The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered | Ep. 1 – I Was Just Trying to Serve My Sentence
A brand-new adventure begins! We’re stepping into The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and returning to Cyrodiil for quests, dungeons, exploration, strange characters, questionable character-building decisions, and the inevitable distraction caused by something completely unrelated to the main quest.
Saturday night has been Bethesda Night for several years now. We have already worked through Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim and, most recently, our near-100% run of Fallout 4. The pattern was always supposed to be high-tech, low-tech, so with Fallout finished it was time to put the guns away and go back to swords, magic and carrying far too much rubbish.
I have played Oblivion before, but calling this a familiar playthrough would be generous. I bought the complete edition from Grainger Games after finishing Skyrim on the Xbox 360 and essentially hammered through the achievements while waiting for Skyrim’s DLC. That was years ago, and I remember very little of it.
🏰 About the Game
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered takes us back to the province of Cyrodiil as the Empire begins to fall into crisis. Emperor Uriel Septim VII is under threat, Oblivion Gates are beginning to appear and the future of the realm eventually depends on finding the surviving heir to the throne.
Beyond the main story is the enormous Bethesda world we came here for: towns, ruins, dungeons, guilds, strangers, side quests and an unreasonable number of objects that can be picked up. This time I want to explore properly rather than rush through an achievement checklist, which may be a dangerous promise considering how quickly we abandoned our first urgent objective to go sightseeing.
🧭 Where We Are in the Journey
Episode 1 starts from nothing. We had no established character, no equipment, no money and absolutely no excuse for filling the inventory with junk almost immediately.
This is also effectively a nearly blind playthrough for me. I am sure fragments of the original will return as we go, but after all these years most of Cyrodiil feels new again. That gives us the chance to take our time, look at the details and follow the distractions rather than simply sprinting from one remembered objective to another.
The fact that our first major delivery was postponed so we could walk north and look at Skyrim suggests that approach is already working.
🥒 What Happens in This Episode
Before we could save Cyrodiil, we had the important matter of character creation. We spent roughly the first half-hour going through the huge collection of sliders and options before settling on a female Nord, because after all our time with Skyrim there was never much doubt about the race.
Hair colour became the first major community decision. Red was tempting because we all love redheads, but blue had the Jade the chocolate thief connection, while papasoup60 threw deep purple into the discussion as another possibility. Eye colours generated comparisons with sharks, Sith and wolves, and some enthusiastic slider adjustments temporarily transformed the face into everything from a withered skeleton to something resembling RoboCop.
At some point Cyclops also entered the conversation. Eventually I accepted that we could spend the entire stream adjusting cheekbones if we were not careful, particularly when most of the game would be seen in first person anyway. Blue hair won, we added icy white eyes and our new Nord was finally ready to begin her prison sentence.
That prison sentence became considerably more interesting when Emperor Uriel Septim VII arrived outside the cell with his guards. Patrick Stewart voicing the Emperor means that throughout this playthrough he is inevitably going to be Captain Picard, and chat wasted very little time expanding that into Star Trek references.
More importantly, his secret escape route was hidden directly behind our prison cell. Apparently our character could have spent years trying to escape while a concealed door and button sat a few feet away. Nobody had thought to mention it.
We followed Captain Picard and his protection detail into the underground passages before becoming separated and entering the rat-filled caves. That was where the real Bethesda playthrough began, because the moment containers and bodies appeared, the loot goblin emerged.
Weapons, armour, clothes, mushrooms, rat meat and anything else capable of entering the inventory was immediately treated as potentially useful. JD supplied #lootGoblin, which was entirely deserved. Rat meat could become burgers, mushrooms could become soup and every spare weapon might eventually be worth a few coins, so leaving anything behind seemed irresponsible.
The controls needed relearning as well. Years of Skyrim muscle memory had me checking buttons for jumping, blocking and menus, and I seriously considered assigning some of the useful actions to the paddles on the Elite controller so that future Saturdays might involve slightly less confusion.
Then we discovered lockpicking.
Oblivion’s tumbler system and I did not immediately get along. A simple lock became a prolonged contest involving timing, rapidly disappearing lockpicks and repeated attempts to understand exactly when the game wanted me to press the button. Eventually we ran out completely and reloaded.
Gary explained the difference between the fast and slow tumbler movements while the rest of chat offered advice. The fact that I own a real lockpicking kit did absolutely nothing to help my performance with a fictional lock on a television screen.
We improved after the reload, although nobody was in danger of calling it mastery. Given how many locked containers a Bethesda game normally contains, this is clearly something I am going to have to learn properly.
Then the collecting caught up with us.
The character slowed to a crawl because we had become over cucumbered. Happy_Cat_Lady responded with an enthusiastic “CUCUMBERS!!!!!!!” while I began the painful process of deciding which perfectly useful possessions the game expected me to abandon.
Clothes went. Low-value weapons went. Bones went, prompting papasoup60 to point out that getting rid of your bones may have consequences for standing upright. Eventually enough weight had been removed for us to continue, although absolutely nothing about the experience suggested that I was going to stop picking things up.
