A YouTube video shows how the 16-year-old Oblivion can still shine today with a lot of mods and ray tracing effects.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion holds a special place in my heart: I hadn’t played Morrowind, and Oblivion was the first time I experienced a 3D open-world game that kept me glued to the screen for a very long time, if only because of its size.
I myself have moved on in the meantime, but an active community is still dedicated to the aged Bethesda title. The YouTube channel (Digital Dreams) has now made the most of the game’s now clearly outdated graphics and shows in its video how Oblivion can look in 2022.
This is how Oblivion can look today
I don’t want to bore you any longer with a long preface, so I’ll present the video in question right now:
For comparison, here you also have gameplay of the original from 2006 from our video archive, the enormous difference becomes clearer.
The creator of the video claims to have used over 200 mods for his upgraded Oblivion version. On top of that came an ENB mod, special shaders and ray tracing effects.
To handle all this, however, a real high-end system will probably be necessary. To record the graphics splendour, a PC with a Ryzen 9 processor, 32 GB RAM and an RTX 3090 graphics card was used – in other words, a very powerful machine.
The result also looks correspondingly chic. Especially the realistic-looking light makes the textures, some of which have been greatly improved, look very modern. In some scenes, such as in front of the Ayleid ruins outside the imperial city, this looks really great in the foreground.
Of course, even a truckload of mods can’t hide the fact that this is still a 2006 title: The stiff animations, the water and the LOD textures then do show that this is not a full remaster.
If you now wish to save Cyrodiil from the Daedra hordes from the realm of oblivion, we would like to remind you of Skyblivion. The modding project has set itself the goal of developing a complete remake of Oblivion in the Skyrim engine. You can get an impression of Skyblivion in the developers’ video:
While experience shows that such projects take a very long time, the modders provide regular updates on the development of the gigantic fan remake and also seem to be continuously making great progress. For all fans of the fourth Elder Scrolls, this is perhaps a small ray of hope.
