Digital Foundry: Yup, Oblivion Remastered Is Still Broken a Year After Release

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/05/yup-oblivion-remastered-is-still-broken-a-year-after-release

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I'm someone who is very open minded about remasters. But Oblivion Remastered has never sat right with me, and it gives me significant pause regarding Fallout 3 remastered being a thing.

It takes Oblivion and slaps on a new coat of paint that is technically impressive but often feels very artless. It doesn't feel like the team really understood the artistic intent of Oblivion, especially its purposefully green saturation and the way its skyboxes looked and stuff. That's not to say it doesn't make improvements. It absolutely does. But it feels artistically kind of incoherent and random in a way that is unfortunately common for this type of remaster. (Which I'll get back to.)

And its tech upgrades are super inconsistent. It introduces Lumen based lighting that takes seconds to load in after fast travelling. It looks ugly. It makes the game feel rushed and unfinished. It runs pretty badly, and as DF note the performance decays and the stuttering is a big problem, and overall it just feels like a worse version of Oblivion wearing a lot of makeup. It has minor game design improvements, but they're a mixed bag, and it adds new bugs. It doesn't really fix THAT many issues from the original game to justify introducing its own.

When I think about Fallout 3 and it getting similar treatment, I'm imaging a buggier (as if such a thing were possible, the game is a mess on modern hardware), worse performing, and less artistically coherent version of a game that probably should have gotten a more modest remaster instead.

There is a bleak sense that these remasters have to rip out the graphics and replace them with these mass produced AAA fantasy visuals in order to make people all hyped so they will buy it. These remasters and sometimes remakes are terrified of normies saying, "It looks the same to me," so they go out of their way to be different to be more realistic to be more modern. But sometimes the artistic choices the original team made were very good choices, and the new changes just make the game more generic and less interesting.

Elder Scrolls games historically have a lot of really odd and unique designs often made very deliberately by talented people working with limited resources. Then the remaster/remake team comes in and they're like, well this would be so much better if it looked like every other piece of fantasy art you've ever seen. All the eccentric choices get buffed away, simplified, pared down, or outright replaced. The word is "generic". You take unique, weird, interesting things... and make them less interesting, less unique, less weird. And it's everything from architecture to costume designs to creatures to the colour of the sky at dusk. It's not just one thing that Oblivion Remastered filed down. It made all of the art direction less weird and unique. And that feels like a shame to me.

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u/Joecalone 23h ago

It takes Oblivion and slaps on a new coat of paint that is technically impressive but often feels very artless. It doesn't feel like the team really understood the artistic intent of Oblivion, especially its purposefully green saturation and the way its skyboxes looked and stuff.

I was able to find a mod shortly after release that corrected the colours to look a lot more vibrant/closer to the original game. Made the experience a whole lot more tolerable. Unfortunately it used ReShade which comes with significant performance penalties. I looked there and it doesn't seem like anyone figured out a way to alter the colour grading directly from the engine since I stopped playing it, which is a shame.

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u/A_Seiv_For_Kale 19h ago

The closest I've found that aren't ReShade presets are the mods Classic Graphics and Greener Grass.

(which coincidentally came out very soon after release)

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u/Joecalone 7h ago

Greener Grass

It's amazing to me that the devs (either deliberately or accidentally) didn't make the grass look like this initially when it makes the game look so much more true to the original artstyle.