https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ6pjQ_zgig compares the original and remastered NPCs, and I found myself preferring the old ones in a lot of cases. It took me some time to notice that it was the lip-sync that got ruined in the remake. All the original mouths work much better. The new ones look like someone is pulling the corners up with fish hooks. Most of the rest of the face is fine, but mouths are just wrong.

Oh gawwd!


The emperor looks terrible! They all (almost) look terrible! My goodness, I will always much prefer the original with all its potato heads and quirkiness!

The new Emperor does look sort of strange. Not bad in my opinion.

New Baurus looks hawt! I want to see that helmet off as well...

New Jauffre for me. Although now I see what you're saying about the mouth synching. It's a little off. But I like the new Jauffre better. The coloring of his face (slight blush on cheeks for instance) and his eyes are more pleasant, imo.

Alright one more. Wow, Brother Martin looks awesome. He looks like a friend of mine from the old days, holy [censored].

The Emperor looks great to me- he has that haggard look that fits perfect into the intro. Jauffre is awesome too, however Jensine just flat out scares me now, haha

One other thing I have noticed is that enemies rarely give a vocal audio cue that they are around the corners, which makes sneak much more challenging. And if they are not moving you cannot get the footsteps either.

The OG was a walk in the park compared to the remaster.

edit- Although I now remember at the start of the game I turned down sound effects to 4, dialogue to 5 and footstep to 4 as they were all super loud at the default volume. That must be the reason the stealth is hyper realistic.

I noticed yesterday or the day before that my shortsword had a weird shadow coming from it which was most noticeable when holding the weapon and looking at a body of water. Today I discovered that turning off Screen Space Reflections (or SSR) eliminated this.

Wait, Male Imperials are no longer spoken by Wes Johnson. That's the end of Oblivion, I think.

Also, I agree that the faces are generally not an improvement. The old potato heads looked like real people, but these new ones are just weird cartoons.

Oh, Argonians are nice though. But why did Borba in Cheydinhal go all grey? Is that because of how everyone looks?

There are still Imperials voiced by Wes Johnson. They added a new voice to give a little variety, but Wes’s voice is still in use. In general I find the added voices a very welcome addition to the game.

Can anybody who has spent any amount of time in Skingrad in the remaster tell me if Shum gro Yarug still falls to his death from Castle Skingrad’s bridge? That pisses me off when that happens in Oldblivion.

So, they have more than one voice per race, then? Or is it just for the Imperials? More voices is good of course, I'm just curious how they've done it.

It does annoy me that I do not hear Wes on the roads. Most times I get the new voice actor.

And I am sure the wolves play the dog audio instead of the correct sound file.

I don't mind that about the wolves, TBH. The little yelp sound they make when dying in the original hurts my soul.

When I saw Baurus, my exact words were "... I have a fanfic to write." My bestie burst out laughing.

My character just stepped out of the sewers. So far, so good.

And yeah, one of my first thoughts: Dang, Baurus!

For those saying Uriel looks strange, he legit just looks like Sir Patrick Steward with hair and slightly larger eyes.

Is that an example of the 'ghosting' I've seen discussed in a Reddit thread?


Doesn't do anything for me.

ACK! What did they do to my lovely Jeanne Frasoric. She's now got a pinched face with squinty eyes.

Could be. Not sure as I haven’t read up on it. The effects were kinda “ghostly”, like, even your character’s head would cause blurry shadows if you moved the third person camera around too fast.

What is the character creation like?

Does it still use the same system of making faces as the original Oblivion, with all the sliders? Or does it use something more like Skyrim or Fallout 4?

What is the new leveling system like? For that matter, does it still have Major Skills, and Minor Skills?

The character creator works almost exactly like it did in Oldblivion. They cut out the weird skin tone sliders (except for cheek and cheekbone flush, and the general skin tone that your character is, light to dark). Hair is a little different and there isn’t rgb values any more. You pick options from a palette, but there are plenty of options. They added lipstick and eyeshadow options that are also presented as options in a palette. Tons of eye color options too.

Leveling system works almost exactly like it does in Oldblivion. Instead of the weird attribute distribution it gives you a number of points to spend. I actually haven’t played enough of it to see how this interacts with enemies leveling with you. You pick major skills with your class, as in Oldblivion.

Don't have it (yet) but have been watching and studying.

UESP wiki has a section on it here: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Oblivion_Remastered
They discuss differences between remastered and original. For leveling, it seems you level on major skills but a change is that minor skills also level you but at a slower rate.

