Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion’s rumoured Unreal Engine remake has a new take on stealth, stamina and blocking, say rumours

A new report has thrown fuel on the fire labelled “Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion remake”. Don’t ask me why people have started labelling fires. It’s probably a rite to summon a Daedra, or something. Anyway, a new version of Bethesda’s somewhat scorned 2006 RPG is allegedly in the works at Singapore-based Virtuos. If rumour speak true, it’s being made in Unreal Engine 5, and will feature changes to core systems like blocking, stamina, and sneaking.

The peddler of this particular leak is MP1st, who I cherish for their minute attention to things like multiplayer shooter update changelogs, but don’t especially know as a spreader of inside gossip. As such, I was wary of writing this up yesterday. But on reflection, there is a paper trail: an Oblivion remake is mentioned (among many other things) on the 2020 planning document Microsoft accidentally shared as part of FTC court proceedings back in 2023. So here I am playing Journo Come Lately.

MP1st attribute their information to the website of a “former Virtuos employee” who worked on the game from 2023 to 2024. They’d rather not say who or link to the website in question because they want to protect the user’s privacy, which I’m sure has nothing to do with wanting other sites to link to them so they can rank highly on Google for the term “Oblivion remake”.

My sibling journalists, if that’s the actual thinking here, I am not judging. When I was OXM’s online editor I had a whole network of speculative Skyrim DLC pieces that daisy-chained to each other in a slow-mo SEO centrifuge of surgically imagined Dwemer fan fiction. Given that everything lives in the cloud, now, I’m pretty sure current Bethesda developers struggle to distinguish my Tamrielic Google-stew from the official lore bible. They’re probably training AIs with it. I suspect it’s a core component of the plot of The Elder Scrolls 6.

Anyway, the former Virtuos employee supposedly cited by MP1st claims that Oblivion is being “fully remade” using Epic’s ubiquitous Unreal tools, rather than Bethesda’s Creation Engine (a descendant of the Gamebryo engine originally used for Oblivion). Apparently, the project makes changes to six particular aspects of the 2006 game: in MP1st’s paraphrase, “Stamina, Sneak, Blocking, Archery, Hit Reaction, and HUD”.

As regards blocking, the remake developers have apparently taken inspiration from Soulslikes, because the old system was too “boring” and “frustrating”. The presentation of sneaking has allegedly been freshened up with highlighted icons, and damage calculation has been reworked. The remake’s handling of stamina is said to be more forgiving – it’s harder to get knocked down when you run out of juice. The HUD has been revamped for younger players, and they’ve added hit reactions for the player and NPCs to make combat more readable. Archery, finally, now has a selection of third and first-person viewpoints.

All of which sounds plausible enough, in that I could use approximately this combination of ideas to describe any number of remakes of games from the mid-aughts.

Let’s briefly return to that leaked 2020 Microsoft planning document. It had the Oblivion remaster down for release in fiscal year 2022. I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen? If it did, our standing with Bethesda PR is even worse than I thought. Perhaps the 2020 planning document was actually an AI-generated descendant of my network of articles on the doings of the Dwemer. I am reporting upon a hell of my own creation!

It can’t be, though, because the document also made mention of a Fallout 3 remaster and, perhaps most excitingly, Dishonored 3. We’ll hopefully get closure on all this at the next Xbox Developer Direct on 23rd January. There’s a “brand new game” in the offing.

Oblivion is perhaps the least-loved of the Elder Scrolls, or the least trendy, anyway. It’s sort of a big green lobby area parked between the oddness of Morrowind and the grandness of Skyrim. Still, it made a splash as the first proper Elder Scrolls game for consoles, and I’m intrigued by the notion that it might be considered hip again. After all, it’s hip to like things other people hate. I’m off to write another load of SEO-teasing fan fiction about the tragedy of Fithragaer, the most absent-minded battlemage in Cyrodiil.