Oblivion is a lot better now that I can read

The other day, I was frantically crouch walking around Skingrad in Oblivion Remastered, tailing the neighbors of a seriously paranoid guy named Glarthir, and thought: This is new, right? When did Oblivion get all these weird, engrossing sidequests? Didn’t I play this game a lot back in the day?

Technically yes, I played Oblivion in 2006…when I was nine, had a horrible attention span, and had only recently picked up rudimentary reading skills. Maybe I didn’t really play Oblivion.

I remember it like it was just 19 years ago: My dad came home from work one day with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Collector’s Edition, a lavish bi-fold case with two discs, an art book, a map, and a metal coin. I didn’t know what The Elder Scrolls was, and neither did my dad. He’d picked it up because he wanted something new to play on our Xbox 360. I don’t think he ever got out of the sewers.

Firing up the games my dad bought for himself and never played was a Park tradition in those early Xbox years. Crackdown, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Rainbow Six Vegas—you know, the hits. I gave Oblivion a shot based on an assumption that it’d be as cool as the metal coin that came with it. I’d never played an open world game and couldn’t tell you what “RPG” meant.

I recall Oblivion’s character creator seriously stressing me out. All the sliders, tabs, and widened Bethesda faces staring deep into my soul were a bit much, so I rolled with a default white guy. I also remember the winding sewers of the Imperial City overwhelming my third-grader sense of direction—on that note, did Bethesda cut most of the sewers part out in the remaster? I could’ve sworn you had to fumble around those tunnels for an hour before reaching the surface.

There’s no way I was reading or listening to any of the dialogue, by the way. I can remember being aware of the emperor’s assassination (because it happened right in front of me), but I highly doubt there was any awareness of the deeply important task the late emperor bestowed on me, a stranger.

As I entered the Weynon House to find Jauffre, grandmaster of the Blades, in Oblivion Remastered last week, a faint wave of repressed anxiety washed over me. I definitely recognized this place from my 2006 playthrough—in fact, I’m pretty sure this is where it ended.

If memory serves, I entered Weynon Priory and accidentally punched a priest in the face (or maybe it was a fireball). Everybody wanted to kill me, so I ran back outside, where all the outside priests also wanted to kill me. I hadn’t saved up to that point, and my most recent autosave was after the fight kicked off, so I panicked and slapped the big power button on the 360. If I’d had any patience to actually read tutorials or listen to what characters were saying, I might’ve learned how to surrender and pay a fine for the accidental assault. Instead, I got confused by some big words and gave up, convinced that I’d permanently doomed that character to perpetual violence.

And that was my sole Oblivion experience for years. I did pick it back up on the PS3 after finishing Skyrim in 2012, but all I remember from that time is rushing through the main quest and jumping until my acrobatics maxed out. No excuses for skipping through the dialogue that time, except that I was 15 and lazy.

Now I’m embarrassed to have believed for years that Oblivion is just alright. It’s great, and the remastered touches bridge the gap between past and present with modern conveniences. Every single sidequest I’ve started since becoming the hero of Kvatch in the remaster is new to me, which tells me that I had no idea how to properly enjoy these games when I was younger. Oh well, better late than never.