General Gaming News

[Raid]

It is, unsurprisingly given MS now own Bethesda, free on Gamepass immediately.

I'm giving it a download. I was saying to Dave earlier that I don't think Oblivion was as good as people remember, but I'm wondering whether my memory's just clouded by Skyrim, which put me off Bethesda RPGs entirely (although it took me 50 hours playing to realise how little fun I was having). Whether I'm right or not, they've clearly put a ton of work into this new remaster, and it looks really quite pretty. With it being UE5, it's probably going to get VR support via the mod, which will be worth experiencing even if it doesn't support motion controls.

[Sly Boots]

Oblivion was the first ES game I played (I played Morrowind afterwards, having enjoyed it), and honestly I remember having a lot more fun playing it than I did Skyrim, even if objectively it's not as good.

[Animalmother]

In my excitement I downloaded the wrong fucking game! So it's 123Gb on console as well which makes more sense, downloading the correct game this time which will take awhile

[Wrathbone]

Oblivion was the first ES game I played (I played Morrowind afterwards, having enjoyed it), and honestly I remember having a lot more fun playing it than I did Skyrim, even if objectively it's not as good.

I've always held Oblivion and Skyrim in roughly equal estimation, for different reasons (Morrowind is of course better than both of them), but actually in retrospect I think Oblivion is better in quite a few ways. Skyrim looks nicer and plays nicer, whereas Oblivion has more entertaining and diverse quests that aren't as droll as Skyrim's, it has more fun minigames (lockpicking is straight up better in Oblivion and once you get the hang of the speech wheel it's fine) and it lets you design your own spells. It's just plain funnier, too, usually accidentally.

I held off on a replay of Oblivion as soon as rumours about the remaster surfaced - properly excited to get stuck into it.

[Rusty]

Squee.... downloading now on my windows laptop 115GB.
When I get home I'll also download it on my main PC.

This could be great ...well I do hope so.

I recently did a full on modded playthrough of Oblivion and enjoyed it apart from it kept crashing on entry to a certain dark place where dark things happen. Couldn't be bothered to try to fix it so this will be a fun comparison.

[Wrathbone]

Some thoughts after the first hour:

- It's really quite pretty, especially once you get outdoors. The soundscape is excellent too.

- Combat feels familiar but refined - it's faster, with more impact.

- One crash, due to UE5 apparently. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.

- There are QoL improvements like sprinting, faster movement and the UI in general. Bizarrely it still has the annoyance of enemy weapons not appearing in their inventory (unlike later BGS games), meaning you have to scrat about looking for what they've dropped.

- It's still very much Oblivion at heart, for better and worse.

[Animalmother]

Yeah pretty much my assessment (without the crash). Very nice looking with decent combat, there's a few improvements that could be made to the inventory system but otherwise it seems pretty solid.

[Wrathbone]

I like how they've added a fairly generous health replenishment outside of combat. It makes sense, as I'd usually just use the wait function to restore health instead.

Horses are still as useless as ever, though. In fact they've made them slightly worse, as you can only use them in third-person now. Ah well, I never really use them anyway, but it would have been nice to have the option of a horse that moved faster than I do on foot and allowed mounted combat.

[Raid]

Do we know if they've "fixed" the monster level scaling? I recall that making exploration less exciting as it meant that every enemy you ever met was level-appropriate, and was generally not liked by players. I have it in my head that this was something they eventually patched out of the original release, but I'm going back the best part of 20 years here.

I made it out into the open world last night. It's not the most exciting of intros, and I ended up wasting all of my health potions in the final section because I didn't realise that "go and guard the emperor" meant "go and talk to the emperor", but it's really quite good looking with some lovely lighting, and emerging into the world proper is still quite impressive even though open world games like this are now very much the norm.

