The great circle has finally closed. Way back in 2016 I was given a task: find the ugliest NPC in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Today I'm setting out to do it again in Newblivion, or as it's bafflingly and officially called, Oblivion Remastered.
As Tyler wrote last week, he was a bit apprehensive about Newblivion's incoming facelift. Many of the characters in the 20-year-old RPG are uggo, sure, but in a mostly charming way. No one wanted the citizens of Cyrodiil to all suddenly become hot in the remaster. This is Oblivion, after all, not Inzoi.
My worry was that they'd become Starfieldy: there were so many generic faces in Bethesda's space RPG that they've all blurred together and I can only remember what maybe two or three characters look like despite spending over 100 hours in that game. Would this remaster strip out the unique look of Oblivion's weirdos and make them into a pleasant but forgettable blur?
Luckily, neither Tyler's nor my fears were warranted. As I sprinted around Cyrodiil (you can sprint now!) rudely gawking at people's faces from a distance of one millimeter, I quickly discovered the next-gen NPCs of Newblivion look appreciably different than their original counterparts—but they're definitely not sexy and there are still lots of weird, memorable, and mildly disturbing faces. Plenty of wonderful uggos, in other words—they're just uggo in a different way. (And, as I found in my original investigation, there are a bunch of perfectly nice looking folk as well.)
My first stop as I burst from Newblivion's sewers with some old man's necklace in my pocket was Bruma, home to Jorck the Outcast, whom I deemed King Ugly back in 2016. He has changed massively in the remaster, no longer owner to "a weird, tiny fish-mouth that's too far from his giant nose" as I said in 2016, adding "when he speaks his whole face stretches weirdly like it's made of fleshy salt-water taffy."
He's not pretty in the remaster, to be sure. He looks like a meth head, or maybe a guy named Dylan whose girlfriend dumped him because he spent the rent money on a guitar he can't play and he's been crying for three straight days. But he's not a nightmarish blob of mismatched features, which is a bit disappointing.
No more jumpscare the first time you talk to Jorck? This did not bode well.
But visiting another character I deemed ugly in my first tour, Logvaar of the Jerall View Inn, I found him much more faithful to the original, though less dorky and more unsettling. Perhaps it's because they swapped out his big brown eyes for beady blue ones so pale they're almost white. Fair trade: I don't like looking at either of them.
Next stop: Newheim the Portly, who wasn't particularly portly in the original, and if anything is less portly now. But whereas he was harmlessly unpleasant to look at in the original, now he's more ominously unpleasant. Again, his eyes are just a little too weird to want to talk to him for long. I approve.
As I made my way through the world closely examining faces, I discovered that even though the citizens look a lot different than they used to, they're often still plenty weird. Mouths, overall, seem too big and cavernous. Faces are occasionally weirdly lumpy. They're a far cry from the original Oblivion, but I like these strange mugs for different reasons.
Here's a gallery of some of my favorite new beautiful uggos.
It takes some getting used to, but I think this is the best outcome I could have asked for. I didn't want them to be hot or bland, and they're not. The remastered faces are still charmingly ugly, but in a fun and different way.
Enough of that and onto the real business. Fans of my original article (there are probably no fans of my original article) are all now wondering the same thing: Chris, did you get bored of your photography assignment and eventually become fixated on Imperial City musician Salomon Geonette again? Did you follow him around, rifle through his belongings, stare at him while he slept, and then stand outside his door for 13 straight days so you could follow him on his monthly journey to Bruma during which you impassively watched him get slaughtered by a wolf?
Ha ha, no, of course not. I only had to stand outside his door for 8 days this time before I could follow him to Bruma.
It was a nice, slow walk, the kind you should really take in Oblivion once in a while, especially since the remastered world is much prettier now. And our trip was spiced up by the moment where, after ignoring me for a couple of hours, Geonette suddenly whirled around and approached me, fists up.
Turns out he was engaging an imp I hadn't noticed. Geonette, weaponless, punched the imp to death with just three blows, adding "You're pathetic!" before continuing his journey.
Damn, Salomon! Looks like the real remaster is that you're no longer a useless goof, you can throw hands like a champ. Sadly, he let his victory over a tiny winged demon go to his head, and when he tried the same moves with a heavily armed marauder outside Sercen, he got slashed, he ran away, he got caught, and he got killed.
I guess some things never change. 20 years later, Oblivion's citizens are still a bunch of weird-looking folk, and Salomon Geonette still can't make it to Bruma without ending up dead next to the road.
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