Meh. If it’s not massively overhauled I’m not interested. Daggerfall Unity is a perfect example of the level of advancement I would like to see of remakes/remasters. I’m not expecting a Resident Evil remake level of change, but if it’s just a paint job I’m not wasting my money, I can mod these games myself.
Three mods make Oblivion the peak of its era:
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Leveled list fix. Any one will do. The base game fumbled it, and everyone knows that, so plenty of people have rebalanced it their own ways.
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Darnified UI. As with SkyUI: it scrunches things down to where they make sense on a 1080p monitor instead of a 480p television in the next room, and it adds a few sort-by options for loot goblins. There’s nothing to be done about the nested tabs because they’re fine. Morrowind has its mouse-driven WIMP setup, Oblivion has its 360 blades dashboard, it’s fine. They are endgame versions of what shaped their era.
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Quest message popup removal. You absolutely do not need a modal fucking dialog, ev-er-y single time your journal updates. The little ching! is enough.
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Oblivion was kind of really bad though. It had the worst level scaling of the genre.
I think the spell crafting was also toned down and more gated than Morrowind. And the equipment I think was overly simplified.
Progression was atrocious indeed.
You had all the reasons to cheese the system by levelling up as little as possible, or ignoring all but two or three of your class skills. Or even choosing to progress specifically in non-class skills.
Because trying out all of your class skills would make you level up way too fast, and suddenly you’re facing armies of enemies and you have zero edge against them.
Not sure how what exactly they changed with Skyrim, but the balance feels a lot better. Maybe it’s the perks, getting rid of classes entirely, or not tying enemy levels to yours that tightly.
Maybe they can fix that in this alleged Oblivion remake of them.
I feel like trying to combine
- high vertical power growth
- non linear “open world”
- power fantasy
all together is just fundamentally at odds with itself.
Personally I’d prefer to see less vertical power growth. I’d rather have the numbers stay somewhat constrained.
Like, let’s say the most damage you can ever do with a lightning spell is 100. Work backwards from that to figure out how much health things should have. We want a master mage to be able to blow mooks up in one zap, mid tier in 3, and big scary shit in 6.
A novice mage zaps for 20. We want mooks to take 3 hits, mid tier stuff maybe 10, and big scary stuff a lot.
Mooks: ~60hp Mid tier: ~210 Bosses: 600
If your gameplay is then deeper than a simple stat check, a novice can persevere and win against a big challenge.
I really super dislike it when you have stuff that looks like a mook or a boss, but is statted otherwise. I remember in Oblivion some witch lady was oddly high level, and she kept fighting despite having like 50 arrows in her face.
Something like that, but with more thought put into it than a Lemmy post from the couch.
I feel like of the 3 “human scaled” elder scrolls (since Arena and Daggerfall are another kind of madness), Oblivion is the one that would need a gameplay loop update the most.
Morrowind and Skyrim have different ways to manage progression and discovery, but Oblivion feels completely broken compared to both.
I wonder how this will effect Skyblivion.
