used. So if you leveled destruction a lot during level 5 you could get a boosted willpower or Intelligence stat when you leveled up. It was a little chaotic. Now you have 12 stat points(virtues) you can add to whatever 3 attributes you want maxed at 5 points per attribute.
IIRC in the old oblivion there was an arbitrary limit to how many skill points you can put in a stat depending on your class. This has been removed, you can now put up to 5 points in a single stat every time you level up to customize the build as you’d like. You get the same skill points regardless of skills you leveled up.
Some stats have been balanced, like how Agility now scales damage of daggers and shortswords now (before it was only bows). Many masteries have been rebalanced and changed to fit the playstyle more. Enemy scaling still exists and AFAIK enemies scale the same, but because leveling has been reworked you shouldn’t have to worry about min-maxing or what skills you’re gaining.
As for face animations, they’re a little uncanny but overall I’m impressed with them. They look great, most of the time.
I haven’t played the remaster, but the old Oblivion leveling system was exceedingly hard to do efficiently unless you planned in advance. It very much needed a rework, although skyrim dumbed it down way too much, in my opinion.
Basically, among all the skills, like destruction magic, blade, sneak, you pick 7 (I think it’s 7) major skills. Those get a boost at the beginning. When you raise your various major skills 10 times, you level up. When you level up, you get to raise three attributes, like strength, speed, or intelligence. You get bonuses to how much you can raise an attribute per level, with 1 being the minimum and 5 being the max. The bonuses are determined by what skills you raised during the last level. For example, the sneak skill is tied to the agility attribute, so raising your sneak skill gets you a bigger agility bonus on leveling up. So, to optimize it, you’d have to raise your major skills exactly 10 times (so none of them go to waste) and fill out the bonuses by raising minor skills, which don’t count towards a level up, to get the ideal spread of +5 to 3 attributes per level.
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.
Has anyone played this on the Steam deck yet?
According to Reddit you get 15-20 fps when I’m lowest settings that make it look worse than the 2008 game
I can confirm, even trying several different combos of optimizer mods, plus running the resolution at 1280x720, it stutters like crazy as soon as you get out of the initial area surrounding the Imperial City and looks like dogshit because of everything at low or lowest.
Baldur’s Gate 3 with almost 100 mods (including optimizers), and similar upscaling settings at 1920x1080 in Desktop mode, runs smoother and looks better on the Steam Deck.
Since the remaster is literally using the same game logic as the original, I ended up just installing the GOG version of the GOTY edition, installed a bunch of mods, and it runs amazing. I don’t think I’m missing much in the way of changes/improvements.
oof, thanks
See my reply to this user above, but yea don’t bother buying it if you only have the Steam Deck. Cheaper and a better experience to buy the original on GOG.
You always have the option to get a full refund within the first 2 hours of gameplay on Steam though, if you want to see the performance for yourself.
The original sold by Steam doesn’t work on the deck so Im not sure GoG’s version will
GOG version runs great for me. I just installed via Lutris using Proton Experimental, no problems to speak of while playing so far.
Then I’ll have to look into that thanks!
I will say, I’m running in Desktop mode and using keyboard+mouse. Presumably controller works, but I haven’t actually tried in handheld mode.
I like the remaster, it plays much better than the original of course. The graphics at first were really sluggish/choppy, but i found disabling the steam overlay fixed it for me.
I’m disappointed with it, but that’s my problem. I can’t put my finger on why, I think my expectations have changed. Somehow I was expecting it to blow me away like the first time I played it and obviously it just can’t do that.
Still gonna sink a fair few hours into it though.
