I’ve opened this year with three different roleplaying games on the go. And so far, what I’m seeing is that one of the three roleplaying games is dated in a much, much more severe way than I was prepared for.

That game, is, of course, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks 2006), which was remastered just last year. A fresh coat of paint is actually revealing, rather than concealing. But don’t get it confused: Oblivion with a 2025 coat of paint now looks gorgeous in many respects, a new, shiny-looking version of 2006’s Cyrodiil. The Elder Scrolls IV was my very first proper roleplaying game. As a little girl, I grew up playing a diet of almost exclusively 3D platformers – Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Jak and Daxter, Sly Cooper – these were my bread and butter. And then I played Oblivion and this is where I think my first “shift” occurred, a shift in understanding about what video games could be. The potential of them. 

Oblivion is still a kind of awe-inspiring achievement, to my mind. An enormous pastoral fantasy landscape that you can explore in any direction at any time. It felt like being involved in The Lord of the Rings, taking part in fighting for an empire on the brink of collapse in the face of demonic invasion. But you didn’t even have to worry about that, as absurd as that sounds. You could run off and become an assassin. You could become a thief, or a mercenary for hire. You could learn the arts of magic and pretend you were a scholar. In other words, you could be immersed in the world in a totally new way to me. My child-brain had never felt such immersion in a video game before.

I remember vividly the Dark Brotherhood quest where you have to fake someone’s death with a poisoned blade. When you’ve done that, you have to flee town and wait twenty-four hours, before coming back in to give the ‘victim’ the antidote to the poison, who is waiting to be embalmed in the chapel. I enjoyed continuing to run into the woods, treating the quest seriously, and not just hitting “wait 24 hours” in the in-game wait menu. Instead, I’d treat my outlaw status seriously (even if the game system didn’t), moving into the woods for a day, hunting for my food, and scurrying into a nearby Ayleid ruin to find a place to rest. But the game doesn’t encourage any of this with any of its systems, or any of its character interactions. Oblivion is a shallow game that the player is forced to deepen themselves. There are whole laundry-lists of suggestions to make the game more immersive: “hunt for your food, change into clothes rather than just running around town in full plate armour 24/7, don’t fast travel but instead walk manually everywhere to appreciate the size of the world, sleep in a bed instead of standing around for twenty-four hours”, and so on. This, I think, raises the question of what kinds of systems we want in a game. Would we actually want these things simulated? Maybe not. The fact that we have an option, that the systems technically support this extraneous roleplaying-heavy playstyle, is enough.

Forcing roleplaying scenarios to work in Ratchet & Clank were discarded (mostly) for the actual framework found in Oblivion. You could sit on benches, buy houses, spend days doing nothing but exploring cities and talking to random people. The game’s story seemed full of roleplaying opportunities, and even if the combat wasn’t totally satisfying, it was mitigated by the sheer vastness and at times darkness present in the game. Exploring the dungeons was terrifying and the number of enemies within them seemed endless.

While returning to Oblivion, I have two games to immediately compare it to in my mind. Those two games that I’m currently playing are Dark Souls III (FromSoftware 2016) and Baldur’s Gate III (Larian Studios 2023). These are both first-time playthroughs of each game that I’ve been putting off playing for a long time. As I talked about in my Roadmap for this year, I’m done with excuses and taking the easy route. Even if video games aren’t particularly strenuous a lot of the time, I’m sick of telling myself that I’ll go even easier and do basically nothing. So these massive games are currently being whittled down. 

The thing that strikes me is that it feels like Oblivion relies on the player to do so much of the heavy lifting when it comes to roleplaying. Immersion is Bethesda’s biggest and best trick in their playbook. The expectation is that the world itself, rather than the characters that inhabit it, should be the player’s object of fascination. When I was younger, this was not only easier to achieve, but it was actually what I was looking for from a roleplaying game. A large part of my research this year will be focusing on the reasons why we play video games, and how video games can be designed to have positive effects on the people playing them. Escapism feels like the primary driving motivator behind many Elder Scrolls games, if not all of them. That’s what a lot of players come to these games for – which isn’t a bad thing! In fact, it’s a good thing. Oblivion is still a fun game in many ways, but I think where it fails, by and large, is in its dialogue and character-driven systems. I can’t think of any substantive choices where I was really worried about what would happen next. In particular, because there’s only one path forward in almost every quest. Just when you think a moral choice might be relevant, there’s no way to circumvent a particular choice. So the impact of performing that act can ring a little hollow, particularly on subsequent playthroughs, where it is clear that you’re expected to follow the game’s script, just like everyone else.

