While the recently-released The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered has seen quite a successful launch, former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra is seemingly not impressed. Taking to social media platform X, Ybarra has written his thoughts about the game, as well as other remasters of older titles.
In his post, Ybarra says that he doesn’t believe that older RPGs like The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, even with a fresh coat of paint with the Remastered release, don’t quite compare favourably to more modern RPGs like FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. Rather, he believes that the bar of quality for a modern RPG is too high for an older title to be able to surpass.
“I’m skeptical about 20 year old remasters,” wrote Ybarra on X. “What was once fantastic, now remastered, will never hold up against modern masterpieces like Elden Ring. The bar has simply moved from safe open world RPGs to what Elden Ring brought us all. I would love to be proven wrong. But I’m not.”
Responding to other posts, Ybarra also wrote about how he believes a remake would be more suitable than a remastered release. “I’d be all in on a real remake,” he wrote. “Remaster is my point and why I’m iffy on this. Everything I read says ‘remaster’.”
When the point of a remastered release being able to tap into nostalgia is brought up, however, Ybarra mentions that he believes that the nostalgia factor is quite limited since the industry has seen plenty of remakes and remasters having been released already.
“I hear you, but I think we’ve had so many ‘remasters’ that nostalgia is limited,” Ybarra responded to a post about nostalgia allowing an older title to compete with more modern releases. “I could be wrong. But I think the gaming community wants fresh and new more than ever.”
When it comes to bringing up Elden Ring as a point of comparison, Ybarra also mentions that he doesn’t strictly mean to compare The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered with FromSoftware’s title in terms of it just being a Souls-like game. Rather, he is focusing more on the sense of discovery and the deep combat system offered by Elden Ring.
“I don’t mean soulslike, I mean the discovery, the classes, the combat system, etc,” he wrote. “Just a new level of quality.”
While Ybarra may have a point about the gaming audience wanting more fresh titles rather than just remakes and remasters of older games, the points he makes does miss out on the idea of bringing older games to a newer audience.
Before the remastered release, Oblivion was an incredibly difficult game to get running properly on a modern PC since it requires quite a few community-made patches to fix game-breaking bugs. Console players, on the other hand, couldn’t experience Oblivion anyway since it was only released on the Xbox 360.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as a shadowdrop earlier this week. The game is also available on PC and Xbox Game Pass. Here is everything you need to know about the game.