I have seen some drop dead gorgeous screenshots of player characters for what it's worth.

Google says remastered does not feature any fix for the A-bomb so expect to need a utility to fix that periodically.

Nexus already has tons of mods out for remastered and that is encouraging. That said, I'd wait and let things sort out as far as how to best install them and let the modding community sort and smooth things out.

It seems the command console works pretty much as in the original (yay!) but some commands won't work with the new engine and remastered introduces some additional commands.

I checked the recommended specs for the game and my puter seems to pass muster.

Will continue to watch and see while the game and modders hopefully continue to develop things.

Oh I didn’t know that about the minor skills.

The remaster has all the same classes you get to choose in OG Oblivion, and has the same option to also create a custom class. The skills governed by an attribute is gone now, so you can play a character with Armorer, Block and Heavy Armor as majors and it is perfectly playable.

The only difference between major and minor is that the minor only contributes a small amount to level up.

At level up you get 12 points to spend- and can put a maximum of 5 into one attribute (except for luck).

For example you could choose +5/+5/+2 or +5/+4/+3 or any other combination of 12.

I just had two crashes in less than thirty minutes. I think I’m going to put the game on hold for a while until they get some of that ironed out.

Good to hear they overhauled the way leveling works. Wondering if the bandits in glass / marauders in Daedric situation got changed.



What class did Baurus guess for your character?





I wouldn't mod anything too extensively just yet. Because remember: updates. As updates occur from the devs, they can mess up mods which aren't keeping up. Right?

The new leveling systems sounds much better than the original. There is no longer a need to level efficiently, or any of that nonsense. You can just play the game and not have to worry about that. That was one thing I really liked about how Skyrim does leveling.

So how does modding work? Do you still use the old Construction Set? Do the mods from the original game still work? Given that Bethesda has said that they are not supporting modding, I am assuming that they have not released a new construction set for it.

The old esm/esp format remains, and the old CS can mostly work with those, but the bsa is replaced by UE's pak, and there is an extra mapping involved for the assets. I think that uses JSON to cross link the two. A version of xEDIT is already made that handles the new entries in the esp, but you need UE to work with the rest.

The CS won't load the new meshes and textures, so the render window is either going to show the old ones, or treat them as missing.

He guessed Pilgrim, which was not a bad guess based on what she was doing in the sewers. I didn’t have a plan for her when we started, so she just used what she picked up while I learned how to deal with things like walking. She spent quite a while crouching because I couldn’t figure out what I had accidentally pressed to make her do that. I’m using a controller on PC, which is fine but started out a little confusing.

I picked Spellsword for her. I thought she would be more magical and use a staff for her weapon, but she likes to wallop things when I let them get too close.

Also, how about that goblin staff? Good grief I squeaked when I popped to third person and the camera stuck it right in my face!

I have not looked at mods yet because I want to spend some time playing first so I can see the differences, but whatever mod made it so I didn’t get motion sick in the original will be my number one mod.

Kane pointed out that staff earlier! It’s delightful!

I love it so much, lol. Such a fun detail.

@ TheCheshireKhajiit- When does your game crash? Is when loading cells or can it be anywhere?

I had just left Side Ways Cave, making my (over encumbered) way back to the Market District. The first time it was in the overworld, the second was when I activated the gate to the Market District after crossing the bridge from the prison.

As it turns out, I can't play Oblivion Remastered on my current rig.

While the Windows 11(software) it runs supports DirectX12, the graphics system (hardware) only goes up to 11.

Damn.

Just as well, though - looks like they ruined the horses for me.

Same here

I've just passed the 50 hour mark in the game, since grabbing it last week. The problem I had with the original was the absurd levelling system, that almost required a spreadsheet in advance and intentionally not using skills so enemies wouldn't out combat level you far too soon. This is so, so, so, so much better. Really enjoying it so far!

As for the crashes, I had that at first a lot too. Fixed it by turning on vlss or whatever it's called to stop screen tearing, and lowered the frame rate to 60 instead of uncapped. Not one crash since then (thank you Youtube!)

Grits: ah, Pilgrim. Sort of like Bard, an all-around class which gets assigned which hasn't got as much pertinence as it might in an older RPG (since there are no musical instruments or song to rally our friends' morale during gameplay).

Too bad glargg doesn't post here. He's the very expert on classes in OB, and how they can be manipulated over time.



