On the heels of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered shadow drop, ex-Blizzard president Mike Ybarra stirred the pot with the suggestion that the 19-year-old RPG “will never hold up against modern masterpieces like Elden Ring.”
“I would love to be proven wrong. But I’m not,” Ybarra added, stressing a shift “from safe, open-world RPGs to what Elden Ring brought us all.” He recognized that there’s an argument for nostalgia, but concluded that “I think the gaming community wants fresh and new more than ever.”
In what certainly reads like a counterargument to Ybarra’s stance, and is at least a relevant comment, publishing director Michael Douse of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian said: “These auld execs gotta support the probable GOTY contenders on their platforms lest they end up feeling snubbed at [The Game Awards]. Got this feeling AAA is feeling more and more disconnected from the audience zeitgeist every year.”
But there’s more to this than fans and studio execs seemingly quibbling over creative differences or nostalgia. For some time, Douse has been championing a shift in the way that people discover and share games, emphasizing that the old way of marketing games doesn’t work in today’s industry, especially (but not exclusively) outside the AAA space.
To this day, his pinned tweet– a thread of post-Baldur’s Gate 3 marketing advice – argues that “the most meaningful connection you can have with audiences is what I call ‘true social resonance.’ What this means is an authentic connection for the short or long term with an audience you know will fuck with what you’re doing.”
Cut to the Oblivion Remastered launch and Douse reckoned “there is literally no better marketing campaign than viral funny faces from a Bethesda game.”
Here again, he reiterates that, “no matter how much you spend, you can’t beat the social resonance of silly little faces.”
Meanwhile, Ybarra’s flat dismissal of Oblivion Remastered comes at a time when it’s become the Game of the Moment overnight, and players – both nostalgic fans and curious newcomers – are generally flush with praise for it.
It’s a harsh and somewhat arbitrary argument – how many modern games “hold up” to Elden Ring? – that doesn’t agree with the remaster’s immediate success, and it can easily be read as a function of the old way of thinking more devs than just Douse have pushed back on.
I’ve personally spoken to dozens of developers and publishers in the past few months (for bigger projects which will hopefully be published soon) about the direction of the industry and the factors that make a Game Of The Moment, and Douse is far from the only one to think that the times are a-changin’.
Does fellow Game of the Moment REPO “hold up” to Elden Ring? Arguably not, but tell that to the millions of people playing and promoting it.
A core appeal of remasters like Oblivion’s is that they aren’t like today’s games, but they can be made to walk like them, getting modern players past the knee-jerk eugh reaction some folks have to dated-looking games.
Once you get over that first bite with your eye, you might find that the systems and ideas of yesteryear not only hold up today, but also can outfox some modern games.
To revisit Ybarra’s argument more directly, some of those ideas may have even become so rare that, excavated 19 years later, they feel “fresh and new.”
Ybarra has grilled remasters before, saying last year that he’s “hoping we don’t see a lot of remasters continuing across the industry” right before Sony announced a whole boatload of remasters that got their respective fans cheering.
Well, the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster got fairly memed into oblivion, but Lunar and Legacy of Kain fans were eating well.
Plenty of Elder Scrolls fans hold Oblivion up as the best game in the series to this day, and not without reason. Even ignoring industry context, retro charm, and overwhelming Steam numbers for the remaster, it’s easy to see why people would bristle at Ybarra’s position.
As our own Andrew Brown said of his first few hours with Oblivion Remastered: “Valen Dreth is still shit-talking you from across the prison hall. But there’s a second world here, too. I can’t stop staring at the way sunbeams drizzle into the cell, or the Seal of Akatosh that now adorns the sewer grate leading to freedom. Oblivion Remastered looks good – really good – and… oh, it crashed when I tried to leave. We are so back.”
Bethesda was right – Elder Scrolls fans wanted Oblivion Remastered, but I’m less sure about the 2,006 units of its $155 lamp: “Beware its inviting flame.”
