Oblivion Remastered Is An Absolute Nightmare - OUT NOW

The lighting is the reality of ray tracing: with old school lighting tricks you have to setup light sources like a movie set to create the scene you want, with ray tracing you get realistic lighting... with no effort

Did you almost kill yourself with those stairs? Next video, Stairs Are An Absolute Nightmare?

There is something special in seeing you complain about something like inventory management in an original version only to complain about how worse it got in the remaster. Maybe it's schadenfreude or maybe it's irony. I'm personally leaning toward irony. Oddly enough this review reminds me of when AI upscaling first started being a thing in the mid to late 2010s and everyone was using it to touch up old video game textures and show what could be for remasters of beloved games. This was a bit before "hyperrealism everywhere" though that resurgence wasn't much different from what was going on in the late 2000s into the early 2010s. And the thing about it is- and your statement of the dungeon in the castle at around the 8:20 mark- yeah. Artistic integrity can easily be super lost with just increasing resolution, fidelity, or altering visual composition without taking into account style and narrative impact. While perhaps real life is hardly ever so... spotlighty on the right things, well. A good way to refer to it is blood. In Oblivion you can't smell old blood and you can't taste it on the air and you can smell it from deep in the cracks of stone in an unventilated area. So while being able to smell the blood from a few rooms down might be a great way to offer immersion and anticipation and dread, ultimately you can't really do that so you need to do visual tricks to get the same result. And that's part of where narrative comes into play beyond narrative sequencing, but through the essence of visual presentation. It's the reason why Silent Hill 1's opening sequence is so well-beloved to this day despite how old the graphics are. It still captures the feeling of dread that creeps into you when you know something in a house or city is wrong and you can smell it coming before you finally find the corpse in the room. I don't know what the balancing act for realistic sequencing and narrative impact framing is especially for video games, especially given how many people I've seen who conflate Red Dead Redemption 2 and other similar games that have hyperrealistic graphics as being "grounded and real." I don't know if you remember old forums from back then but seeing people conflate hyperrealism and guns with "adult" and "reality" was hyper fucking annoying. And seeing some people who would only ever play games if they had guns or hyperrealism was also incredibly annoying. Irritated the absolute shit out of me. So, when it comes to realism I want to make sure people have an accurate understanding of what reality even is, but also people are constantly confusing style with fidelity and vice versa. It's like I can't escape the 2000s despite the fact I desperately want to.

The menu system genuinely frustrated me to the point of almost stopping my playthrough multiple times.

I swear the pitch for remasters like these is just "What if we took this old game with dated graphics and try to give it the graphical quality of games like Cyberpunk 2077, and then we can sell it for full retail price like its a new game again?", they then "upgrade" the graphics and spend as little time as possible on everything else before releasing it. Anyway, I love the video!

Something I will say in bethesda's favour is at least they haven't delisted the original version like some studios do when they release a remaster *cough* creative assembly *cough*

I honestly thought the graphics in remastered were fine untill you pointed out how much the lost in translation. Look how they massacred my boy