If you dig into Oblivion Remastered's files you can find almost the whole original game like a set of dinosaur bones

The Adoring Fan from Oblivion Remastered, looking creepy.

(Image credit: Bethesda)

If you're anything like me, the first time you laid eyes on Oblivion Remastered, you wondered why it was called Oblivion Remastered. 'Surely,' you mused to yourself in an urbane, handsome, charmingly mischievous sort of way, 'this is a full-on remake? This is far too much work to just call a remaster.'

Well, it's because it really is a remaster—that 2006 game wrapped in a few lovely looking layers of Unreal Engine 5. If you delve into Oblivion Remastered's files, you'll eventually find pretty much all the files for the original game in the exact same structure they were in when they hit your hard drive in 2006. Head to [Drive Letter] > SteamLibrary > steamapps > common > Oblivion Remastered > OblivionRemastered > Content > Dev > ObvData > Data and, if you ever spent any time shuffling mods around an original Oblivion install, it'll be like seeing an old friend.

It's nearly all there. Some stuff has been yanked out—there's no original Oblivion .exe in the root directory any more, nor the stuff for the original launcher—but those .ini files you spent hours tweaking? Right where you left them. The music, texture, and shaders folders? Still there. The original game's .esm, .esp, and .bsa files? Unmoved. I downloaded the original Oblivion to compare, and many of them are the exact same size as they were in 2006. I even swapped the Oblivion.esm master file between the original game and the remaster, and both of them ran fine, like nothing had changed (because, well, it hadn't).

Some things have expanded or contracted in size. The .bsa archives for the game's voice lines, for instance, have gotten bigger (I'm guessing for the extra VO), and the Remastered directories have some extra entries for stuff like the Deluxe Edition content, but for the most part it's the Oblivion you loved 19 years ago. Here's a quick side-by-side of the two games' directories.

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The directory for the original Oblivion, showing an array of .esm, .esp, and .bsa files. — Here's original Oblivion.(Image credit: Future)

I suspect to some of you who did more employable degrees than I did, this won't be much of a surprise, but I've found the experience oddly educational and a fun example of the technical wizardry Virtuos and Bethesda did to make the thing work. This really is Oblivion when you peel back enough layers. That's a remaster to me.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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