The Oblivion remaster may have been shadowdropped, but more than 4 million players have showed up to the remaster of Bethesda Game Studios’ 2006 open-world RPG.
Sometimes, the best marketing is having no marketing at all. Though it works better here for a much-beloved game rather than Bethesda’s previous shadowdrop attempt.
Released on April 22, Bethesda has announced the 4-million-player milestone in less than 4 days since released.
Of course, the use of “players” here as a metric instead of “copies sold” refers to Oblivion Remastered being available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, like all first-party games released by Microsoft-owned publishers.
Oblivion Remastered faithfully redid all the graphics using tools from Unreal Engine 5 running on top of the same codebase and Gamebryo game engine that powered the game. So it may look night and day as if it’s a remake, but it’s not, as Bethesda insisted that it retains the gameplay of the original. Though some gameplay changes were made, like the much-maligned level scaling system.
Another recent example of this style of remaster is Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, where it uses Unreal Engine 5 graphical assets running on top of the original game’s code.
(Also, Oblivion’s graphics didn’t age well, and speaking as someone who was aware of the game when it was brand-new, it didn’t look good back then compared to its contemporaries, either. Which makes the graphical changes in the remaster much more impressive than it would say a theoretical Skyrim remaster.)
Fans of Oblivion are eating good this year, as not only this remaster just dropped, but there’s also Skyblivion, the upcoming fan-made mod conversion of Skyrim that is attempting to recreate the entire Oblivion game.
We’re comfortable in reporting this as apparently Bethesda is all cool with the modding team to the point sending in free codes of Oblivion Remastered to them. That mod is nearing completion.
In the words of the Skyblivion social account: “Two cakes!”
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered is out now on PS5, PC (Steam, Microsoft Store) and Xbox Series X|S. The game is also available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.