Oblivion got remastered and we could all return to Tamriel again

(as if we didn't already live rent-free in that world). Weeks before the game was released there was a multitude of leaks from supposedly legit sources. The leaks never panned out until, at the last moment, they did. All these leaks created three camps: those who adamantly defended the veracity of the leaks, those who were cautiously optimistic but skeptical, and those who fervently denied it being true. The last one was based on something Todd Howard had said in an interview back in 2016 when Skyrim Special Edition released: that remastering Oblivion and Morrowind would be too much work, they were too old and too different. But since then there has been a Microsoft acquisition, and now we can surmise that it's Microsoft that's pushing for these remasters. 

Throughout the weeks of leaks I watched the moderators on the Bethesda Game Studios discord server work their asses off in removing all mentions of leaks as they allowed nothing unofficial on the official BGS server. Makes sense. And then April 21st happened:

Once that image dropped the Oblivion discord server EXPLODED. We went from 2000 members to 7500 members in a WEEK. The subreddit emerged as one of the most active gaming subreddits on the entire site. Not bad for a game that's technically 19 years old. We all watched the reveal video as a community on April 22nd and freaked out together on discord.

I was still playing Pillars of Eternity 2 at the time of the drop and wanted to finish that. I started to play the Oblivion Remaster four days later, on April 26th. I finished last night. The intro made me cry and after that first time I'd still feel teary-eyed the next few following times I booted up the game and got the menu. It's so good T_T

They spruced up the character creation a bit, now each race has two different origins. As usual I created a Dunmer, but this time a Dunmer specifically from Vvardenfell. Amazing. I didn't like any of the hair styles though, and ended up covering it up with a hood for most of the game. My favourite playstyle in Oblivion is a Monk build. It's very satisfying to play as a female elf running around in a dress and punching things to death. 

The Feather enchantments and spells became my new best friends as I set out to explore the world. I used Map Genie as I went to make sure I didn't miss anything. By the time I finished I had explored every single location, closed all 60 Oblivion Gates, completed every single questline, and run out of quests to do. 

The Ayleid ruins are mesmerizingly beautiful. The first time I played the original Oblivion I thought they were extremely creepy, but now I was just wandering through them thinking how goddamn beautiful they are. 

The entire world was beautiful tbh, and I wish they had added a feature to hide the HUD for better screenshots. 

The Shivering Isles was amazing. I loved the extreme dresses xD And I really liked how they made Sheogorath look. Haskill looks so sweet and kind. Although, once again Taxonomy of Obsession made me want to close the game down and never return. Eventually I did complete it though.

Overall the game felt very similar to playing Skyrim in 2012 in that it would unexplainably CTD every so often. I've seen a lot of people with high-end rigs being unable to play it at all. I had very minor issues though. Every time I loaded a new zone after a loading screen I'd get a bit of stuttering and textures being slow to load in, but all I had to do was give it a moment to properly load and it would run smoothly after that. The remaster also didn't fix any of the known bugs and glitches from OG Oblivion. They're all still in the game lol.

My first major bug happened at the end of the Mages Guild questline where Mannimarco just wouldn't aggro. In OG Oblivion I would have simply used console commands to fix it, but in the remaster using the console disables achievements. I was 60 hours in at that point. So I turned to Nexus. Modding the game would also disable achievements, but I simply installed the Mages Guild fix mod as well as one achievement enabler mod and I was good to go. Finally Mannimarco aggro'd properly. As an added benefit I could now use console commands without disabling achievements. 

My second bug wasn't really game breaking, but it was annoying nonetheless. At the end of the Knights of the Nine questline they give a speech celebrating your victory. The speech got interrupted by a bear getting too close aggro'ing all the knights and after that the knights would just be stuck outside the Priory, unable to be interacted with. I didn't realize they were stuck until I returned there many hours later and at that point I had no past save to reload to make the speech run properly. 

Another bug that seems very prominent which also happened to me was during the main quest when you would go to Sancre Tor to pick up Tiber Septim's armor. You're supposed to free the ghosts of four ancient Blades by defeating their skeletons. But when I got to the fourth one, the ghost had already spawned and the skeleton was actively attacking it. I defeated the skeleton and the ghost would just stand around where he was instead of walking to the crypt with the others to unlock it for me. I fixed it by leaving the zone and waiting an hour. When I returned the ghost was moving to where he was supposed to be. 

I'm very proud of myself for completing No Stone Unturned and Work Is Never Done without the use of console commands. I wanted to play the remaster as vanilla as possible and it annoyed me so much initially that I had to resort to mods to get the Mages Guild questline to work. 

The Deluxe Edition came with two new quests. The Burning Trail quest was a little treasure hunt leading up to a meeting with the Mythic Dawn, which eventually gets you the Armor of Cataclysm and the ability to summon Mehrunes' Harbinger. The A Wound in Time and Saving Time Itself quests did make me raise my eyebrows a bit on the lore front. These quests, being in a mainline game, make it so that not only has an Elder Scroll been stolen before, but also that Elder Scrolls are verifiable means of time travel, the Order of the Hour are keepers of the Scrolls, and mind degradation is inevitable for any and all liches. It's uuuuuh... It changes a lot of things. The Armor of Order you get from those quests did look badass though!

I was really looking forward to seeing the final showdown between Mehrunes Dagon and the avatar of Akatosh in upscaled graphics and omg it delivered *w* 

The only issue was that after the fight Ocato comes up to talk to you and after that the final cutscene starts and once the game returned my character would be stuck in place. I couldn't move, couldn't even bring up the menu and the last autosave I had was when I entered the Temple of the One just before Martin goes dragon. I ended up having to watch the final fight showdown six times while I tried different fixes I found online before I finally managed to get my game to work again past cutscene. The way I did that was by running away from Ocato before he could talk to me, I ran a circle around the dragon statue back to the door and exited the Temple of the One. The game got stuck on a black screen attempting to load up both the final cutscene and the outside of the Temple. I force quit the game again thinking it had failed, but when I started the game up after that I had a brand new autosave from outside the Temple. Success!! Time to finish the Shivering Isles. 

I've actually only completed the Shivering Isles DLC once before, on my very first playthrough way back in 2013 when I played it for the first time. In every subsequent playthrough I've dropped it before completing the main questline of the DLC either because the enemies have turned too bulletspongy to be any fun at that point (the remaster fixed that thankfully) or Taxonomy of Obsession completely killed my vibe. I had forgotten most of what happens after you take one of the Duke spots. It was cool to see Jyggalag :3

Most of my screenshots from this game are landscape shots, and I'll finish this post with some of those.

This game was the best unexpected surprise release in years. Now, do it again, but for TES 6.