Sure, it’s fun to observe the wacky Radiant AI NPCs doing their thing – talking to each other in silly ways, stealing bread from other NPCs because they’re hungry and being murdered by the guards for it, or just generally bugging out – but when you talk to them, they generally have their one unique character line, a few other lines for worldbuilding or setting information, or anything relating to their quest, and then they cease to exist. There’s almost no-one in Oblivion I really feel like I know, or who has quirks that impact the story. I remember a lot of character names, to be sure – Raminus Polus, Hannibal Traven, Mannimarco, The Gray Fox, Armand Christophe – but what motivates these people? Even the most important of these characters are given very little time to actually know them. We fill in the blanks ourselves with imagination, just as we do with immersion and worldbuilding. I think the player does a lot of the heavy lifting, again. 

The idea of choice and then consequence is very far from the forefront of Oblivion’s design. This kind of design is not a bad thing. But I can’t really think of any conversation that’s truly interesting in Oblivion. Characters are also an issue for Oblivion. There are names I remember, but I think just because of how long I spent in that world as a child. These days, there’s no character I really care to listen to besides the Emperor, Jauffre, Sheogorath, or Lucien Lachance for any extended period of time. And again, the story’s main antagonist, Mankar Camoran, gets a short amount of time in the spotlight giving monologues and little else. Everyone in Oblivion is there to spout their lines and little else. I’ve talked about the weird nature of Oblivion’s necromancers, but there’s something even more revealing about how the majority of the game acts this way. Baldur’s Gate III has one-line characters, to be sure, and given there are more of them, I can’t necessarily remember them yet either, but probably with enough hours spent, I will remember some more. The main difference that separates Oblivion and Baldur’s Gate III is the depth that most characters, and many decisions, are given. There are more options to move through a quest that also result in the game responding in a different way, rather than just “go here, kill x, return”. Dialogue is my main problem – it is so restrictive that the character you construct in your head simply can’t always exist in dialogue. You’re either a goody-two-shoes, a lunatic, someone so painfully unobservant they must ask stupid questions, or a sycophant. These are all fairly extreme positions, but it’s what you’re stuck with throughout Oblivion‘s entire runtime. Baldur’s Gate III, on the other hand, lets you play many different kinds of characters outside of these extremes, ask far more sensible questions, and approach situations with a nuance outside of “I am a good champion” or “I am a lunatic murdering assassin”.

All this isn’t to say that I no longer like Oblivion, or that I don’t still revere it in the same way, but its design feels particularly flawed when the graphics have been dragged into the modern age. When I play the original version, with its brighter colours and worse-looking characters, there’s no disjunction. I can sink into a world that I know inside and out, and do it in a way that feels congruent in both gameplay and presentation. A 2025-looking Oblivion makes its flaws painfully apparent. 

Let’s look at Dark Souls III, shall we? It feels unfair to compare a game designed in 2006 to two games, one designed a decade later, and the other almost two decades later, but I think it’s important to do when Oblivion is headlined on the market once more, sold as a new game. Dark Souls III presents a fundamentally broken world, which is accessed in a pretty linear fashion. I’m up to Farron Keep, but so far it seems like there’s no real choice of which way to go – interesting when compared to the original Dark Souls (FromSoftware 2011) or Demon’s Souls (FromSoftware 2009), where you could choose which area you wanted to tackle first. Dark Souls III nonetheless holds my attention because the challenges put in my way feel worth tackling. 

Take the second area, the High Wall of Lothric, which has many paths but only one way forward. The challenge is in finding which path works, and slowly chipping away at the opponents and traps put in your way.  Overcoming the overwhelming amount of obstacles to reach the next checkpoint is one of the most satisfying things imaginable, even putting aside surmounting the unique, dangerous boss encounters. Oblivion’s dungeon design, simply due to the incredible size of the world, is far less crafted. Instead, everything is modular, which makes a lot of sense for a game on this scale. But no longer do I feel the same appeal of areas that are just so vast. I tried to do a bit of walking around in Oblivion. It used to be something I enjoyed very much, seeing the world and luxuriating in time spent in the wilderness. This was, at first, still an isolating prospect. It really does feel awesome to buy some supplies, strike out into the wilderness, and not return back to civilization for weeks. My favourite way to do this is to go into the wilds to the east of Niben Bay, past the poor city of Bravil, and find the one spot of civilization out there, a small inn out by the river, and base myself out there. It was still just as fun to make my own goals and to immerse myself in the world in that way. 