Someone earlier in the thread said that anything which relies on OBSE won't work. I'm guessing anything with pure vanilla assets will be okay, but -- total guess.

Apparently there is a beta version of OBSE64 available. Not a lot of detail yet.

Vanilla assets should get redirected to their replacements, unless they were cloned to be retextured, or anything else that created a new form.

At some point, there is likely to be a way to upgrade any mod for the original game, assuming asset conversion can be somewhat automated. The big difference for mine is going to be the way outfits are layered on the body, instead of replacing it. I used outfits to allow variety in body shape for different NPCs and that may no longer be possible.

Silanu is not going to be happy with that.

I find it very handy to be able to repair magic items at 25 Armorer, instead of the old 50 points.

Agility now aids daggers, short swords and bows, which is also interesting.

Yes I thought that was a nice change. Kinda like finesse weapons in D&D allowing you to emphasize your dexterity instead of your strength for certain builds.

Some bugs so far:

Oblivion gates appearing before going to weynon priory
Vicente Valtieri randomly goes bald
Ascended Immortals from Mankar Cameron's paradise appearing in Dunbarrow Cove
Sometimes plants don't disappear after they're foraged
Crashing after making more than four potions at once


Perks of Vicente going bald: I did dig the new Noseferatu movie. BIll Skarsgard can get it.

New player issues I'm seeing online: They don't know how to level up. One guy beat the entire game fighting wolves and scamps before asking online when he's suppose to level up. Another guy only did the main quest and never talked to anyone not needed in the main quest, never leveled up. He fast traveled everywhere if he could. Didn't even know about the guilds or the Arena. Someone else didn't know you were supposed to talk to Uriel Septim and there was a pile of mythic dawn bodies when he left the little room where he gets killed.

Did he not sleep at all? I am assuming that the level up system still requires nap time.


He missed 90% of the game! As poorly I RP, I wasn't that bad. Rule #1, learned in Daggerfall, reinforced in Morrowind: talk to everyone.

The not leveling up thing really amusing. Did they not wonder what the icon at the top of their screen all game was?

I'll admit that up until April 21st, when they announced the stream, I still thought it was all a bunch of BS. But I'm incredibly glad that I was incredibly wrong. Oblivion Remastered has been addicting to play. It feels so new yet so familiar at the same time.

And thankfully, they changed the leveling system. Although the jump from adept to expert difficulty is poorly done. Adept is too easy and expert is an absurd jump in how hard it is. That's one of the things I most want to see fixed.

But overall, it's fantastic.

And of course, my first character is an Argonian.

@ RaderOfTheLostArk- Yes, I am disappointed the slider scale is gone from the OG. The balance of the difficult is not well done and hope a patch will address that.

@ Kane-Incredible that people do not look things up on the net...

**

The only bug I have seen (or should say heard) is when I entered a cave and the rain audio kept playing from the outside world. It totally ruined my sneak build and I lost all ability to gauge the enemy, haha

There are plenty of visual glitches all over the place when exploring outside. The UI needs work too.

Still, I am loving it so much and will play the Oblivion out of it. The dirt tracks have a real muddy look and feel after rain- looks so nice!

Never slept. I'm guessing when there was that span of time Martin asks to study he just waited and didn't do anything else.

I'm so meticulous about talking to everyone I can due to Oblivion that even in Baldur's Gate 3 I spoke to everyone I could.

I wonder if they were primarily FPS gamers.

That's likely, honestly.

The fast traveling doesn't surprise me at all, either. I see so many gameplay clips of people who are always in a rush. Fast travel forever, and sprint everywhere they go.

People are always in such a hurry to get nowhere.

I've got two alchemist characters right now who I just explore and pick lil mushrooms with. One specializes in healing and buffs and the other in poisons. Is it putting off the main quest? Sure. But I"m having fun.

This is going to be a hot take, but I’m of the opinion that BGS games should drop the main quest and just focus on doing the best possible faction and side quests. I haven’t really enjoyed a BGS main quest since Oblivion. Fallout3’s was ok, but I thought the side stuff was more interesting. Skyrim’s was underwhelming, IMO, and I never even finished Fallout4’s main quest. Starfield’s is likewise mediocre, IMO.

It has been years since Beth made a good story game- even the side quests have deteriorated into simple fetch and carry quests. I am still in shock over what they called a 'bard's college'...Beth needs to hire new story writers, period. I enjoy playing Beth games only for the exploring and collecting items/weapons.