The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered- Best Difficulty To Play In
Remastering a 19 year old game is never an easy task. Two decades bring quite a lot of changes to what is considered a standard in gaming, with expectations regarding most facets of a videogame moving alongside the times.
READ: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered- Optimized Settings
One of those facets is difficulty, which has grown to be a bit of a hot topic in the industry. Virtuos and Bethesda decided to change the original approach, but only slightly. So if you are wondering what's the best difficulty to play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on, we’re here to help.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered Difficulty, Explained
No remaster or remake will please everyone. In attempting to strike a balance between keeping hardcore fans of the original and newcomers happy, you will inevitably steer more towards one of those sides, or sometimes bounce between the two.
Virtuos changed the original difficulty slider available in Oblivion for the more frequent approach of recent years, 5 options. They’re your typical Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, but renamed to fit the Skyrim approach. In fact, they’re exactly like the ones present in Skyrim, but without the top option of Legendary. They’re also different in damage calculations.
In Skyrim, difficulties scaled like so:
- Novice- Damage Taken= 0.5x Damage Dealt= 2x
- Apprentice- Damage Taken= 0.75x Damage Dealt= 1.5x
- Adept- Damage Taken= 1x Damage Dealt= 1x
- Expert- Damage Taken= 1.5x Damage Dealt= 0.75x
- Master- Damage Taken= 2x Damage Dealt= 0.5x
- Legendary- Damage Taken= 3x Damage Dealt= 0.25x
This is a very archaic way to scale difficulty, especially when using a combat system that doesn’t allow for a lot of skill expression. Higher difficulties frequently just translate to longer fights due to more healing being necessary, and due to enemies tanking a ton more hits to die.
Oblivion suffers from exactly the same problem, but to an even worse degree. The difficulty options were shrunk to five while the values were doubled at the extremes. This is how it scales in the Remaster:
- Novice- Damage Taken= 0.167x Damage Dealt= 6x
- Apprentice- Damage Taken= 0.286x Damage Dealt= 3.5x
- Adept- Damage Taken= 1x Damage Dealt= 1x
- Expert- Damage Taken= 3.5x Damage Dealt= 0.286x
- Master- Damage Taken= 6x Damage Dealt= 0.167x
What this translates to in practice is an inability to land into what feels like the perfect difficulty for most players. For those who just want to breeze through the game, the lower difficulties are fine. But for those who enjoy a bit more challenge without turning the game into a chore or having to revert to exploiting systems and enemy AI to succeed, there is no right choice.
As it stands, Adept is too easy. Enemies die in too few hits and players can face tank most opposition with little to no challenge. The issue is that the jump to Expert, which is a whopping 3.5x increase in damage taken while also dealing less than a third of the damage in Adept is too steep for most.
Battles that in Adept last only a few seconds and pose no challenge become slogs that take minutes to complete and endless casts of Restoration to get through. Master is a joke of an experience and doesn’t seem to have been playtested at all. Image posted above for reference.
Best Difficulty To Play On
After experimenting with all available difficulties for a while, I can offer two solutions, neither of which are perfect. Ideally we will see mods in the future which tailor difficulty in much more interesting ways, like affecting how good enemies are at noticing you in stealth, how aggressive they are in combat and if they work in groups to overwhelm you or not.
Until that moment comes, here are our suggestions.
Adapt Difficulty On The Fly
My recommendation for users on all platforms is to make use of then fact that Oblivion Remastered allows you to change difficulty on the fly, even in the middle of a battle. As I usually enjoy more challenging games, I end up sticking to Expert for most of the experience.
If I get into an encounter that becomes a chore or that seems utterly unfair against my class choice, I turn it down to Adept, and once the encounter is over I bump it back up to Expert. The change is instant that takes 2 to 3 seconds to get through. It is annoying, but the most hassle-free solution I found.
Difficulty Mod
If you are on PC and don’t mind mods, I highly recommend Difficulty Slider Fixed from NexusMods. At the time of writing it has over 147k views and over 30k downloads.
It isn’t the perfect solution, but it is the best we have access to at the moment. As it stands, the mod allows you to choose from four different difficulty models, which adjust the values with much smaller differences between the options. The highest model has a 3x modifier at each extreme (Novice and Master), while the lowest caps at 1.5x.
Using this mod you will find it much easier to land into a more balanced difficulty, which I’m still experimenting with. For now, I would recommend 1.75x damage dealt/0.57x damage taken, or the more steep 2.0x/0.5x.
You can install it using Mod Manager or by following the instructions in the download page, which I’ll post below for ease of access:
- Download the main file
- Extract the main file archive into "The Elder Scrolls IV- Oblivion Remastered\Content\OblivionRemastered\Content\Dev\Obb Data\Data"
- Open "Plugins.txt" file located in "The Elder Scrolls IV- Oblivion Remastered\Content\OblivionRemastered\Content\Dev\ObvData\Data"
- Add "Difficulty Slider Fixed.esp" to the bottom of the text file
