Reading Oblivion has significantly improved for me now

Hey there! A while back, I found myself creeping around Skingrad in Oblivion Remastered, playing detective for some paranoiac dude named Glarthir. I wondered if Oblivion's mysterious side quests just popped up out of nowhere, seeing as I played the game back in 2006 when I was all of nine years old.

My memory might be a tad hazy, but I played Oblivion alongside Dad, who'd picked it up for his Xbox 360. To be honest, though, he never got much further than the sewers. I remember the game showing up with a fancy collector's edition, complete with an art book, map, metal coin, and two discs. I had no clue what The Elder Scrolls was at the time - didn't even know what RPG meant.

I was in awe of the character creator, but the numerous sliders and wide, unnerving faces left me stressed. So I went with a default white guy. The winding sewers of the Imperial City baffled my third-grader sense of direction then (a question for the ages: did Bethesda remove most of the sewer part in the remaster?). My attention span was terrible, so I couldn't care less about the emperor's assassination or the tasks I was supposed to complete. I do recall accidentally punching a priest – or maybe it was a fireball? Regardless, everyone thought I was the worst, so I high-tailed it outside where more priests wanted to kill me. You can probably guess how that day ended - I hit the power button and gave up.

Years went by, and I picked Oblivion up again on the PS3 after playing through Skyrim in 2012. I only rushed through the main quest, skipping all the dialogue because ... well, I was lazy.

I've since realized that Oblivion isn't just alright, but actually pretty darn great. It's a blast going back and tackling side quests in the remastered version, since none of them were grinded into my memories from my first playthrough. It seems I had no idea what I was doing when I was younger. Oh well, better late than never.

Now, if you're talking about additional quests, that likely means the remaster includes pre-existing DLCs more prominently in the base experience, not entirely new content. The remastered version offers technical updates, like 4K support, dynamic lighting, cross-save functionality, and Game Pass integration, but no brand-new side quests have been added.

Morgan Park has been gracing the pages of PC Gamer since 2018, initially as a freelancer before becoming a staff writer. Besides Oblivion, his writing endeavors have extended to Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before he got his big break, he spent his high school and college years churning out articles for small gaming sites without pay. Morgan is a beat writer focused on the latest shooters and the communities that play them, also contributing general news, reviews, features, guides, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.

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