A few hours ago, Bethesda Game Studios announced that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has surpassed 4 million players in its first four days since its launch on April 22. It’s undoubtedly an excellent early result, albeit not an unexpected one. Oblivion was, after all, already a very popular game in its time, selling three million units in less than a year. Of course, this remaster has the advantage of being included with Game Pass, where PC and Xbox users with an active subscription can access it without paying an additional fee.
The marketing strategy might have worked in its favor, too. While Bethesda kept absolute silence until April 21, when they told fans to connect the following day to watch the full unveiling, there had been leaks and rumors since early 2025, and a few insiders had already correctly anticipated that it would be shadowdropped at some point in April. By the time the game launched on Tuesday, there was already intense anticipation among Elder Scrolls fans, essentially without any effort from Bethesda.
Elder Scrolls games have always had very long legs, thanks to the official support of Bethesda and the unofficial support of the legion of modders who still work hard on games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. Oblivion Remastered likely won’t get any more official content (though a few performance patches would definitely be welcome to improve the open world stuttering). Still, despite some limitations, the modding community is already hard at work, and there are already hundreds of mods on Nexus.
The game is unique because its graphics run on Unreal Engine 5, and its game logic is on the original Gamebryo engine. This makes it a bit more challenging to mod than the original game, as explained on the Nexus website:
- The core data for the game is still loaded from the plugin files, as with the original games; however, each game object (record) in the plugins is mapped from Oblivion Engine to Unreal Engine using JSON. This means that the traditional methods of detecting conflicts may not work anymore.
- When adding new content to the game, the JSON data for this content would need to be inserted.
- The JSON structures for many game objects include additional values that did not exist in the original game, and the purpose of them is currently unclear.
- Any text that is added to the game via plugins seems to show up with an “[NL]” prefix, which is currently thought to mean “Not Localised”. Investigations are ongoing to work out how to make mods that don’t have this prefix.
- The new Unreal Engine versions of the textures, models, particles and animation files appear to still be linked to the original version in some cases.
- The Level of Detail (LOD) for this game appears to use a completely new system, most likely heavily controlled by the Unreal Engine side of the game.
- The game uses several scripting languages across different systems, including an updated version of OBScript, Unreal Engine Code, and Unreal Engine Blueprints.
- Concerning a possible script extender for the game (equivalent to xOBSE), there is a challenge of the Creation Engine script extender devs being unfamiliar with Unreal Engine and Unreal Engine modding being unfamiliar with Creation Engine script extenders.
Fortunately, these challenges aren’t nearly enough to deter modders. Some of them have already paused their ongoing work on Skyrim to tinker with Oblivion Remastered. A lot of reverse engineering will have to be done, but the Bethesda modding community has already achieved the impossible with Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, extending their feature sets well beyond the original games’ scope. We’ll keep an eye on any noteworthy developments within the scene.
