I've been playing a lot of Oblivion Remastered and was hoping on starting a discussion thread about it.
I've put in around 12 hours so far and it's everything I wanted from a remake. Aside from the gorgeous graphics overhaul, they added a lot of more subtle QoL changes that really add up. Having a sprint button is great, and the reworked leveling system is way better than how it used to be. Combat has also been enhanced in lots of subtle ways like significantly better animations and better impact when hitting enemies.
The remaster is very impressive, when news got leaked that this was in development I expected a low effort re-release with a higher resolution, but they managed to make it play like a modern title. The lighting is crazy good and the open world can look breathtaking at times. They also managed to keep all the old Oblivion charm by not messing around with things people loved - the game under the hood still works the same, glitches and hilarious NPCs are still intact. They even kept some goofs from the original.
The only two issues right now for me are:
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Open world performance is just not good. It hovers around 50FPS on my 3060 Ti in the open world on medium settings, which is rough.
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Difficulty settings are wack. Normal is too easy and hard is way too hard. The slider literally goes from 1x/1x damage taken/damage dealt to 3x/0.6! No idea why we can't get something in the middle, but luckily there's already a mod that fixes it (I'm now using 2x/0.75 which is the sweet spot).
If those get fixed, it's basically a perfect remaster. Anyone else here playing right now? How are you enjoying it?
I've not yet touched it. But since you mentioned it: How does leveling now work? And more importantly, how does enemy scaling work?
If I remember correctly, in the original, I felt strongest when I got Umbra at Lv 1 and just never levelled up.
Furthermore, how are the character animations? I saw the Emperor in the Remake and while the model was quite nice, in combination with his facial animations, I actually preferred the original. What I assume to be the original animations paird with updated models seemed too uncanny. However, that problem could be specific to him.
The old style auto added points based on what attributes you used. So if you leveled destruction a lot during level 5 you could get a boosted willpower or Intelligence stat when you leveled up. It was a little chaotic. Now you have 12 stat points(virtues) you can add to whatever 3 attributes you want maxed at 5 points per attribute.
IIRC in the old oblivion there was an arbitrary limit to how many skill points you can put in a stat depending on your class. This has been removed, you can now put up to 5 points in a single stat every time you level up to customize the build as you'd like. You get the same skill points regardless of skills you leveled up.
Some stats have been balanced, like how Agility now scales damage of daggers and shortswords now (before it was only bows). Many masteries have been rebalanced and changed to fit the playstyle more. Enemy scaling still exists and AFAIK enemies scale the same, but because leveling has been reworked you shouldn't have to worry about min-maxing or what skills you're gaining.
As for face animations, they're a little uncanny but overall I'm impressed with them. They look great, most of the time.
I haven't played the remaster, but the old Oblivion leveling system was exceedingly hard to do efficiently unless you planned in advance. It very much needed a rework, although skyrim dumbed it down way too much, in my opinion.
Basically, among all the skills, like destruction magic, blade, sneak, you pick 7 (I think it's 7) major skills. Those get a boost at the beginning. When you raise your various major skills 10 times, you level up. When you level up, you get to raise three attributes, like strength, speed, or intelligence. You get bonuses to how much you can raise an attribute per level, with 1 being the minimum and 5 being the max. The bonuses are determined by what skills you raised during the last level. For example, the sneak skill is tied to the agility attribute, so raising your sneak skill gets you a bigger agility bonus on leveling up. So, to optimize it, you'd have to raise your major skills exactly 10 times (so none of them go to waste) and fill out the bonuses by raising minor skills, which don't count towards a level up, to get the ideal spread of +5 to 3 attributes per level.
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn't understand the leveling system, they'd wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
Yep, the old "optimal" way to play, if you didn't want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.