“I have seen the gates of Oblivion, beyond which no waking eye may see.
Behold, in darkness, a doom sweeps the land.”
We continue to live in times both unprecedented and highly unpredictable. But one thing that hasn’t changed over the last few decades is Western nations’ continued excuses and outright denial of the atrocities happening in Palestine, in both Gaza and also the West Bank. Since 2023, Israel has been conducting a systematic genocide of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, which was already effectively the world’s largest open-air prison, reducing every building in the area to rubble and killing likely hundreds of thousands. Many countries (most pointedly the United States), their governments and many national media outlets continue to either ignore or minimize this, claiming that everything Israel is doing is a legitimate response to the Hamas attacks in October 2023. This deliberately erases more than 70 years of Palestinian struggle and hardship under Israeli government oppression, particularly since Israel occupied the West Bank following the 1967 Six-Day War.
Microsoft is a very large multinational corporation, with many different sectors and business interests. One of them is cloud computing, through its Azure service, as well as their ongoing research into AI. Microsoft sells these services to many people, organizations and countries, including the government of Israel and their “Israel Defense Forces”, referred to as the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) by many Palestinians and their supporters. Israel uses these services to plan and enact their genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. Microsoft cannot claim mere ignorance in this; it is actively facilitating this, with the tacit approval of Microsoft management. Multiple former employees have staged demonstrations, with Microsoft promptly firing them.
What does this have to do with The Elder Scrolls? Since ZeniMax Media was acquired by Microsoft in 2021, Bethesda has become a part of Microsoft Gaming, which is now the largest video game division in the world, encompassing Xbox Game Studios, Activision, Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement has called for consumers to boycott all Microsoft owned products and services, because ultimately the most effective means to get Microsoft to change course is to hurt their bank balance. Naturally this is quite challenging; Microsoft possesses a virtual monopoly over the operating system space, and many other services it offers people use daily at work, such as Outlook and Microsoft Office.
Nevertheless, this boycott also includes all games made by Microsoft, and their subsidiaries. BDS are actively calling out their premier titles like Minecraft and Call of Duty, but The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, “surprise” released in late April, certainly has considerable cultural cache given its history. Here at Entertainium, the editorial team have decided we will not be covering any games from Microsoft and its divisions going forward from this point as a result, until the BDS boycott is lifted. None of our coverage should be taken as an encouragement to either purchase or play any Microsoft game at the present moment, but at the same time, thousands of developers who work for Microsoft-owned studios deserve to have their hard work acknowledged and critiqued by gaming media outlets like ours.
On multiple levels, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a game from another era. For one thing it was released 19 years ago and so its gameplay is fairly dated by today’s standards, although at the time it was considered significantly dumbed down from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Even at the time it was clunky, with quite an unresponsive first-person combat system and a very floaty third-person camera. The levelling system was also very strange, requiring you to actively use a skill to level it up. This meant you’d spend a lot of time jumping across Cyrodiil to raise Acrobatics, or actively making pointless potions in order to increase your Alchemy ability. I always forgot to use Illusion or Mysticism spells because they were quite situational.
Oblivion Remastered retains all of this, for better or worse. This is still Oblivion, but now running on Unreal Engine 5, although all the quirks of the original Gamebyro engine are still present underneath. It is certainly a lot prettier than the original game; the landscapes of Cyrodiil are gorgeous, filled with lush forests, snowy mountains and damp swamps. The colour scheme has been adjusted to be more “realistic”, which may disappoint some people who preferred the hyper-real exaggerated colours of the original, but everything from characters to weapons and dungeons has had a complete visual upgrade, with global ray-traced illumination giving some very different lighting to many locations.
For the most part the original voice acting has been retained, but for some characters, notably where different races of characters shared the same voice actor, new lines have been recorded to give each race some unique sounding dialogue. Similarly, the original DLC add-ins, like Frostcrag Spire and Dunbarrow Cove, have been implemented into the game more elegantly, with new voice lines mentioning them as rumours, allowing players to discover them naturally. Frostcrag Spire in particular now dominates the landscape from its position perched over Bruma, whereas in 2006, the tower wouldn’t be visible when you got too far away. In a similar manner, the Throat of the World, the tallest mountain in Tamriel which players climbed in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has been appropriately positioned on the northern edge of the game world, while it was absent previously.
While the visuals may have been remastered, other aspects of the game have not. There are still a plethora of bugs, many of which were present in the original game, but also a host of new ones. In particular, sound seems to have not had much attention, with the sound effect for looting a corpse being reused when opening most containers (whereas it should play a sound effect for each type of container, like a barrel, or a chest of drawers). Some character voices are oddly loud or quiet at random times. Performance is likewise pretty rough, with noticeable stutter when traversing the open world, which seems to be related to the way the original game engine loads different zones.
I played hundreds of hours of Oblivion growing up, and despite playing it after Fallout 3, ended up enjoying it even more. Coming back to Oblivion is a bit like revisiting a town you haven’t been to in years; many things are still in the same location, but it all looks quite different. It’s a game I’ll always have a soft spot for, and for which I’ll tolerate the jankiness a lot more than in Bethesda’s more recent titles (most pointedly, Starfield). Oblivion Remastered appears to have been quite a success in terms of player numbers and it seems inevitable that Fallout 3, New Vegas and even Skyrim will possibly get a similar remaster treatment in the coming years, especially with The Elder Scrolls VI still an undefined number of years away.
We at Entertainium continue to hope that Microsoft will no longer turn a blind eye to the atrocities it profits from and will fully divest itself from the apartheid state of Israel. As a reminder, we will no longer be seeking to review titles or accept game codes from Microsoft owned studios, until the boycott is lifted.
