To quote my Waypoint coworker Shaun Cichacki, “I have to apologize to Bethesda. I wasn’t familiar with your game.” No, seriously, I had no clue Bethesda would just straight-up drop The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered today. I figured the studio’s Oblivion remake was on the way, given news slipped earlier this month about the iconic RPG getting a remaster. But dropping this thing on a Tuesday in late April? By the gods!
Like many of my peers in games journalism, today’s Oblivion news fills me with a ton of nostalgia. I used to gobble up as many Oblivion previews as possible back in the day, given the game was so incredibly hyped up for the PlayStation 3. I vividly remember Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine writing story after story, explaining how based and epic Oblivion would be once it hit the PS3. My 12-year-old self was dying to try the game. I eventually rented it from Blockbuster with mild excitement, as the fantasy setting didn’t quite grip me as much as Bethesda’s 2008 release, Fallout 3. But, hey, all that Oblivion hype remains in my brain as a seminal part of my teenage gamer years. You know, right next to all the Touhou music I listened to on repeat.
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Anyway, two decades later, Oblivion Remastered is out. And some guy on Reddit is playing the game in VR. The best part? You can try Oblivion in VR, too. If you have a solid gaming computer, that is.
Dust off the Oculus Quest, it’s time for VR
YouTuber LunchAndVR posted a video earlier today depicting Oblivion Remastered completely translated to VR. In the video, the YouTuber wanders through an early game segment, attacking enemies by swinging his sword via motion controls. His weapon even floats in midair as he moves, objectively a pretty cool look.
While VR is innately intensive for any gaming computer, Oblivion Remastered performed quite smoothly in the early level LunchAndVR played through. Graphics and lighting look slick, with the game’s frame rate averaging around 70 FPS on his rig. The YouTuber notes that he’s running on medium graphics with DLSS on a GeForce RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9-13900 with 64GB RAM. In other words, LunchAndVR needed some pretty solid specs to achieve a decent frame rate at his graphics settings, and you should expect the same.
Note that LunchAndVR described the video as an “early test.” Oblivion Remastered could potentially perform better in VR over time.
“More to come soon!” LunchAndVR teased. “Regarding performance: Game runs really well indoors, but occasionally crashes. People seem to have no crashes when running on Oculus runtime with Quest Link, for us with Virtual Desktop or SteamVR, there are some crashes.”
‘Oblivion Remastered’: built for VR?
Could VR Oblivion Remastered become the greatest way to play the game? It’s likely. Redditors on r/virtualreality were dazzled by LunchAndVR’s gameplay, expressing their amazement that Oblivion was already playable in VR — let alone with VR motion controllers.
“Day 1 VR mods. Within what, three hours of launch?” one user commented. “Wild.”
It’s not like Oblivion Remastered‘s VR mod is running off some strange, never-before-seen technology, however. LunchAndVR is playing in VR via UEVR, a popular tool to turn flatscreen (or non-VR) Unreal Engine games into VR titles. In the Flatscreen to VR Modding Community Discord, a wide assortment of Unreal games are listed based on UEVR compatibility. Oblivion Remastered is described as functional, but “very performance intensive.” In the interim, LunchAndVR provided a link to a profile for better VR performance in Oblivion Remastered. Note that the performance optimization profile won’t give you motion controls.
You can grab Oblivion Remastered now via Steam. For more information on setting up UEVR, check out LunchAndVR’s YouTube tutorial on the tool. I’ll warn you, though; you’ll need a powerful gaming computer to fully enjoy the game in virtual reality. At least for now.
