6d ago

Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025?

For many gamers, this week's release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it's provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven't gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.
I'm in that second group. While I've played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I've never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game's somewhat janky engine.
Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.

19 comments

I finally started playing the original release on Steam since I don’t have a powerful computer.
It is fun, but it’s much smaller than I imagined. People always complain about the drauger ruins in Skyrim as being repetitive, but damn those oblivion gates are just the same thing again and again. Hardly any variety between them.
I’m pretty close to just dropping this game and starting up Skyrim again.
- Yeah, but you really don't have to engage with every oblivion gate you see. There's a lot of really great quest lines to engage with, but the main story is one of the least interesting the game has to offer.
  
  100% agree. The thieves guild, dark brotherhood, overall mages guild (minus the recommendations and lackluster manimarco) are all better than the Skyrim faction questlines. Even some of the standalone quests are just a master craft of storytelling
- This is pretty much the exact same experience for the remastered, except it's 120GB (vs 5GB) installed and the gfx are modern.
  If you want the Skyrim experience, but a different game, try out the Enderal workshop overhaul on Steam.
- The Oblivion gates are super boring. Before dropping the game, try the Shivering Isles expansion - it's a really different experience from the base game and I personally like it much better. It starts here:
  
  Yeah imo the gates were kind of a chore, seconding the shivering isles
- It is fun, but it’s much smaller than I imagined.
  It's a product of its time. Oblivion's game size was right at the 4.7G limit of what would fit on single layer DVD-5.
  Oblivion Gates
  Ugh, arguably the most boring and repetitive part of the game. Such a wasted opportunity too as they could have made each Oblivion gate be a hellscape mirror of the area that it spawned in (including towns). That would have been a fairly small amount of additional data for a huge gain in game play.
  They suck, don't do any more of them then you have too.
- If you limit yourself to only going into dungeons that quests send you to, you'll have a better time. Legend tells it all the dungeons in this whole game were made by one person, so blundering into random ones tends to be really underwhelming compared to Skyrim. While that is charming for me in its own right to wander into a random dungeon and not know whether there will be anything interesting about it at all, all my best memories of this game are of the quests and the dialogue.
- Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it's best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.
- Yeah I definitely remember oblivion gates being a drag, but I only ever did the main campaign on one character so I never bothered with them on subsequent plays. Anyone know if the new version modifies the gates at all?
  
  As far as I know, the new version didn't change a single thing other than graphics and maybe some bugs. Right now, I am doing an oblivion gate and I am just running through without fighting anyone. I actually just turned my steamdeck on and was in the last room. It was too easy and much better that way.

As far as remasters go I think it's pretty good.
Don't expect a 2025 game in terms of mechanics and level design. For it's time Oblivion was a very good game. This is a polished version of the original with updated graphics and somewhat modernised combat and movement. They ironed out a lot of clunky mechanics and bugs too.
As far as remasters go the GTA ones were absolute dogwater just like warcraft 3 remastered. This one is very good and imo comparable with the command and conquer remasters.
I dont think they could have done much more without making the game completely different.

I think oblivion was the best RPG of the series. And the remaster just made it more enjoyable to play. The original had some...interesting ideas that ultimately flopped (that god awful levelling system they bastardized from morrowind).
The quests are peak, quirky, and actually have rewards at the end since you can't make god tier equipment right out the (oblivion) gate. Levelling feels good again, and you don't have to cry into a pillow because you ran too much and leveled your athletics and now you HAVE to take a speed point as an attribute on level up even though you wanted strength.

Tbh, I actually think this ends up being a win for Skyblivion. I think a lot of first-time Oblivion tryers were hoping for more dramatic changes, as opposed to basically unchanged Oblivion with a weird facelift running on top.
- Yeah whatever they improved for the remaster, it pales in comparison to the upgrades available in modded Skyrim.

I just started playing this remaster, and only played to Skyrim before. And I really love this title! I feels the same waves than when I was on Skyrim. I think this release is the best occasion for newcommers and younger players

I like it. I think if I had been a first time player (far from it — I played it at release), this would be a worthy way to experience the game. That said, playing it again just feels deeply discordant for me. It's drop-dead gorgeous with the visuals, but the sound effects, NPC models, and so much more just remind me of the original jank, and it snaps me back and forth, lol. Going back to KCD2, cus it's new to me.

the doomed king and his armed guards need to escape through a secret passage that just so happens to cut through my jail cell seems a little too convenient
I remember playing it for the first time in 2006 and I had completely forgotten about that guff by the time I got out of the tutorial. My character went on to ignore the main quest for many dozens of hours.
Of course several of those hours were spent struggling to defeat boars that started appearing on the road at level 5. They were insanely tough since I'd accidentally made the most difficult possible custom class. At least the remaster doesn't have that problem. Instead the combat is very easy — unless you go up one level in difficulty in which case you'll probably be killed by a mudcrab.

19 comments