The Oblivion Remaster Is Real, and Could Be Out Sooner Than You Think

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is undoubtedly one of the most important open world games ever made — the pivotal game inspired a decade of open world design, and lay the foundations for Skyrim. For years now, we’ve heard rumors of Oblivion getting a remake, and now we can definitively say, yes, that remaster is real. And it might be coming out sooner than you expect.

A host of screenshots were discovered on the website of Virtuos, a co-development studio that has worked as an external developer on a wide array of games — Age of Mythology: Retold, Dark Souls Remastered, NieR: Automata, Rise of the Ronin, and more.

Fans poking around on Virtuos site discovered nearly a dozen screenshots, and while the images have since been taken down, it’s been corroborated by multiple sites and users that they indeed existed — and they’re all now on Reddit and Imgur. One of the screenshots is even a comparison between the 2006 game and the remaster.

Now we don’t know if Virtuos was the primary developer on the remaster, or if they served more of a support role. But the screenshots give us a pretty good look at how the classic game has been redesigned. What’s kind of funny about these in particular, however, is that it shows the remaster really is keeping the spirit of Oblivion alive.

As one of the very first Xbox 360 games, Oblivion had a bit of a strange color palette where everything blended together. Many would come to call this generation of games the “brown” generation, with filters and liberal use of the color brown that made many games dark, almost muddy in a way. But it’s almost iconic at this point, seeing how a whole swathe of games embraced the same distinct visual style. Oblivion itself almost made liberal use of bloom effects that had the sun constantly blinding you. Yeah, that might sound annoying, but it’s weird what we get nostalgic for.

While this remaster certainly looks like a massive step up visually, even just from these screenshots, it’s clear that the vibe of Oblivion is perfectly intact. Ironically, these screenshots look even more brown than the original game, and the lighting is clearly still bright in the way it reflects off of armor. It’s one of those things that’s hard to put your finger on, but the images just inherently feel like Oblivion.

But as good as these look, the bigger surprise is that Oblivion Remastered might be on the verge of release. For months now, there have been rumors that the game is finished and ready to go, with Bethesda just waiting for a time to shadow drop it — even a month ago, reports were saying so. Now GiantBomb’s Jeff Grubb has said the week of April 21 is when we’ll see the game's shadow drop. It’s unclear if this release is going to be tied to any kind of event, like an Xbox Developer Direct, or not.

Eurogamer is also reporting the release is planned for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC — which would make sense with Xbox’s recent push to go multiplatform. There’s also apparently going to be a Deluxe Edition that, I kid you not, includes horse armor — something that became a massive in-joke with the original game when you could purchase an additional $2.50 DLC that gave your horse armor.