“We’ve changed the approach to leveling,” Dan Lee, art lead at Bethesda Game Studios said during the Oblivion Remastered reveal video, “which I think will make a lot of people happy.”
That’s an understatement. The original Oblivion leveling system was busted beyond belief. You could easily level in an inefficient way, gaining less stat boosts than the game expected you to, and then be outmatched by the random bandits you used to be able to beat up thanks to Oblivion’s aggressive level-scaling.
You’d get a variable number of points to spend on your stats based on how many skills you’d increased before leveling up. Because level-ups were triggered by increasing your major skills—the ones core to your class—you needed to grind up minor skills to get a decent number of points to spend. If you played to the fantasy of your class, by sneaking around picking locks and shooting people if you were a thief for instance, you’d trigger a level-up too fast. Instead, your thief would be better off spending half their time glomping around in heavy armor hitting people with hammers and casting spells. It sucked, and was the first thing most players modded away.
Describing the leveling in Oblivion Remastered, Lee simply said, “It’s inspired by the leveling systems of both Oblivion and Skyrim, so it’s the best of both worlds.” Which sounds great, but doesn’t actually tell you anything. Now that I’ve played a few hours, got out of the sewers and done some quests, I’ve seen it in action. And yes, it’s a huge improvement.
In Oblivion Remastered, you simply get 12 points—called virtues—to spend improving your attributes every time you level up, no matter what. The effect of some of those attributes has changed too. Agility now improves the damage you do with shortswords and daggers as well as bows, and when you pump your Endurance up to increase your hit points, the amount you get is retroactive, treating you as if you had that higher Endurance every time you leveled up before now. No more rushing to boost your Endurance before everything else, thank goodness.
There are plenty of other changes in Oblivion Remastered, with obvious improvements to the graphics, interface, and the way argonians and khajiit sound, but some things have been left unchanged for the sake of nostalgia—like the clunky lockpicking and persuasion minigames. I’m glad someone had the common sense to throw the finer details of Oblivion’s original leveling into the dustbin of history, though.