Rejoining the Emperor brought the story back into focus and the Star Trek references straight back with it. Chat suggested the entire adventure could be a holodeck programme, which naturally led to Barclay being blamed somewhere along the way. We also had birthsign and character-class choices to make, and I leaned towards bonuses that work passively because anything requiring me to remember another button is already at a disadvantage.
The escape eventually ended with the assassination of the Emperor. Captain Picard died in our arms, and “He’s dead, Jim” became the only reasonable response. We were handed the Amulet of Kings and told to take it to Jauffre, while Baurus explained where we needed to go and Captain Renault’s sword quietly returned to its proper owner after I noticed it had disappeared from our inventory.
After one last stretch through the sewers, we stepped outside and finally saw the remastered Cyrodiil properly.
It looks fantastic. The landscape, water, trees and distant mountains repeatedly produced views that looked like desktop backgrounds, and after spending so long underground it was difficult not to stop and stare at everything.
We had, of course, been given an urgent job involving the future of the Empire.
So I went north.
I remembered hearing that if you travel far enough towards the northern edge of Oblivion’s map, you can see the low-detail Skyrim landscape beyond the playable area, including the Throat of the World. There was no sensible way we were going to continue the main quest without confirming this personally.
A marker went onto the medieval satnav and we started walking. The trip involved swimming, climbing, missing roads, fighting wolves and imps and repeatedly checking whether the distant scenery was actually what I thought it was. Vvoornth described the whole exercise as faffing about, which seems unnecessarily judgemental.
Eventually we reached the northern boundary and there it was: the mountains towards Skyrim and the Throat of the World beyond the invisible wall. The actual Amulet of Kings delivery had not moved forward at all, but an entirely self-appointed mission had been completed successfully.
I have already decided that once we finish the game, we may have to come back and investigate how far beyond those boundaries we can get.
Only after that did we turn around and head towards the place we had been told to visit in the first place. The return journey gave us more locations to discover, more scenery to inspect and more enemies to remind us that our freshly escaped prisoner was not particularly well equipped for wilderness expeditions.
Chat provided the usual background conversation along the way. Tea rounds developed, Red Dwarf quotes started multiplying, SnowRunner was mentioned purely because people know it annoys me, and JD reminded me to quick-save. Gary then contributed the equally important instruction to remember the slow save as well.
Eventually we reached Weynon Priory and delivered the Amulet of Kings to Jauffre. He explained that the Emperor had an illegitimate son, Martin Septim, who needed to be found in Kvatch if the line of succession was going to continue.
Jauffre also offered us supplies, which immediately threatened another cucumber emergency. We inspected the new equipment, rediscovered weapon durability, noticed the state of our boots and started reorganising everything we were carrying.
Then we found a chest in Jauffre’s office.
Storage.
Until we acquire somewhere genuinely our own, that chest is going to become home for anything I cannot quite bring myself to sell. Chat immediately raised concerns about somebody eating the cheese, which required a clear rule for the new series: nobody touches the cheese.
That seemed like a good place to finish Episode 1. We had built a character, escaped prison, watched Captain Picard die, looted everything that was not nailed down, fought with the lockpicking system, become over cucumbered, ignored the main quest to look at Skyrim and eventually delivered the Amulet.
Martin Septim can wait until next Saturday.
At the end of the stream, we raided into AngryJoeShow.
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you want to see the creation of our blue-haired Nord, the first appearance of #lootGoblin, my deeply impressive virtual lockpicking abilities and an urgent imperial mission being postponed for a walk towards Skyrim, the full episode is on YouTube.
Watch The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered | Ep. 1 – I Was Just Trying to Serve My Sentence
You can follow the full series through the Oblivion Remastered playlist or find more videos on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a like, subscribe and let me know how long you think it will take before Jauffre’s storage chest is completely full.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
Bethesda Night is live every Saturday, and Oblivion Remastered is going to be with us for quite some time. There are dungeons to clear, quests to follow eventually, cheese to protect and an entire province full of objects that I probably do not need to carry.
Join us live on Twitch or YouTube and help decide whether we should follow the quest marker or investigate whatever interesting thing has appeared off to one side.
🏰 Community & Links
The adventure continues between streams as well, whether we are discussing games, films, music or trying to work out why I am carrying seven different swords.
Live — Join Bethesda Night and the rest of the weekly streams:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Join the people encouraging the loot goblin:
Discord
Socials — Follow the journey beyond Cyrodiil:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — Something to listen to while sorting the inventory:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — Help keep the streams and adventures going:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — Find everything else I am working on:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🥒 Over Cucumbered and Only Just Getting Started
Episode 1 was exactly the kind of return to Oblivion I wanted. Very little remains in my memory, so instead of simply replaying a game I already know, it feels like we are discovering Cyrodiil again with all the distractions and bad inventory decisions that come with it.
Next Saturday, Martin Septim is waiting in Kvatch. Assuming nothing interesting appears beside the road before we get there.
— Dr Ravenholm
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