I'm not excited for a remake of Oblivion (or any other Elder Scrolls game)

It's about the whole product.

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Once again, the rumor mill of the internet is turning on Bethesda Softworks’s greatest franchise, The Elder Scrolls. The target this time, as before, is the fourth mainline game, Oblivion from 2006, getting a full remake.

This particular piece of gossip pops up at least once per year, with each time someone proclaiming that an announcement is imminent and giving some leaked details regarding the nature of the remake. This time, Oblivion is getting a full remake in Unreal 5, and, as a result, there will be no mod support. Any announcement of this sort is designed to elicit backlash from Elder Scrolls players as the various titles, especially Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, are viewed just as much as platforms for modding as games unto themselves. There are total conversion mods available for these games that really do turn them into new games, and the modding scene has ensured that none of them has remained stuck in the graphical paradigm of their original release.

We cannot underestimate the drive for a better rendering of the fantasy world of Tamriel. Modded Skryim can look like a current-gen game, even though the original came out on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Modders have even taken it upon themselves to port the first two of the trio into Skyrim’s engine to enable the benefits of its tremendous graphical mod base, which speaks to the power of these virtual worlds. Hell, before Skyrim came out there was a “Morrowblivion” port of Elder Scrolls III into Oblivion’s engine. The fans, in essence, are already giving themselves what they want through their own efforts, specifically the long-promised “Skywind” and “Skyblivion” ports of games III and IV.

With all that as background, I am not particularly excited about a 4k Unreal 5 port of Oblivion, not that I am inclined to believe it. I must also be honest that I am not excited about Skywind or Morrowblivion.

These games are more than their graphics, more than their environments, and more than NPC dialogue. To say that you can get the essence of Morrowind by playing a recreation of it in Skryim is to miss the forest for the trees. It’s another permutation of the thinking mistake that has plagued games since Gaming Ground Zero in 2007, which is to consider a game a summation of various parts: a list of features accessed through graphics rather than a complete product.

A great part of the charm of all these games comes from all the little intricacies of its particular engine. Oblivion’s interactive environments, where everything can be picked up and moved around or knocked down with weapons, go along with the way the game draws those objects and ragdoll physics they implemented at the time, even if we might find some of those things a little funny now. The graphics, too, came through to the player via its method of rendering. I have nostalgia for the full-screen glow on its own, but the way it affected certain games of the time (like World of Warcraft or Overlord) is part of the artistic effect. Things like higher-resolution textures, better faces, or bigger trees don’t change this feeling. Moving objects into a different engine risks muting the vision of the art as belonging to a time and place, like colorizing an old black-and-white film. I feel the same about the first two installments, Arena and Daggerfall, which are drawn using a 2.5D sprite-based engine. There is something special about those graphics that is hard to translate to full 3D. While you risk muting the art with mods, these games always end up feeling like themselves, no matter how many textures you replace.

And these things also can’t be fully separated from the gameplay. The way the game is rendered and how it is animated affects how the gameplay operates, and the gameplay of each the Elder Scrolls game (including the first two) is very different from the others. Porting Morrowind into Skyrim might make Vvardenfell very pretty, but what about the way you master the world? Morrowind has a combat system that uses rng for hits, a complex leveling system involving many skills and attributes, unique racial bonuses and oddities (like the fact that beastmen can’t wear helmets or shoes), more difficult and convoluted fast travel, slower walking, harsh fatigue penalties, and the list goes on. Playing through Morrowind with Skyrim’s combat and animations does a great disservice to the source game.

This is also true of Oblivion. While closer to Skyrim, Oblivion has its own combat system (which I prefer to Skyrim’s), its own leveling system, and its own approach to gear that Skyrim cannot approximate. The encounters and the world itself are designed with these systems in mind. Skyrim would not also automatically become better if you were to paste Oblivion’s combat system on top of it. All the parts of the game were designed at the same time, so it is best if Skryim maintains its own unique identity as well.

Regarding heavy modding, there is an argument, given the above, that they ideally remove the need to do remakes or ports. We don’t need Skywind when we have OpenMW (a modern open-source version of Morrowind’s engine) and a massive catalog of functional mods to visually tune the original game (with its special gameplay and interface) to perfection. Morrowind in HDR with some texture replacements is really a beautiful and immersive experience and was, as a result, my favorite game of 2022, some 20 years after the original game came out. Oblivion also has many visual upgrade mods, but Skyrim is probably the best example, as the focus on graphic-enhancing mods since the game’s release in 2011 has kept the visuals of the game relevant to modern paradigms (thus the desire, even early on, to port all the other games into it). In fact, I think my current version of Skyrim, with its upscaled textures, enhanced lighting and weather, and full HDR support, looks better than modern games I play because the core aesthetics of the original game are superior.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think Oblivion needs a high-res Unreal 5 remake to be current. What it needs is the equivalent of OpenMW – an open-source modernization of the engine that still has mod support. Porting it to a new engine would take too much out of the original game that gave it its identity. If Bethesda wants to re-release it, the sensible thing to do would be to package in the best mods for console users. It is less work and wouldn’t kill the identity of the original game.

And I have to be honest. I just don’t trust the modern industry to do any of these games justice.

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