Dreaming of Tamriel
My Love of The Elder Scrolls and Thoughts on the New Oblivion
Skyrim, Cyrodiil, Vvardenfell, the Iliac Bay, the chances are, no matter your age or gender, you can attach blissful memories to at least one of the locations I have just mentioned because for over 21 years now, I know millions of people just like me have been leading double-lives as assassins of the Dark Brotherhood, warriors of the Fighters Guild, heroic Dragonborn, the Nerevarine or as Heroes of Kvatch.
Like many of you I’m sure, I’ve been a fan of The Elder Scrolls for many years now. My first exposure to this series was in a caravan late at night, 9 years old, huddled under the duvet, my new Xbox 360 under the TV and with a copy of Oblivion spinning inside the disc tray, Patrick Stewart as Uriel Septim VII filling me in on my supposedly grand destiny after I had just crafted a Bosmer fit for ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ it was pure magic.
Later, I loyally counted down the days until one chilly November the 11th I returned home from school to tear the cellophane off that black box and take my first steps into the rugged province of Skyrim. For the next 6 months, I would get up early before school just to grind out the schools of magic until I hit that sweet skill level 100.
As an adult, my tastes have turned away from the saccharine dopamine hits of Skyrim’s action-RPG focus and streamlined progression and more towards the class-making and slow-burn of Morrowind’s ways, I bought and then saved the game for weeks, desperate to play but needing to do exams; the night I found out I’d be getting into university I bought a load of beer and got absolutely plastered as I quested my way around Seyda Neen and Balmora, labelled an ‘N’wah’ and a ‘S’wit’ by the local Dunmer, enjoying the good news and looking forward to the impending Summer of Vvardenfell adventure.
The Elder Scrolls is a series that means a lot to a great many number of people and just like you, I have waited and agonised for years now; from age 11 to 25, I have been waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6. I hope we finally get it soon.
But what is is that we all seem to love about this world: Tamriel (or perhaps Nirn, if you’d prefer) so much? And what keeps us coming back for the 5th, 10th and 20th playthrough? I think most critics and players would point towards the scope of The Elder Scrolls series as its defining feature, the fact that there is so much and such a variety of things to love. It is true that the games rarely exceed expectations in any one area besides accessibility and sheer scale but my favourite part of this series is the one thing in which I think the games are unmatched: immersion. No other RPG or open world game feels like playing The Elder Scrolls. The series has often been labelled a ‘fantasy life-sim’ especially in the case of Daggerfall and while that crude assessment doesn’t capture the full beauty of the franchise, it can be a pretty apt descriptor.
In what other franchise can you sit yourself down in a virtual library and spend hours reading page upon page of lore and fictional history? Better yet, how many games present the same events from various sources, each with an interpretation marred by culture and prejudice? In how many other series can you then rise from your in-game armchair and mingle with tavern patrons as they squabble and complain to you and each other by a roaring fire? The immersion and lore truly make The Elder Scrolls games for me and no others match this series for that. Morrowind is my virtual ticket to go camping in an alien swamp, spending hours gathering alchemically potent fungi for mages as the beating of wings betrays the approach of Cliff Racers, Oblivion whisks me away to the green, West Midlands English towns and woods of my childhood, where every stony bridge and old house was sinking with the burden of the centuries and Skyrim is the closest I can get to seeing the Northern Lights without a long train ride to Scotland and presents an intriguing, fantasied-up slice of Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia.
Something else the Elder Scrolls games (apart from Skyrim) do better than anything else I’ve ever played is magic and alchemy. There is not a single other RPG or fantasy game I enjoy being a mage in, 99% of the time you’re just a generic AoE (area of effect) spam class, a different flavour of ranged specialist or you get to be the healer/buff role and have to sit back stacking bonuses and min-maxing timers while your mates have all the fun. Not in The Elder Scrolls. The schools of magic and the options they provide are so vast it’s almost impossible to cover, only in the first 4 Elder Scrolls games can I make an enemy collapse under the weight of his armour, set him on fire then rip out his soul and seal it in a dagger, only in these games can I choose to play entirely wearing wizard robes, specialising in hand to hand combat and spells that augment my physical strength to superhuman levels, only in these games can you find enchanted boots that blind you while giving you massive speed, which you can then counteract by brewing a specific potion. I implore you, if you’ve only played Skyrim or if you usually play a standard warrior, you need to boot up Daggerfall Unity, Morrowind or Oblivion right now and get into a mage character.
Before I move on, let’s not forget one of the other stars of the show: Jeremy Soule’s timeless soundtracks for the trilogy of 3D Elder Scrolls games. I’m not willing to defend nor scorn the composer in regards to the unproven allegations against him but regardless of what anyone thinks, his career seems to be over, which will damage the series’ future for me. These songs instantly whisk me away to Tamriel when I hear them, or remind me of Oblivion NPC memes.
