Oblivion: What Makes a Good Remaster?

There’s a lot of excitement around the Oblivion remaster, which should be revealed and released this coming week. Put it in your diaries.

A lot of the excitement is coming from the improved visuals. Images have leaked from the developer’s website, and mentions of the game have also been found hidden in the Bethesda website too.

We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of the shadowdrop earlier in the week, and I’ve been thinking since about the power of nostalgia in these things. The challenge, I think, is for the developer to make the game as you remember it. Imagination and memories can be awful liars.

I’m playing the first Tomb Raider game right now. It’s part of the remasters set. It’s sometimes beautiful, especially in textures and in Lara Croft herself. At any time you can press start and see what the game used to look like, and the difference is huge.

But that old fashioned version isn’t how I remember it. We can all remember laughing at her pointy boobs, but what was going on with her face? Her hair? THIS is the collection of pixels guys were lusting after?

The developers of the Tomb Raider set have done a mostly amazing job on these games. Nothing bothers my memory of them at all, even though they’re completely different.

I had a similar experience recently when someone showed me the difference between Kingdom Hearts 2’s original soundtrack and its Remaster soundtrack. So very different, but not in a way that hurts my memory. That is a good remaster.

Oblivion: Remastering a Classic

Here’s the thing: Tomb Raider and Kingdom Hearts 2 are classics. The gameplay, certainly in the latter, holds up impeccably. And actually, it holds up in Tomb Raider too, for the most part, so long as you accept that quality of life features killed gaming for us all.

Part of the memory of Tomb Raider is the endless caves. Changing that would alter the memory completely. I wish they’d done a bit more with the combat. That is not how I remember it. Or the wide mouths on the animals you kill. They’re factually accurate, of course. But we’re not talking facts, we’re talking memory.

Oblivion is a classic too, of course. I said earlier in the week, for many people, the Elder Scrolls started with Skyrim. This will be their first chance to play another game in the series.

How do you remaster a game that not only needs to impress fans, but also needs to live up to the idea of what these games mean to people who’ve played barely any of them?

The obvious thing is in the visuals. Oblivion was not a looker, even when it came out. This will be the most beautiful Elder Scrolls game to date, and if it’s done right in terms of tone, people will recognise it straight away.

How far should developers change the gameplay? That’s a hard question, because ultimately somebody will be disappointed. But combat fit for 2025, some quality of life things – these should at least have been considered. This isn’t just a remaster, it’s the first new single player Elder Scrolls game since Skyrim came out. It needs to live up to that.

It’s a hard line to walk. But people are excited, and that’s half the battle.