After a frantic few weeks of rumors, the announcement day for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remaster has arrived. Bethesda has confirmed that a dedicated stream will air today on Twitch and YouTube starting at 11 AM Eastern Time/8 AM Pacific Time/4 PM British Time.
According to rumors, the game should be shadowdropped, meaning that it should also be released right after the stream. Meanwhile, we have uncovered some details about the developer’s design philosophy for this project. Bethesda picked Singaporean game developer Virtuos to aid them in this remaster. The studio previously worked on the Nintendo Switch port of NieR Automata: End of Yorha Edition and on The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition, while also collaborating on major triple-A projects like Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Island 2, Horizon Forbidden West – Complete Edition, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Last year, game development website 80Lv interviewed Virtuos specifically about their work on remasters and ports. During the interview, Design Director Nicolas Roginski shared a reply that, in hindsight, cannot have been referencing anything other than the Oblivion Remaster:
We are working on a very big, unannounced project. Our approach for the design work of this remake is simple but challenging. It’s challenging, mainly because of players’ perception of their old memories. We tend to recollect things much better than they really were. Hence, if we deliver the reality of what gaming was like in the earlier days, there is a good chance that players will be disappointed because it won’t match the “feeling” of their memories.
To produce a quality remake, we aim at recreating the “feeling of the memory”, not the actual memory. Our design approach at Virtuos is “Keep, Improve, Create”:
- Keep what is core to the original vision and core memories players have of the original game.
- Improve what you need to modernize because standards have evolved.
- Create in the sense of what needs to be removed or added to surprise the player, and set a new standard for the genre, which has evolved over the years.
Virtuos is also working alongside Konami on another very big project, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. However, the interview was published in March 2024, while MGS Delta: Snake Eater had been announced in May 2023 and was in fact already referenced in the 80Lv article. As such, it’s almost guaranteed that Roginski had to have been referring to the Oblivion Remaster.
The idea of recreating the feeling of the memory is definitely the right one, at least on paper. However, executing that concept is undoubtedly harder than simply adopting it. The return of The Elder Scrolls IV is sure to induce a lot of nostalgia in a lot of people, but only a quality product can make it resurface with positive feelings.
We likely won’t have to wait long to judge it all first-hand. Are you excited? Let us know in the comments.
