It was the biggest game in the world to me – I'd been waiting at least a couple of years, frantically reading every magazine exclusive and preview, but when The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion finally arrived, it blew me away as a young teenager.
I bought the surprisingly reasonable collector's edition, and still have the coin and lore book that accompanied it, along with a Prima guide to the game. They're prized possessions, so when Bethesda announced and then shadow-dropped a remaster of the game a couple of weeks ago, it was a big event in my household.
I'm now in my 30s, and thanks to a generous loan unit from Nvidia via Overclockers UK, rather than trying to scrape by on a Dell with some upgraded parts, like I was in 2006, I've been able to sink my teeth into Oblivion Remastered on a blistering PC rig with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti powering it (swapped out for the 5070 I used at first).
The difference was always going to be staggering compared to the vanilla game (which is one I've replayed repeatedly, so I'm not all that nostalgia-tinted in my memory of it). Still, the more I've explored this spruced-up version of Cyrodiil, the more I've been basking in just how good the game looks on this hardware.
When I played Assassin's Creed: Shadows on PS5 Pro a couple of months ago, I was struck by the fact that ray-traced global illumination (RTGI)might be the biggest generational leap of the last few years, rather than the ray-traced reflections that people sometimes want to hear about more. That's underlined further by Oblivion Remastered.
Just like Shadows uses RTGI to produce gorgeous lighting that accurately recreates the way sunlight hits a forested hill, or torchlight flickers in a campsite, Oblivion Remastered leverages similar tech in Unreal Engine 5. It's a big advert for Epic's Lumen system, which brought that sort of realistic lighting to Fortnite a couple of years ago.
Now it's becoming more common, and while the burden it puts on your graphical hardware is pretty significant, the benefits are crazy beautiful. A game that previously had areas that looked a little too similar to each other now boasts drastically different-feeling biomes thanks to atmospheric fog and lighting that works wonders.
The swamp down by the southern city of Leyawiin feels nothing like the bracing clarity of Bruma in the snowbound north, and the whole open world can cycle through weather and time-of-day effects that have super credible lighting to augment them. It makes for a world that, yes, might be slightly less fantastical to look at in certain conditions, but which feels way more vividly real when you commit to it.
I've committed alright, hitting the 20-hour mark while barely scratching the surface of that main quest, just as one traditionally should. The Arena and the Fighters Guild are practically done, but I've got acres more to do in the Mages Guild, and I haven't even joined the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood.
With a tattoo of the Oblivion symbol on my right forearm in real life, this all basically translates to my being in seventh heaven right now, to the point where certain super-familiar locations and moments are making me a little emotional.
I'm even having a great time reliving my youth by tinkering with graphical settings to see what outcomes I get. The discovery that Unreal Engine 5's ultra settings are taxing but not much different to a way lighter High default, for example, is really fun to dig into.
In all honesty, though, when you have a card as powerful as the 5070 Ti, you don't end up doing much compromising – at 1440p there's none required, and at full 4K I've still been easily achieving 60fps even in the open world. That's the sort of performance that has me sitting for hours at a time, forgetting to make dinner or get up at all.
I'm basically a month into my PC gaming renaissance now, and there's no sign of a killer game to pull me away, especially because Xbox Game Pass (and therefore PC Game Pass) is having such a killer year. Doom: The Dark Ages is right around the corner, after all, if I can pull myself away from Oblivion to see how well it runs, with the full and confident expectation that the answer will be "excellently".
