Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

TheNozz said:

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Modding a game so that your heterosexual character doesn't get hit on by random men throughout the entire game seems like a no-brainer mod for a large majority of the playerbase. I'm sure Nexus is on the case furiously banning it.

It's too late for Assassin's Creed Shadows, where the historically straight male lead has entirely male romance options outside of one woman who is legendary in Japanese history for staying loyal to her husband at all costs, even after he died. Outstanding respect for Japan there.

Anyway, how is Oblivion on console? Morrowind was pretty bad on Xbox back in the day, but I got Skyrim's PS5 edition for like $8 a while back and it plays fine. Is Oblivion Remastered something I could just load up on the PS5 and have a decent experience with? I'm definitely partial to mouselook at this point but I also like sitting on the couch with a controller (plus trophy support). Not much of a modder and haven't modded Morrowind yet, didn't mod Arena or Daggerfall. (Yeah, try playing Daggerfall straight out of the box and beating the game, it'll put hair on your chest)

DickTrickle said:

Apparently they've massively improved FO76 and added actual stories, NPCs, and quests. I also guess they've been getting frequent updates since the show launched. I haven't played it at all, just what I heard.

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Last time I played the base game was excellent, they just needed more end game shit. But for leveling up and doing quests and story shit? The game is excellent. I spent about 130 hours just dong that.

Rajaah said:

Anyway, how is Oblivion on console?

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Remaster plays just like Skyrim.

Wonder why they kept the name "Arena" for the first Elder Scrolls, because as far as I can see, there are no actual arenas in the entirety of that game.

Originally it was supposed to be a multiplayer deathmatch type PC game with medieval weapons, mostly set in an arena(s). I think there was also a town where you could buy things. Once development got underway, they found that it was fun to explore the town and talk to people / buy things, so they started expanding on that, adding wilderness areas to traverse / train in, and so on. Eventually we ended up with this whole world being created.

Thing is, they never got back to the "Arena" idea or actually built any arenas, so the name doesn't make any sense. Weird that they kept the name intact through development.

Tuco said:

Yeah it's funny how it was possible to scope creep into an entire world but not possible to rename it "Tamriel" or something

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It's a game called Arena with no arenas in it. Yeah, Elder Scrolls: Tamriel would have made a lot more sense.

I played through all of that game in the past, and while it does have the entire continent, it's much much smaller in scope than Daggerfall. Each province has like 10 areas of note and the rest is just like procedurally-generated fill-in space to run across (which there's no point in doing when you can just fast travel anywhere on the map). Compared to, say, the Skyrim we get in Skyrim, ES1's version of Skyrim is empty as hell.

Cyrodil only has one location in it (the capitol) and the rest of the province is entirely inaccessible, as well. Don't expect Elsweyr or Valenwood to actually look like they're "supposed to" either, because all the areas are pretty much the same. Elsweyr might have snowy zones, Valenwood might have desert zones. You'll find the same variety of biomes in each province and it's all very cut and paste. The main difference between provinces is the background / sky layer (for example, Morrowind has the volcano off in the distance for the sky layer).

The main point of Arena is to run two dungeons in each province. You talk to specific NPCs in the province capitol, get a dungeon added to the map, run it, get a second dungeon added to the map, run that, get a fragment of a staff. This happens in every province, I think, with the capitol being the final dungeon that you can go into once you've beaten the dungeons of the other provinces. It's not that dissimilar to an early Zelda game in that regard, in that the only things you really need to do in each province are talk to some NPCs and hit the dungeons, then off to the next province to do the same.

Daggerfall covers like 5% as much "land area" map-wise but it has a vastly bigger world, a zillion more locations, much larger locations, actual traversible terrain with things in it, etc.

I actually preferred Arena when I played the two of them simply because it worked better. Daggerfall was bigger, more interesting, had better character creation options, and nicer graphics, but none of that mattered when it was a huge glitch-fest that I had to restart multiple times. Most of that is ironed out with newer versions of Daggerfall that you can download online (I insisted on playing both of them off of disc, 90's style, at least until I gave up on that midway through ES2).

Putting aside that ES2 already covered Lilac Bay, I really hope ES6 includes both High Rock and Hammerfell in their entirety. It's such an interesting location(s).

Arena was a good appetite-whetter for seeing all of these locations fleshed-out and filled-in via later games. Would be cool if we ever actually get full games for Valenwood/Elsweyr/Summerset/Black Marsh. Valenwood in particular is my favorite province for a variety of reasons and it's never gotten its own game. Would also love to see a Morrowind 2 that covers the other 60% of Morrowind that isn't Vvardenfell, using similar design elements and biomes. All of that seems like a pipe dream at this point though.

Pretty much beat Morrowind, or at least broke the game in half. Game is so insanely easy to get overpowered in that it's kind of ridiculous. Turns out if you taunt NPCs a few times and then bribe them to reset the chance of taunt working, over and over, eventually they'll snap and attack you, and once that happens you can kill them without it being against the law (provided no one sees it). Used this to my advantage to raid the shelves of a rude blacksmith. Also sneaking and using walls as barriers let me get 100k worth of armor from the drug czar's plantation.

Cranked the difficulty up to max, running around in a full suit of Glass Armor with a Glass Longsword, summoning skeleton pets and levitating over walls and mountains. ...I'm like 4 towns into the game

Went looking for an Oblivion Remastered to buy, hoping there was a nice box set available.

.........There's no physical edition at all? I should have expected that, at this point.

Remember when Elder Scrolls games had box sets with lorebooks and maps and whatnot, even in console editions?


We didn't know how good we had it.