Oblivion Remastered has a new texture error, and this one mucks up a gag from the original game

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun: a second texture error has been located in Oblivion Remastered’s whizzbang skins, rendering the game unplayable and life unlivable. Right after players noticed that the new texture on the door to Cheydinhal’s Dark Brotherhood sanctuary recklessly bungles a bit of the sect’s background lore, someone else has noticed a gag on one of the game’s shop signs hasn’t survived the transition to 4K.

Spotted by detail-oriented Redditors (via TheGamer), the sign for Lelles’ Quality Merchandise—a general store on the Anvil Waterfront—wasn’t quite uprezzed properly when Virtuos brought it over to Oblivion Remastered. In the original, 2006 game, the sign reads ‘Lelles’ Quality Mercandise’ with a letter H clumsily interposed between the C and the A. It was a charming, funny nod to the owner’s general haplessness (which becomes even more apparent when you help him fend off a gang of thieves during the Fighers’ Guild questline).

Genuinely heartbroken by this vv from r/oblivion

In the remaster, the sign maintains the spelling error but not the clumsy fix. It now reads ‘Lelles’ Quality Mercandise’ with nary an H to be seen. Instead of a deliberate joke, it just looks like someone at Bethesda couldn’t spell merchandise—though NPCs will still note the error in dialogue.

It is, let’s be honest, an incredibly minor thing, but it does highlight one of the dangers of contracting work like this out. Just like the Dark Brotherhood’s front door, it’s likely some poor, beleaguered texture artist at Virtuos just didn’t quite get the significance of the thing they were working on. Then again, I guess there’s no guarantee Bethesda’s own people wouldn’t have overlooked something like this if the studio had done the remaster in-house.

With any luck, it’s one of more than a few issues that will be ironed out whenever Oblivion Remastered gets a patch. Which I’m hoping is any day now. Someone needs to teach useless old Savlian Matius that he can enter Castle Kvatch, after all, as well fix my Arch-Mage Robes so that my character’s derriere isn’t constantly clipping through the back. Scandalous.