Summary
- Oblivion Mobile was the last game developed by Vir2L, the sister studio of Bethesda, responsible for the Elder Scrolls Travels mobile game series.
- The game follows the same plot as Oblivion, albeit a truncated version.
- Oblivion Mobile is essentially a primitive, buggy dungeon crawler.
Oblivion Remastered has reintroduced the world to the quirky, wonderful land of Cyrodiil. There are countless daily posts of new players discovering things for the first time, and it warms the heart of an Elder Scrolls veteran like me to see the next generation enjoying Oblivion.
Something that’s been all but forgotten over the years is that Oblivion actually had a mobile tie-in game, technically the final game in the Elder Scrolls Travels mobile series. Bethesda was an early adopter of the mobile genre, publishing four games exclusively for mobile.
These games were all developed by Vir2L, a former sister studio of Bethesda that appears to have been folded back into Bethesda sometime around 2010.
There are four games in the Travels series: Stormhold (2003), Dawnstar (2003), Shadowkey (2004) and Oblivion (2006).
Crawling around Kvatch
Back then, the operating systems for mobile devices weren’t homogeneous, meaning several versions of each game exist, one for each popular mobile device. Oblivion Mobile was functional on any phone that had Java enabled. This included several BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson and Motorola models.
Oblivion Mobile recently came up in a satirical post on Reddit by MarshallDyl2, who jokingly referred to the mobile version of Oblivion as the remaster.
Oblivion Mobile loosely follows the same narrative as Oblivion, one must stop the Mythic Dawn and consequently save Tamriel. You escape the sewers, find Martin, face off against Mankar Camoran and close, shut the jaws of Oblivion as they say.
This sounds great, doesn’t it? Until you realise that you’re playing a mobile game from the primitive era of that platform. Here’s some footage from The Cantina to illustrate how Oblivion Mobile plays. Pixellated enemies creep around at a glacial frame rate, combat is a button-mashing swing-fest (a lot like actual Oblivion), and the game is fairly buggy, to boot.
The game is essentially a dungeon crawler, progressing you through Oblivion’s main quest in as few maps as possible. That being said, there are a couple of side quests too. You can stop a pack of goblins from attacking the Imperial City, or slay the Troll King, so there are a couple of things to do if you can stomach actually playing the game.
The real question is – when are they remastering Oblivion Mobile? The remaster is simply incomplete without it.