It was in December of last year, not long before I started this Substack, that I decided I would play Oblivion again soon. I had just finished a several dozen hour binge of Morrowind again and realised I haven’t touched Oblivion since 2021 when my save was cut short by the mysterious vanishing of my file and my unwillingness to start again after over 10 hours of progress. Slowly, the first months of 2025 rolled by and between my replaying of other games and writing this Substack, the idea of replaying Oblivion got pushed further and further back; this all changed a few weeks ago when tantalising and delicious rumours began to spread on r/GamingLeaksandRumours of an Oblivion Remaster.
I was utterly unconvinced.
Every day there seemed to be another source talking about it but I still clung to my scepticism. “Who needs a remaster anyway?” I thought, even as the first few images of the game finally turned up “There’s nothing wrong with the original.”
And then it happened.
The remaster of Oblivion dropped and on a whim I decided to watch the reveal and got a hearty punch of nostalgia to the gut. The classic soundtrack, the glimpses of Cyrodiil’s Tolkien-esque wilderness again, the Imperial City’s circular walls. All of a sudden, I had to have it.
Conveniently, just as the remaster arrived, I was ready to put together my new PC and at last, on Sunday night last weekend, I sat down to relive a slice of bliss from those nostalgia-soaked Xbox 360 days.
As you can see, the Oblivion Remake is absolutely gorgeous. I’m running the game on an RTX 5070, High Settings with an i7 12700KF CPU and have been blown away by gorgeous vistas around every corner so far. I am choosing to call it a remake from here on because, as I understand it, the only surviving elements from the original game are parts of its engine, the soundtrack, much of the audio and of course, the blueprint for the game itself; all assets were rebuilt from the ground up, so I consider it a remake.
There has been some consternation online (and in my head when I first saw screenshots of this game) about its more naturalistic and ‘dull’ colour palette compared to Oblivion from 2006. While it is true that this game’s colour palette is a lot more muted, we shouldn’t forget that the original game had the opposite issue: it had too much bloom. I even booted up the original on Xbox 360 to remind myself how that game looked, which turned into some digital archaeology as I loaded up a character I made all the way back in 2016 and had forgotten about.
There is still lots of colour to be found in this remake, as you will see in the screenshots below.
As I’m playing this on PC, I’m proud to say that for once, all the screenshots in this article were taken by me!
The most important thing for me is that the original game’s art-style has not only remained intact but actually is enhanced by the gigantic leap in technology, I’m trying not to make this article an art-gallery but I have been utterly enchanted by the Diagon Alley-esque city of Cheydinhal and its purple, Tudor houses and weeping willows. This city didn’t stick out to me in the original game but I have fallen in love with it in this remake.
There are a few scant ‘improvements’ here and there that have fallen afoul of the community, like one of the variants of steel armour being ruined and the blood-red, glowing door to the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary being greatly toned down but for the most part, it all works.
There are some gameplay changes in this remake as well but to be honest, it could be my memory but I really feel these have been over-emphasised; Oblivion 2006’s dreadful levelling system has been somewhat rectified and enemies react a little more to damage now, the graphic boost too gives magic some more visual flair but otherwise? It doesn’t feel particularly different to play. I love this series but as will be quickly apparent if you’re new, combat has never been The Elder Scrolls’ strong suit.
Getting into more controversial, hot take territory here, I’d wager that those coming over from Skyrim will find the gameplay more engaging by default as that game largely stripped away the depth from The Elder Scrolls’ traditionally open-ended magic system and forced a highly restrictive 2-hand system on the player; in this game, unlike its successor, you can still cast spells while wielding a sword ‘n’ board.
One area where I’d hoped for more though was in the complexity of Oblivion’s battles. Oblivion was the first Elder Scrolls game to really feature battles between large groups of NPC’s but just like in the later Skyrim and in Fallout 3: Oblivion with guns, they feel really flat and usually involve 4-6 Imperials and the player facing half a dozen Daedra. I understand the game and its engine have limits, and this was supposed to be a 1:1 remake of the 2006 original but personally? I’d have been with the retaking of Kvatch going off-script a little bit and having some more set-piece moments and a higher enemy count.
Another, albeit very minor issue I have with this remake/remaster is that they appear to have severely dumbed-down the game’s physics. A lot of the charm and jank of the original came from its chaotic ragdoll physics, which would cause small enemies to go flying if killed by powerful spells and this also meant you could smack corpses, hanging lanterns, signs and other physics objects around; this capability has been greatly curtailed in 2025.
