There’s no official mod support for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But when has that ever stopped modders from forcibly isekai-ing their favourite anime characters into the wrong realm? Not even 24 hours have passed since the fantasy RPG remaster was released in a “surprise” announcement by Bethesda, and the modding scene has already created 90+ mods and counting (and that’s just on one popular modding website). What’s most intriguing is that they’ve discovered some old mods for the original game still work in the remaster. It’s an exciting time to be an Elder Scrolls modder.
As posted on Reddit, one curious player dusted off a simple mod from 2008 which adds late game armour to your prison cell at the start of the game. When they tested this in the new remaster it “worked perfectly” – but only after manually updating a plugins.txt file in the game’s folders.
This plugins file is usually handled by the Oblivion mod manager but that won’t work in the remaster, so you have to add an extra line to the end of the .txt file by hand. But aside from that bit of fiddling, it works. Another user followed the same steps and found that, yes, the spiffy Daedric armour from late in the game does indeed appear in your shiny remastered cell.
While this opens up a lot of possibilities, it’ll likely take time for the roving gangs of modders to scrounge their way through the ancient library of Oblivion mods in search of the most compatible ones. Right now it looks like simpler mods which involve model swaps are doable, provided you add new models to Unreal’s paks (paks are basically beefy little folders full of assets). But not everything is going to be so cut and dry. Also, this is all in service of a fancy schmancy remaster, which means many older glow-up mods, like texture packs, are somewhat redundant. But others which involve new quests or characters, or rejigged systems of magic, might feasibly be ported. Who knows.
Image credit: Bethesda
Meanwhile, modders are cracking on with other straightforward alterations for the remaster. On NexusMods, there’s a mod that bumps up the colour so that the world looks as bright and saturated as you remember. Another removes the need to repair weapons. And, of course, there’s one that lets you skip the Bethesda and Virtuos logo screens on startup.
The current most popular mod lets you remove carry weight restrictions altogether. Which I find deeply insulting to the spirit of Oblivion. Is it even an Elder Scrolls game if you don’t spend half your time by the roadside dumping surplus arrows and pots you accidentally picked up in a neighbour’s house? Come on, folks. Embrace the chafe.
The remaster changed a lot of stuff. The user interface, for instance, has been completely reworked. And your character’s movement has seen a lot of tweaks and improvements. There are new sound effects, VFX, and it’s all slathered in Unreal’s real-time lighting. Most significantly, the levelling system has been redesigned, so the divisive level scaling you may remember from – ugh – two decades ago is no longer present in the same form. I can’t wait to see some absolute masochist mod it back in.
