As thousands flock to the launch of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, the character creator is being used to generate terrifying (and often hilarious) abominations. Yes, Oblivion is back, and so are those funny faces.
Oblivion Remastered, developed by remake specialist Virtuos using Unreal Engine 5, has a long list of visual and feature improvements. It runs at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, as you’d expect, but other changes are more meaningful. Everything from the leveling systems to character creation, and combat animations to in-game menus have been improved. Meanwhile, there’s lots of new dialogue, a proper third-person view, and new lip sync technology. The changes are going down well with fans, some of whom believe Oblivion Remastered would be more accurately described as a remake. Bethesda, however, has explained why it went down the remaster route.
Bethesda’s remaster gives Oblivion a new lick of paint, and while everything in the game looks a lot better than it did 20 years ago, there’s no getting away from that trademark Bethesda face jank.
And, as is typically the case with Bethesda games, Oblivion Remastered’s character creator lets you create some outlandish faces. Some of these have already gone viral across social media, despite the remaster being less than 24 hours old. Here’s a snippet of our favorites:
This is my magnum opus in Oblivion Remaster. Sir Vancealot pic.twitter.com/q3hsDd3Uys
— CAMELCAST OFFICIAL (@CAMELCASTOff) April 22, 2025
Trying the Oblivion remake, character creation is going well, elves are gorgeous now pic.twitter.com/fjw4oqoPBl
— Julia (@Julia_CaSsian) April 22, 2025
As old-school Fallout fans may have noticed, there’s something worryingly familiar about these Oblivion Remastered faces. That’s probably because they rekindle memories of the original Fallout talking heads, which, at the time (late ‘90s) looked impressive, but now look, well… a bit like some of these Oblivion Remastered faces.
oblivion so funny to me. we finally have the technology to recreate the og fallout talking head renders in real time pic.twitter.com/SSG5iVLlKq
— 🦇🩸𝕸𝖔𝖓𝖌𝖗𝖊𝖑🩸🦇 (@FearMongrel) April 22, 2025
one thing that’s pretty neat is that the way some faces are done in oblivion remastered is similar to faces in fallout 2 which means a fallout 3 remaster could look closer to fallout 2 and have WAY COOLER LOOKING GHOULS pic.twitter.com/dHVawmh9cl
— shley died from lavender town syndrome (sad!!) ˂/3 (@gloomygvrl666) April 23, 2025
It’s all in good fun, of course, and evidence, really, that Oblivion is back in a big way. What would be a big Bethesda game launch without some reliably old face jank? Veteran fans wouldn’t want it any other way.
And it really does look like Oblivion Remastered is a hit. On Steam it enjoyed an impressive peak concurrent player count of over 180,000 on release day — a figure that’s set to increase as the game heads into its first weekend on sale.
We’ve got a comprehensive guide to everything you’ll find in Oblivion Remastered, including an expansive Interactive Map, complete Walkthroughs for the Main Questline and every Guild Quest, How to Build the Perfect Character, Things to Do First, and much more.
Image credit: @CAMELCASTOff.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