But looking at the structure of the world, there was nothing that was as interesting about Oblivion as the foreboding world of Dark Souls III, which was constantly challenging me to get better at the game, to master myself, and to stay on top of a high level of difficulty. Oblivion’s challenges never change. And as I said  before – the characters don’t challenge me either. There’s no expectation that anyone will truly remember or recall what I did before. This wasn’t a problem back in 2006, but it feels much more obvious now, especially when compared to Baldur’s Gate III. 

Baldur’s Gate III is a game that people have raved about for so many good reasons, ever since it came out. I bought it a long time ago, but never really convinced myself I had the time until last year. Getting properly stuck into it over the last month, it is awe-inspiring just how well-rendered the characters are, even from the get-go. This is helped of course by great facial animations and incredible voice acting, but even the writing itself is responsive and accommodating of so many different player decisions. Character creation is relevant beyond the first few moments of the game, unlike Oblivion, with abilities to bring up your class or species in discussion coming up pretty consistently through Act One. Each combat encounter is carefully curated, with a new challenge around every corner. And every companion has something to bring to the table. Shadowheart has a tough exterior but it’s easy to crack, and see the vulnerable woman beneath it. Lae’zel is a confrontational hothead who espouses her culture’s virtues (namely: murder things and might makes right), but I can already see how you can try to appeal to her, to think of the world less transactionally. I’m warming up to Astarion in a big way, as well, for the ways in which he displays emotional vulnerability but also masks it with a noble air. Astarion presents this nuance with an undercurrent of a fear of being treated as a monster. This isn’t to start talking about the moral choices set up all throughout the game, all of which feel significant thanks to the game’s framing, and the knowledge that the game follows through on these varying choices. Just knowing that the game can change is enough to make me interested in every decision, even if it doesn’t really do very much in the long run. Because I know that there’ll be a choice just round the corner that does. 

Oblivion, on reflection, has one companion that stands out. Mazoga the Orc, who does go through a little arc in her mini two-quest sequence. She wants to be a knight, and helping her get revenge is one of the best little quests in the game, and it is cool to see her found her own little knightly order. She deserves it. It’s also genuinely a little confrontational to talk to her for the first time, as she rubs people the wrong way by assuming that you’re just another anti-Orc person here to tell her that she can’t be a knight. But she’s a character you warm to pretty easily after those opening moments of miscommunication, and learning about her is satisfying. 

What I’m saying, I think, is that Oblivion is still a good game. Oblivion still has me hooked to the screen when I’m playing it. But given that it’s also a repackaged version of a game from 2006, I can’t help but compare these tiny moments of success to the much more powerful and impactful successes of these newer games. As I continue to play through all of them, I’ll no doubt return to each one individually and write an article on them. But for now, I think it’s important to reflect on how Oblivion struggles as a more modern-looking RPG. Only a few quests and a few characters have the depth that I think players expect. The world facilitates fun only for as long as the game’s systems interest you, because much of the wider world isn’t as curated as I think most players have now come to appreciate.

If there’s any takeaway from all of this, it is that I think we do want and appreciate, now more than ever, a more curated experience. Those aren’t easy to make. By no means are these easy things to make, or cheap things to produce, the latter of which is a huge factor in game development. And I can’t just say “go, make good video games!” as I hear so many say. Video game production is hard. And there really is still so much to love and enjoy about Oblivion, even if it is your first time playing the game in 2026. Either the remastered version or the original version are games I could still recommend. But, but, there are other games with more polished, more curated, more interesting stories and gameplay these days that feel more rewarding to get into. It’s hard to articulate how I feel about Oblivion beyond “it is still good, but…”, and while I do feel that sounds unfair, it’s really the only conclusion I can draw. Oblivion just doesn’t feel like it exists properly in the year 2026. 

I look forward to getting through more and more roleplaying games this year, writing about all three of these games some more, and then also getting back to my series on Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (Obsidian Entertainment 2004), and I hope to see you along for the ride!