When Bethesda finally revealed Oblivion Remastered earlier this week, I could hardly believe my eyes. Somehow 2006’s trip to Tamriel, known for its weird, potato-faced characters and smeary stretches of low-res verdant grasslands, is now the best-looking Elder Scrolls game ever made. A long history of HD overhauls has conditioned me to expect underwhelming results from remasters – Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Dark Souls Remastered are barely indistinguishable from their Xbox 360 parents, for instance – and so to see the Imperial City that I explored nearly 20 years ago rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with ray tracing was momentarily unbelievable. Not only that, but the game has been enhanced with upgrades to combat, RPG systems, and a multitude of other details. All that considered, I wondered if Bethesda and the project’s developer, Virtuos, had got the title wrong. Surely this is Oblivion Remake, not remastered?
It turns out I wasn’t alone in that thinking. Numerous fans have declared it a remake, and even Bruce Nesmith, the senior game designer on the original Oblivion project, has said “I’m not sure [the word] remaster actually does it justice.” But while I doubted Bethesda and Virtuos’ remaster claim at first, after playing several hours it’s actually pretty clear – Oblivion Remastered may look like a remake but it plays like a remaster.
There are plenty of reasons why Oblivion looks like a remake and they can be easily summed up: Virtuos has done a huge amount of work, with “every single asset redesigned from scratch.” In terms of what you physically see on screen, it is all brand new. Every tree, every sword, every crumbling castle. This means Oblivion lives up to modern graphical expectations. Not only is it beautifully textured, it also has gorgeous lighting and a whole new physics system that ensures every arrow and weapon strike affects the world realistically. And while all who you meet in the game are recognisably the same folks you crossed paths with back in 2006, every single NPC model is a brand new creation. It’s a hugely impressive overhaul that rejects the idea of making something that “looks like you remember” and instead aims for something that’s great by 2025 standards. It’s the best a Bethesda Game Studios RPG has ever looked, and if I had seen it before the remaster rumours began I’d probably have believed that it was The Elder Scrolls 6.
It’s not just visuals, though. Combat has been overhauled, and so swinging a longsword no longer feels like fencing with a balloon. The third person camera is now actually functional thanks to the addition of a reticule. Every menu, from the quest journal to dialogue to the lockpicking and persuasion minigames, have all had refreshed interfaces. The original, horrific levelling system has been replaced with a much more logical hybrid of Oblivion and Skyrim’s approaches. And finally you can sprint. With so many visual and gameplay upgrades, surely we are firmly in remake territory?
The big issue here is not so much one of technology, game changes, or project scope, but semantics. There are no industry-defined parameters for remakes and remasters, and publishers recklessly throw the terms around. Rockstar’s “Definitive Edition” remasters of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy are unmistakably blocky PlayStation 2-era games with upscaled textures and modern lighting effects. But the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, also branded a remaster, sports all-new graphical assets and looks like a game from the modern era. Things are even muddier when we get to remakes: Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls both rebuild their respective games from the ground up, but are faithful, 1:1 recreations of the original experiences. Resident Evil 2, meanwhile, sticks more-or-less to the original blueprint in terms of structure, but completely redesigns the way you interact with the survival horror icon. And then we have Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth, which radically overhaul the design, script, and even story beats of the original games. All five of these examples are considered remakes, but there’s very little shared philosophy between them.
At one point in time, the general consensus seemed to be that if the game had been rebuilt from scratch in a modern engine, it was considered a remake. Remasters, meanwhile, were more limited upgrades performed within the scope of the game’s original technology. Such a definition is clearly becoming fast outdated, though. Today, it seems more fitting to say that a remaster is a graphical overhaul that preserves the design of the original game (bar a few quality of life gameplay upgrades), while a remake redesigns a game from scratch. Such a definition would “downgrade” Demon’s Souls and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Delta to remasters, and ensure the remake term only applies to games that genuinely feel like new takes on old ideas.
