Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).

The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.

Yep.

Yeah, it ran on AOL’s platform and was a multiplayer dungeon crawler similar to SSI’s other stuff.

Digital Molecular Matter, the DMM you mentioned in Force Unleashed, is just as interesting IMO. It calculated how objects would break under various types of stress and produced some of the best and most realistic destruction in gaming. It even simulated wood splintering vertically when twisted!

I’m guessing it had similar problems to Euphoria since I haven’t seen it mentioned since.

90% of Oblivion’s voice acting budget must have gone to paying for Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean to say a few dozen lines. It’s long been a meme that basically every other person in Cyrodill shares the same six or seven voice actors.

Jeremy Soule did amazing work. Unfortunately it turned out he was a terrible person and he was blacklisted from the industry after multiple allegations were made against him during the #MeToo movement.

I’m still on dual 1080p monitors and a machine that’s more than a decade old and was mid-tier at best when brand new. I’ve only upgraded the GPU and doubled the RAM, yet it still runs basically everything at an acceptable framerate. Hearing that would boggle the mind of my younger self, who struggled for days to get Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware one, not AOL - you know you’re old when you feel the need to specify) to run at more than four seconds per frame in outdoor areas on a fairly new machine.

They announced a 2025 release date back in 2023, and as of the last video update a few months ago it seems they’re still hoping to hit it.

I haven’t seen how they handled the Shivering Isles yet, but if they managed to make the Plane of Madness boring then I’ll be more than a little annoyed.

Ha. Years counted for more back then. Remember, this was back in the day when graphics technology made a qualitative leap every few years. Nowadays things have stabilized and the focus is on boosting framerate and pixel count, but back then each generation was a monumental leap forward in fundamental rendering tech.

It’s a marketing tactic called “shadow-dropping”. It’s a risky tactic that relies on word-of-mouth for marketing instead of an expensive ad campaign. It tends to be used either when the company isn’t confident in their product, or if the drop is so desirable that it’ll sell well regardless of marketing.

We can assume this is the latter, though it’s possible Bethesda were also hedging their bets due to the remake’s lack of mod compatibility since long-tail revenue from modding basically carries them for the several years between game releases.

This is my main complaint with the remake so far. Original Oblivion was bright and vibrant, which stood out due to the obsession with brown-filtered “realism” in games at that time. Trees almost looked like they were painted with pastels.

The colors in the remake are noticeably toned down. It still looks great, but it lost that dreamlike quality that sold Oblivion as a fantasy world.

Oblivion uses Gamebryo. Creation is Skyrim and later games. That might seem pedantic since it’s a newer version of the same engine, but one of the major reasons for the rename was Bethesda ripping out the Gamebryo rendering code and replacing it with their own, more modern renderer.

The modders have still done amazing things with Oblivion, but they’re limited by the ancient Gamebryo tech. Postprocessing shaders, high-poly meshes and texture upscaling can only do so much, especially on a 32-bit engine that can use at most 4 gigs of RAM (2.5 gigs if Bethesda didn’t set the LAA flag and the end user hasn’t installed a 4GB patch).

The original is also required to enjoy Skyblivion, the fan-made remake with much more love and care put into it, when it comes out later this year.

Bitwise operations are elegant in the same way nunchucks are elegant: they are impressive and versatile in the hands of a master, but inflict a lot of self-imposed bruises in the hands of novices.

To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.