Oblivion Remastered Already Has The Mod Community Working Overtime
“The best possible outcome!”
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has barely been out for 24 hours, and yet the Bethesda’s active modding community is hard at work. The remake, which shadow dropped this week, already has over 130 mods without any official support from its developer. And according to creators, there’s a surprising reason why so much progress has been made so quickly.
Within hours of its release, popular website Nexus Mods saw an influx of Oblivion Remastered creations that can alter the game in minor and major ways. From mods that return the original game’s most saturated color palette to ways to tweak difficulty and balance, players are already getting into the nitty gritty of skewing the experience to their particular playstyle (or just goofing around with memes).
As first noted by users on Reddit, the mod community was able to get right to work so quickly because the Oblivion Construction Set, the original tools used to create mods for the 2006 game, are still compatible, years later.
The Bethesda modding community has been able to conjur mods for Oblivion Remastered in what feels like record time.
“Kind of crazy, but you can open the new game files in the TES construction kit from Oblivion days,” one user wrote in a thread on the r/ElderScrolls subreddit.
“It is literally just Oblivion under the hood!” another posted in the thread. “The best possible outcome!”
There’s little reason to believe this wasn’t a conscious choice by Bethesda Games Studios. As development team members outlined during the game’s grand reveal, there was a concerted effort to retain all of the quirks of the original. Stilted, over-the-top voice acting, dated minigames, and even known exploits are still in the game, making this remaster a truly faithful redux of a the game millions first played in 2006.
Bethesda Game Studios games are famous for fostering modding communities that keep adding and expanding on the existing worlds. As recently as 2023’s Starfield, players have been releasing game altering downloadable options. It’s become such a core part of the Bethesda RPG experience that the developer has been releasing official mod support for all of its games released in the last decade, allowing the most prominent and consistent creators to sell their work.
When the team revealed Oblivion Remastered, it confirmed that it wouldn’t release an official Creation Suite as it did with Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Starfield. It’s unclear if that support will come after launch as it did with Starfield. Regardless, there are plenty of ways to make Oblivion Remastered the best version of this RPG classic for yourself.
Among the most popular mods available are several engine optimizers that help PC players smooth out the performance of the game, reducing stutter, input latency and more. For players who long for the bright green vistas of the original, there’s a mod to swap out the realistic real-time light for something a little more vibrant.
Those tired of being encumbered can help matters by reducing the weight of basic arrows. There’s ways to decrease the stamina cost of certain actions, slow the rate at which weapons and armor degrade, and to remove level-scaled quest rewards so you’re not stuck with useless versions of the game’s coolest loot.
There are already dozens of mods to help players customize the Oblivion experience however they please.
Unsurprisingly, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has already been a tremendous success for Bethesda, Virtuos and Xbox Game Studios. On Steam alone, where the game is available for $50 dollars, its already reached a peak of 182,000 concurrent players, a very loose indication of how well this game is performing there. It’s also the top selling game on the PlayStation Store. On Xbox, the game launched into Game Pass Ultimate, which means millions more could jump in as part of their monthly subscription.
It’s a big week for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers who love RPGs. Not only are they getting a pretty flawless remake of one of the most influential role playing games of the century. Later this week, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the debut game from indie studio Sandfall Interactive, also releases and has already become a frontrunner for game of the year.