This section has turned into a bit of a round-up of my negatives with the game, so I’ll put the big one right here: in true Bethesda fashion, Oblivion is poorly optimised, an issue not helped by the notoriously unreliable Unreal Engine 5. The recommended specs for this game (according to Steam) are as follows:
Both my processor and graphics card are significantly more powerful than the recommended settings for this game and I am still getting issues with stuttering, worse, the recommendation for 32GB of RAM is frankly, absurd. 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum for PC gaming and 16GB has been the standard for the past decade now at least, a remake of a 2006 game should not require double that amount. Get your act together, Bethesda. I’m one of the lucky ones, I’ve only had a few crashes and a VRAM issue that was fixed after a reinstall of the game but a lot of people online can’t even play Oblivion at the moment.
It’s also been reported that despite Steam indicating otherwise, the game is basically unplayable on Steam Deck.
I’m not looking to review the entire game here, just to share my love for this series and my thoughts on the Oblivion remaster so far, so I’ll begin to wrap it up here.
If the only Elder Scrolls game you’ve ever played is Skyrim, then I say this as gently as I can, with as little gatekeeping as possible: this is the real Elder Scrolls. Skyrim is set about 200 years after every other game in the franchise and lacks almost all of its defining RPG mechanics; the other games’ main quests centre around the player undertaking assignments from Uriel Septim VII or his Blades, who are centuries gone by the time of Titus Mede II and the Thalmor in Skyrim. If Skyrim had you smitten with the world of Tamriel then Oblivion and perhaps Morrowind and Daggerfall after will really show you what the series is all about.
If you didn’t like Oblivion 2006 and are looking to give the game a second chance then my gut feeling is that it won’t win you over but times and tastes change so why not give it another go? Steam refunds are generous and the fancy new lick of paint and marginal improvements very well may be enough to sway you.
As a child playing for the first time in 2009, Oblivion was like nothing I had laid my eyes on before; it was a whole other life on a disc. Behind every stoic oak and watchful willow of Cyrodiil lay a seemingly infinite supply of dank caves to quest through or ancient Ayleid ruins to plunder. Not since Ocarina of Time had I been so enthralled with a virtual world, in those naïve times I wondered how I could ever truly get bored of such a game. It was a virtual experience that ensnared my senses and engendered in me a lifelong love of the magic imbued lands of Tamriel. Of course now the seams in this ageing world are plain to see: much of the Cyrodiil Province’s caves and crypts are the same copied and pasted assets arranged in different patterns, the hilariously inept AI breaks your immersion frequently and the quality of guild questlines is jarringly uneven. But to be an Elder Scrolls fan is to accept imperfection. Not one of these games has a combat system that even reaches basic decency, the voice acting has forever been hammy and the franchise has a long history of watering-down and retconning the provinces it depicts in the video games; Cyrodiil was described as a jungle before Todd Howard watched The Lord of the Rings! Regardless, I think people will still be playing these games in 20 more years’ time because inside all of us there is a child who grew up dreaming of powerful witches and wizards, brave knights and plucky forest rogues.
If you can dream up that childhood fantasy hero then in Oblivion, you can make them.
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The remake has me interested in replaying Oblivion for the first time in more than a decade. All I need to do now is... upgrade my GPU and double my RAM. Ah well, maybe in a year or three.
It's been surprising and encouraging to see so much commercial interest in this remake of an almost-twenty-year-old RPG. Seems like gamers both remember and dearly miss the old Bethesda magic. I smiled wide when you compared Oblivion's world to the environment you grew up in, because its world used to remind me of the forests and ravines of central Indiana that I explored as a kid. Ya just don't really get those sensations from FO4 or Starfield. Incidentally, +1 for Tamriel Rebuilt. My hot take is that it's the very best way to experience a Bethesda RPG in 2025. Fingers crossed that TES6 learns the right lessons.
Oh, and congrats on the upcoming milestone!
I'm on a parallel arc with you at the moment despite having zero interest in ever revisiting Oblivion in any form. Instead I've finally broken down and downloaded the current Tamriel Rebuilt build for Morrowind, the project that introduced me to modding, sectarian conflict, and internet communities in general, and it's been like revisiting my home town except instead of everything i remember having shut down there's actually more going on. I think that's part of why these sorts of games are so much more nostalgic than others - the fact that their big feature is immersion means the places become as real in our minds as physical locations, and trigger the same familiarity/memory responses. And you're right, the Soule soundtracks are indelible part of that sensation. I can almost hear them sometimes just walking around my neighborhood.
It is interesting how much nicer Oblivion looks just with mildly better thought out lighting though. Of every technical 'advancement' through the ages I think the one we could've skipped was Bloom.