Oblivion Remastered review: Wait before you buy?

 It is absolute tourist behaviour to say “Oh, it’s a Bethesda game, it’s supposed to be buggy, it’s part of the fun he he~!” No. It is not. When you play an Elder Scrolls game for hundreds of hours, the last thing you want is to encounter a game-breaking bug and have to roll-back a save from earlier in the day. You don’t want to be taken out. You want to escape. You want immersion. Please don’t take me out of Tamriel.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the best games ever made. A 10/10 RPG masterpiece the likes of which there will never be again. It was the 2006 Game of the Year, awarded so by numerous publications for its ability to transport you to another world in a way that no other game managed before, or since (and we can argue that with its sequel too).

This will not be a review of Oblivion from 2006, instead it will be a review of the so-called Oblivion Remaster of 2025, the third-best selling game of the year. We will be reviewing the changes made by Singaporean studio Virtuos, who you get to blame for the problems with the remaster because I’ve been seeing people give Bethesda too much credit for this and honestly, I don’t think anyone from the Microsoft subsidiary touched it.

Surprise dropped in April 2025, the Remaster – which is more of a remake due to a great deal of changes to the game design alongside a visual and audio revamp – is unfortunately a buggy mess.

We can not express enough that Oblivion Remastered, in its current state, is even more broken than the original ever was. Thank goodness that the game it was built on is such a triumph of the medium.

8:30 AM