In a way, I could find interest in a modern Bethesda-esque game, and I have. It’s called Cyberpunk 2077, and it’s been an engaging ride between the variety of quests that aren’t entirely just “go shoot these guys” and just seeing a somewhat believable city in a video game as well as its desert outskirts, as well as still having some funny random bugs pop up like floating enemies and cars dropping from the sky on occasion. However, would I go for a Bethesda remaster specifically? Other than Skyrim’s latest re-release I mean?
If I asked someone who knew about Elder Scrolls on what game could most use a remake or even just a remaster, they might go with Morrowind. That game is pretty well-aged at this point, and it also looks the part, but within the context of that timeframe it looks pretty neat more for the art style, before big budget graphics turned more toward HD realism. A graphical overhaul of that with current tech keeping it at a decent framerate would be a huge leap comparatively, and I remember seeing things involving that Nvidia RTX Remix thing that replaces assets in older engine at runtime or whatever kind of crazy idea they had there with Morrowind as an example, then going on to have Portal RTX with really shiny cubes and buttons for whatever reason.
However, Oblivion came about 4 years later and is a pretty big jump in visuals, back when those were actually more of a thing. But it looks a bit weird for different reasons, most notably the puffy people faces that would later show up in Dark Souls games and the like due to sharing the same FaceGen thing. But that’s part of its charm, the fact that it’s an HD era game that isn’t totally browned out yet still has all the bloom, plus everything else about it being goofy as hell. They would save the muted tones for Fallout 3 afterward, then follow that up with the grayish Skyrim.
So now there’s apparently been leaked screenshots of this long-rumored Oblivion remaster thing, outsourced to some company I’m not too familiar with to run in the current Unreal Engine to some degree. For one thing, it took about two decades to hit a graphical leap more comparable to what we were getting back in the day within 5 years, at least in my opinion. For another, it looks a little brown, at least the harvested screenshots that I’m seeing. Not entirely brown but still looking a little like 1970s film kept under decent enough conditions. Other screenshots aren’t as brown though, but for some reason the ones chosen for a roughly direct comparison highlight that specific tone change, plus an art shift maybe closer to Elder Scrolls Online.
On one hand, it does look a bit more than an ultra HD graphical overhaul due to these art shifts, but I have also seen some texture packs for Elder Scrolls games that do end up changing the “mood” of things as well just by having different colors and tones on average. There’s also claims that combat has been overhauled so instead of slapping swords and throwing particle clouds it’s… somehow different I guess? I also wonder if it’ll keep the wacky persuasion wheel. If this does end up coming out then I guess we’ll see how it holds up, and if anyone will be making or at least porting mods over to the new version.
As for me though, I sorta recently found the ultimate all-DLC-included version of Oblivion on GOG for a couple bucks. And I’ve had the disc version of the Game of the Year one that includes the two bigger expansions since around when I got more into PC gaming about a couple decades back. I feel like I got interested in the game due to finding videos online of funny glitches, and seeing that you could play as a lizard may have also helped. And I later got into Morrowind after that, though not as much as I did later on once I figured out how the game really worked. And I’ve recently played through Morrowind as well, in a janky yet mostly working co-op format made from a fork of the community engine rebuild project OpenMW. Plus there’s still the community project to remake it in Skyrim’s engine, complete with new voice acting for all the previously unvoiced text in that game. Pretty ambitious.
So back to Oblivion, I feel like if I was going to revisit the game I’d probably install that GOG copy and whatever attempts to keep the game from crashing on my hardware, for whatever issues would arise there. I’m not sure how much they’d sell this new Oblivion remaster for, but I’d ballpark at least $60 USD, plus there’s apparently a “deluxe edition” with DLC bonuses because I guess they had to add even more of that to the game that resulted in horse armor, the harbinger of monetization to come. Also I’m not good at prices because I apparently undershot the Switch 2 price by $50 USD if not more, depending on how that turns out. But of course for all I know with societal collapse on the horizon it’s better to wildly overestimate pricing, so let’s just say the Switch 2 will be at least $600 USD after the pre-order rush (not counting 5000% scalper markup) and this remaster will be $100 USD physical, I don’t know.
Now if money were no object, as in either I was some rich fuck who was benefitting from a lack of taxpaying like the usual bastards, or we somehow went full-on Starfleet Federation post-scarcity that recent Star Trek shows keep trying to undermine, would I go for this remaster going by what I’ve seen? Maybe just to try it out, but it probably wouldn’t “feel” like I remember Oblivion. Nostalgia is a hard thing to work around, but I’ve seen so many modern games take on this sort of look for medieval-style fantasy or even just medieval period, just the whole higher realism thing because the graphical power is there. I’m not immediately turned off by realistic graphics either, as I’ll play things like the PS5 Spider-Men or Death Stranding or the aforementioned Cyberpunk just fine. I just think I’d have to see more of this new Oblivion thing to make a better judgment, but in a lot of cases in general, if I already have the original thing and the new version’s not cheap, I tend to stick with the old just because if there’s not much reason to jump on it, like more functional controls or fun extras or having it run better on PC. And sometimes even if it is cheap, like that Blade Runner point and click remaster thing, whose entire purpose now is to go on sale cheap enough to get access to the included original at a steal.