The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition (2009)

I came back to the 2009 GOTY edition recently, mostly out of stubbornness after the 2025 remaster's performance issues became a running joke, and I remembered exactly why this game lodged itself in so many brains like a permanent resident. You start as a prisoner - a classic Bethesda cold open - crawl through the Imperial Sewers with Patrick Stewart narrating your destiny, and emerge into Cyrodiil's sunlit countryside. That first step outside is still effective. It earned its reputation. What this GOTY package gives you is the complete original experience: the base game, the Shivering Isles expansion, and Knights of the Nine. The hour count is genuinely absurd. The main quest, which tasks you with shutting down the Daedric invasion of Cyrodiil and protecting the last of the Septim bloodline, runs a solid 30-plus hours on its own. Then Shivering Isles opens a portal to Sheogorath's realm, split between the Mania and Dementia halves, each with distinct visual identity and questlines where your decisions directly determine which major NPCs survive and what gear you walk away with. Knights of the Nine rounds it out with a faction quest that rebuilds a disbanded order of holy warriors. On the generous end, you're looking at well north of 150 hours if you join the Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood, which remains one of the best questlines Bethesda has ever written. Now for the honest part. Oblivion's infamous level-scaling system is genuinely bad design. Enemies scale with your character, which sounds fair until you realise your skill point choices in early levels can make mid-game combat feel like punching damage sponges with a wet noodle. The fix, both in player communities and in the 2025 remaster, is to be deliberate about how you level. If you build without thinking, the game will punish you quietly and persistently. The Oblivion gate missions - the mandatory dungeon crawls tied to the main quest - are also the definition of filler: fight through corridors, reach a tower, pull a stone, repeat. You can skip most of them, and I strongly recommend doing exactly that. The voice acting, while iconic in the way only limited casting budgets can produce, means you will hear the same three voices across dozens of different NPCs until it starts feeling like a fever dream. On PC, the moddability is the real long-term value proposition. The modding community has spent nearly two decades producing overhauls, graphical patches, AI improvements, and quest expansions that the vanilla release simply cannot match. If you want to run this version rather than the remaster, installing the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and a texture pack should be your first two steps. The original engine also runs on virtually any hardware, which is not a small thing given the remaster's documented performance problems on high-end machines. For RPG players who care about faction depth, moral ambiguity in quest design, and a genuinely strange high-fantasy world, Oblivion holds up on those fronts. The writing is uneven - the main quest is thinner than the guild questlines it competes with for your attention - but Shivering Isles in particular is weird and surprising in ways that modern open-world RPGs rarely attempt. If you skipped this at launch and want the most stable, moddable entry point into Cyrodiil without paying remaster prices, this is it. Monika, Scout Team