I've been playing a lot of Oblivion Remastered and was hoping on starting a discussion thread about it.
I've put in around 12 hours so far and it's everything I wanted from a remake. Aside from the gorgeous graphics overhaul, they added a lot of more subtle QoL changes that really add up. Having a sprint button is great, and the reworked leveling system is way better than how it used to be. Combat has also been enhanced in lots of subtle ways like significantly better animations and better impact when hitting enemies.
The remaster is very impressive, when news got leaked that this was in development I expected a low effort re-release with a higher resolution, but they managed to make it play like a modern title. The lighting is crazy good and the open world can look breathtaking at times. They also managed to keep all the old Oblivion charm by not messing around with things people loved - the game under the hood still works the same, glitches and hilarious NPCs are still intact. They even kept some goofs from the original.
The only two issues right now for me are:
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Open world performance is just not good. It hovers around 50FPS on my 3060 Ti in the open world on medium settings, which is rough.
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Difficulty settings are wack. Normal is too easy and hard is way too hard. The slider literally goes from 1x/1x damage taken/damage dealt to 3x/0.6! No idea why we can't get something in the middle, but luckily there's already a mod that fixes it (I'm now using 2x/0.75 which is the sweet spot).
If those get fixed, it's basically a perfect remaster. Anyone else here playing right now? How are you enjoying it?
It's normal for a Bethesda game to have every town's NPC be a named character with routines. So to do that in Oblivion would require programming a whole bunch of additional named NPCs that don't exist in the original game.
Perhaps a crowd system could've been implemented... But... I can't think of any Bethesda Game Studios game that ever used crowd systems.
Extra named NPCs was what I was hoping for. I understand why they didn't because it would of been a huge change and I'm sure some of the fan base would have been very vocal about it.
I would have loved if they shipped it with mod support and maybe a oblivion+ version with official mods built by their teams like added npcs and other extras.
Oooh modders will find a way. Nexus has already been slowly populating with smaller, simpler mods. It's only a matter of time before more complex mods come around.