[DjchunKfunK]

Do we know if they've "fixed" the monster level scaling? I recall that making exploration less exciting as it meant that every enemy you ever met was level-appropriate, and was generally not liked by players. I have it in my head that this was something they eventually patched out of the original release, but I'm going back the best part of 20 years here.

I made it out into the open world last night. It's not the most exciting of intros, and I ended up wasting all of my health potions in the final section because I didn't realise that "go and guard the emperor" meant "go and talk to the emperor", but it's really quite good looking with some lovely lighting, and emerging into the world proper is still quite impressive even though open world games like this are now very much the norm.

They didn't remove the scaling in the original and it's still here in the remake but caps out I believe. They have fixed the levelling system though which is what caused the main issues in the original.

In Oblivion Remastered, both minor and major skills contribute to leveling and you simply get 12 points—called virtues—to spend improving your attributes every time you level up, no matter what. The effect of some of those attributes has changed too. Agility now improves the damage you do with shortswords and daggers as well as bows, and when you pump your Endurance up to increase your hit points, the amount you get is retroactive, treating you as if you had that higher Endurance every time you leveled up before now. No more rushing to boost your Endurance before everything else, thank goodness.

I never really got into Oblivion so it feels like i am playing a new Elder Scrolls game in many respects. Not sure how much I will play though as Clair Obscure is out on Thursday and I really want to play that.

[Raid]

They didn't remove the scaling in the original and it's still here in the remake but caps out I believe. They have fixed the levelling system though which is what caused the main issues in the original.

One of the reasons people didn't like the monster scaling was that it never really felt like your power level changed relative to the world around you - it doesn't feel good as a player if you level up, you know you're dealing more damage now, but it has no real effect if the monster health pools increase too so you're still taking off the same percentage of that monster's health even if the actual numbers are higher.

It's a moot point for me as I'm not expecting to play a huge amount of this, I just thought it was interesting from a game preservation / remake quality standpoint. How far should a developer go in modernising a game for an audience used to contemporary design philosophies, and does that stop it being a remake and more of a reimagining?

[Wrathbone]

It's a moot point for me as I'm not expecting to play a huge amount of this, I just thought it was interesting from a game preservation / remake quality standpoint. How far should a developer go in modernising a game for an audience used to contemporary design philosophies, and does that stop it being a remake and more of a reimagining?

In that respect I think they've hit the nail on the head. It looks better, it plays better and the changes they have made are mostly sensible and faithful to the spirit of the original. I've not got far enough to get an idea of what the level scaling changes are like, but apparently it's more like Skyrim, which is fine by me. I will say that even at low levels the enemies don't seem to be the health sponges they used to be. All round very happy with it so far.

But if anyone's worried that the modern polish will detract from the bug-riddled experience of a BGS game, never fear. I've already encountered a major quest bug in the Kvatch section of the main quest, which I've not encountered in 19 years of playing Oblivion. Others have apparently encountered it too. Thankfully you can get past it quite easily if you know what to do, but you'd think that sort of thing would have been long ironed out for a remaster. Here's the issue and workaround if anyone else has it:

Spoiler

After you open the gate to Castle Kvatch and defeat the enemies, Savlian Matius is supposed to lead everyone inside the castle to help clear it out. Instead, he stands in place in the courtyard and can't be convinced to keep moving. It's a pretty tough fight inside by yourself (even with the legion troops and Martin who may follow you in), but all you need to do is get the ring from the Count and return to Savlian, and that will complete the quest.

[Hatredsheart]

Always loved Oblivion, sank hundreds of hours faffing with mods and it ended up giving me my username here and on WoW.
It's tempting me back...

[Wrathbone]

No official mod support, though inevitably there are already tonnes of mods. I only tended to dabble with UI mods in Oblivion, so now that's been sorted in the remaster I'm quite happy with the vanilla game.

[Animalmother]

An npc asked me to help him get fish scales. I turned my back and he was immediately killed by a mud crab that wandered up from the river. I'm not sure if it was scripted or pure chance.