Owned this on Steam first but I encountered strange bugs when trying to mod that version which require convoluted, strange, or poorly explained workarounds. In my experience, this is a better version to play to avoid the nonsense. While I love Morrowind dearly, I've never convinced a friend to play it because it's so not the same style of action RPG that the series leaned into. Any Skyrim run I play is usually bloated to the point of falling apart at the seams just to make it feel fresh and fun these days. Oblivion has none of that baggage for me. The vanilla experience has some jank, sure, but it's vastly more amusing jank. Surely you've already seen clips illustrating how the tone can whip between a serious, fascinating story with intrigue and deception that captivates and a digital recreation of the Three Stooges with injections of Monty Python. I love the storytelling in the best questlines, the weakest still have their neat moments, and the ugly is just pure glee to witness.
This is a really solid remake. There's some excellent voice talent and sound in general, and the redesigns largely capture the original's essence. From what I can tell, the new visuals like Saturn passing by the station are great. It's so competently made though that I feel the need to nitpick what isn't so great. Firstly, I'm running this on a toaster. Not expecting the performance to be good with this fossil of a PC, so that's fine- not a fault of the remake. That said, the demo drops you into the thick of things without a chance to tweak settings on your own. That, and apparently the intro cutscences aren't pre-rendered? They're extremely choppy for me, so I unfortunately couldn't stand to see how things had changed in that regard. I'd like to see that changed so I could get the whole experience the first time loading it up. Seems like a performance hit that could be spared, though it probably won't affect any systems that meet recommended specs. Some things have animations now that really slow the pace down. I think the surgery pods make sense to be a bit slow, but the softs really do seem to take their sweet time to get useful thanks to the new animation that plays each time. Speeding up this animation would seem to help the controls feel more responsive- fighting them probably isn't worth carrying over to the remake. Overall, though, the remake is looking very good. The Nightdive team are clearly aware of what made the original great and how they can freshen things up just enough. The atmosphere and dark humor are still intact, and the gameplay hasn't been compromised in favor of convenience. Also nice to see that someone left at least a few unopened soda cans. Looking forward to the full release!