So if we accept these proposed definitions, is this new version of Oblivion a remake or a remaster? As anyone who’s played even just an hour of it can plainly see, Oblivion Remastered absolutely has the correct name. Yes, those new assets and Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing effects make it look brand new, but beneath that glowing skin is a collection of 20-year-old bones, organs, and muscles, all roughly stapled and taped together in that unmistakably Bethesda way. As the studio explained, “We looked at every part and carefully upgraded it. But most of all, we never wanted to change the core. It’s still a game from a previous era and should feel like one.”
The hallmarks of that previous era are everywhere. It’s in the loading screens that hide behind almost every single door. It’s in the baffling persuasion minigame that still, despite the interface upgrade, barely makes sense and feels utterly disconnected to your conversations. It’s in the design of the cities, which have the simplistic design of theatre stage sets rather than the complex, knotty arrangements of authentic population centres. It’s in the NPCs, who wander like awkward automatons and talk with all the grace of an AI trained on a “how to be society” manual. It’s in the combat, which even after a significant upgrade still feels detached and unwieldy. And it’s in the long list of bugs and glitches that still remain, reverently preserved in the name of upkeeping the original’s quirky charm.
Just a couple of months ago we were treated to Obsidian’s Avowed, which offered a vision of the future for some of The Elder Scrolls’ key building blocks. Its kinetic combat is practically space-age compared to Oblivion Remastered’s, while its approach to rewarding exploration makes the rolling hills and grotty caves of Cyrodiil feel very much a relic of yesteryear. Such modern systems help put Oblivion Remastered into context. That’s not to say that this revised classic has nothing to offer in 2025 – far from it. The magic of its world still sparkles brightly, its Rohan-like open fields filled with dozens of mysteries and oddities. Much of its ambition remains intact even two generations later, such as the dynamic goblin wars that wage between its NPC clans, or the narratively-satisfying questing structure that remains head-and-shoulders above Skyrim’s many “visit a draugr-filled dungeon” missions. Many of its old-school ideas around player freedom feel refreshing in an age where we now reject the hand-holding nature of games from the 2010s. But the granular details of Oblivion are clearly grey and long in the tooth. There’s no finesse in its dialogue, nor elegance in the way its systems interconnect. And the level design, be it cave, castle, or the cursed lands of Oblivion itself, feels positively ancient. A remake’s job would be to update all those ideas, but this project is all about reliving the old. As such: Oblivion Remastered.
Video games have historically leant on terminology from other mediums. In the world of movies, remakes are brand new productions with fresh casts, crews, scripts, and sets. Remasters are existing films that are enhanced as far as possible to match modern picture quality standards. But an old film is still an old film; the 4K restorations of Jaws and The Godfather look incredible, but they are clearly products of the 1970s. You can see it in the direction, the delivery, the effects work. It’s in the texture of the film grain. Oblivion is like those blu-ray restorations of classic films. It pushes visual quality as far as it possibly can, which thanks to the more malleable medium of video games means recreating the project’s “exterior” in a brand new engine. But beneath that shell, Oblivion is unmistakably a product of the 2000s. Alex Murphy, executive producer at Virtuos, had the perfect analogy during the reveal stream: “We think of the Oblivion game engine as the brain and Unreal 5 as the body. The brain drives all the world logic and gameplay and the body brings to life the experience that players have loved for almost 20 years.”
Oblivion Remastered is exactly what it says it is, and that shouldn’t be seen as downplaying its achievements. Instead of insisting that it’s a remake, we should actually be using it as the quality bar by which we judge remasters from other titan-scale AAA companies. This is what Mass Effect Legendary Edition should have been, rather than a cleaned-up re-release. This is what Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy should have been rather than an incredibly cynical-feeling cash grab. Because there’s nothing cynical about Oblivion Remastered. It looks like a remake crafted by passionate hands but plays like a remaster preserved by loving fans, and that’s exactly how it should be.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
