One of the most controversial parts of Oblivion wasn’t the voice acting errors or the hilarious jank – those things are actually lovable and still in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. The most controversial parts of Oblivion were its leveling systems, specifically its level scaling, which is still in the remastered release, but don’t worry – modders have already taken a hammer to the classic game’s funkiest parts.
For those who have never played the 2006 original (and those who don’t remember a 19-year-old game in detail), Oblivion’s quest rewards would scale to your level. So, let’s say you complete a quest at Level 10, you’ll be rewarded with a Level 10 sword. But if you complete the same quest at Level 25, you’ll get the Level 25 version of that same weapon.
Enemies scale similarly. As you get stronger and stronger, certain enemy types will almost disappear entirely from the game and be replaced with tougher, spongier foes such as minotaurs or bandits who are somehow equipped from head to toe with super rare armor that kind of made walking around Cyrodiil unbelievable.
The decision to leave level scaling of this kind in is eyebrow-raising, especially since Skyrim had a neat workaround for the problem and fans have been outspoken about the “disappointing” system for ages. But, again, good ole trusty modders have already come to our rescue.
The Unleveled Item Rewards mod, for example, “makes all leveled items in the game unleveled, because this very concept infuriates me,” modder Trainwiz writes. “Like my god, why? WHY? What kind of insanity made anyone think this was a good idea?”
“When I learned that quest rewards STILL pull from a leveled pool like some sort of troglodyte moron game made for idiots, I was overcome with an impossible incomprehensible fury,” Trainwiz jokes in the mod’s description. “I blacked out, but when I awoke this mod suddenly existed… Anyway, this mod makes it so that any leveled quest reward in all the base game and all the DLC (I may have missed some so tell me if I did) will always be the best possible quest reward you could get.”
For the odd enemy scaling, there’s the Balanced NPC Level Cap mod that does what it says on the tin: “Adds consistent level caps to 1,400+ NPCs from the base game and all DLCs.” It does so by adding max level caps for enemies, but since this was a mod designed for the original game, “there may be some issues as modding is not officially supported yet.”
