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First it was a rumor, then it was pretty much confirmed by a leak: There’s a remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion coming.
I just hope they didn’t remaster all the ugly out of its mugs.
There are unwell people on the internet who will try to convince you that every RPG before 2020 was full of hot people, but it’s not true. Oblivion is so known for its ugly NPCs that a few years ago we asked Chris to go look for the ugliest Oblivion faces he could find.
The first batch of NPCs Chris encountered were pretty regular-looking. Not realistic—they have a certain Mr Potato Head quality—but normal, if you suspend disbelief and accept that they’re all a little too similar-looking.
Later, however, Chris met Jorck the Outcast—that’s him in the screenshot above—and that’s definitely a dude who could have success at the World Gurning Championships. Chris described his stretched face texture as “fleshy salt-water taffy.”
I like Jorck and the other oddballs in Oblivion, and I also like that even its prettier NPCs are still just regular-looking folks (I threw a variety into the gallery below). I look a bit weird myself, and when I go outside my apartment and see other people’s weird faces, I know that all is well: I have not woken up in a Twilight Zone world where everyone is hot except me. Only some people are hot, as it should be.
Some might object and say that there is no need for a fantasy RPG to reflect the real world’s full spectrum of chin indeterminacy and eyeball ratlikeness, but there is also no need for it to be populated by bombshells. I suppose it comes down to what sort of fantasy you’re after.
Oblivion is a game in which, forgetting about his quest to find ugly NPCs, Chris broke into the house of a glassy-eyed dude named Salomon Geonette and robbed him while he slept—picking the pockets of his full-clothed sleeping body—and then stood outside his house for 13 days waiting for him to go on a trip, just to see what would happen to him. (Wolf killed him.)
I’m not sure what kind of fantasy that represents, but it isn’t one that should take place in a world full of hotties, if you ask me.
None of the leaked Oblivion remaster screenshots show closeups of NPC faces, but we do have a clue about the direction the developers might’ve gone, because a character that appeared in Oblivion also appeared in Starfield.
Here’s the Adoring Fan in Oblivion and in Starfield:
They do have similar features, despite the Starfield version not being an elf, but as much as I try to see the character on the right as a more realistic version of the character on the left rather than a sultrier version, I don’t think I can do it.
The likeness is totally lost. The round face, the low forehead, the texture between the upper eyelids and arched eyebrows that’s so stretched it looks like a botched facelift… with none of that preserved, the guy on the right looks like an actor people pretend isn’t hot but actually is. He’d play British gangsters and playfully flirt with Amelia Dimoldenberg in a chicken shop.
Maybe it just isn’t possible to modernize old characters without making them hotter. I suppose we’ll find out soon: If the rumors are true, the Oblivion remaster is very near.
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Kurt Indovina
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