Ways To Make Oblivion Remastered As Hard As Possible

Summary

No fast travel playthrough forces intentional quest planning and enhances exploration.
Power leveling early can exploit enemy scaling for a challenging experience.
Permadeath adds real consequences in battles, making every decision impactful.

Now that the remaster for Oblivion is out, many players are revisiting the wonderful land of Cyrodiil or seeing its sweeping plains for the first time. However, on the game's default difficulty, the game is pretty easy, particularly for RPG veterans.

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By Hamza Haq

Luckily, there are some easy ways to make the game more difficult and give players a real challenge like they've never had before. This list is ranked both by how fun the difficulty restrictions are, and how hard they make the playing experience.

8 No Fast Travel

The Long Way Around

In Morrowind, players could only get around Vvardenfell fast by contracting the use of the large strider beasts. Still, in Oblivion, Bethesda were more generous and decided to let player fast travel to any location they liked as long as they have been there before. Players can fast travel to any major town as soon as they exit the sewer grates at the beginning of the game.

While this certainly makes things convenient, it does mean that player can miss out on a lot of the incidental beauty and discoveries of Oblivion's world, as well as the challenges that spawn on the road. Many players argue that even without this challenge run, players shouldn't overuse fast travel. A no fast travel playthrough requires players to think intentionally about what quest they're following, and trying to be as efficient as possible in plotting possible routes.

7 Power Level Early

A Real Oblivion Crisis

One of the more controversial choices in Oblivion's difficulty scaling is that the enemies scale with the player's level, regardless of where they are in the world. That means if the player is level 1, they're likely to only run into imps and basic wolves in the wild, but if they're level 50, the creatures get a lot more nasty. This has always been a controversial decision.

This can be exploited to make the game feel more dangerous. By power-levelling one of the major stats chosen at the start of the game (such as stealth, and using the good old rubber-band technique to get it to 100 fast), the game can scale way up in an unbalanced way, as all your other skills are still pretty weak, meaning the game becomes a lot more challenging.

6 Vow of Poverty

Cash-Strapped

In The Elder Scrolls games, it's pretty easy to make a lot of money, fast. With Thieve's Guild fences to take stolen items, players can wrack up mountains of gold very quickly by selling as much gear as possible, and stripping every castle and home in Cyrodiil for parts.

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By Shane Black

This can be entirely circumvented by just refusing to pick up, or spend, gold. Give all your money away to beggars, or simply place it in a chest somewhere in the world. Rely only on what you can find, and don't engage with the economy. It forces players to think carefully about their build, and adapt on the fly to what they can find, prioritising quests that have loot rewards rather than cash.

5 Realistic Healing

Who Eats During Combat?

In Dungeons & Dragons, it's often a heated topic for debate whether players should be allowed to drink health potions in the middle of combat. Similar criticisms have been levied at games like Oblivion, where players can scoff down a barrel of apples to regain their health in the middle of a fight. It's unrealistic, but nobody particularly minds that much, particularly as restoration is one of the easiest skills to level.

However, in this playthrough style, players can't heal in the middle of a fight. After all, they need time to bandage wounds and to let that food do its work. It means being very intentional in fights, only picking battles that can be won and not turn into an endurance contest, encouraging whole new playstyles, and making every fight more deadly as a result.

4 No Magic (Enchanting Included)

Barbarian Style

Oblivion has a great magic system (with many hotly debated tier lists). Through a discrete list of effects, players can not only find spells that suit their playstyle, but they can create their own unique spells, and put similar effects onto their gear to make incredibly powerful equipment that can carry players through the hardest challenges with ease.

In this playthrough, you're not allowed to do anything with magic. You're not allowed to cast spells, make spells, enchant items, or, if players want a really big challenge, not even engage with potions and poisons. This forces players to become a martial and stealth expert, requiring deep thought on loot, skill acquisition, and playstyle.

3 Difficulty To Max

Push It To The Limit

At the time of writing, the Oblivion remasters difficulty levels are a little borked. Adept, the default difficulty, is pretty easy and accommodates almost any player, but turning it up to Expert makes the game exponentially more difficult with enemies becoming far more tanky, and the player only being able to take a few hits. Turning it up to Master only makes things worse, and some have called those difficulties unplayable.

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By Tristan Jurkovich

That's what makes this a great challenge. There's no getting around the difficulty here. Players need to be exceedingly careful with their choices and push every game system to its limit. If that involves cheesing the game, so be it.

2 Permadeath

Permanent Consequences

The permadeath run in RPGs is a classic challenge strategy, and for players who value realism, it's the only path that makes sense. Respawning and quick-loads can mean the consequences of poor choices can be cast to the side pretty easily, and for most players, that's totally okay, but for the hardcore, permadeath is how every battle becomes meaningful and risky.

No longer can players go galavanting in dungeons without preparation. A match-up in the Arena could mean certain death. One wrong move, and a hidden trap could end an entire playthrough. The stakes become massive, completely changing how the game is played.

1 All Of The Above

True Insanity

Every listed playstyle is just one way of making the game more difficult, but, the most obvious way to increase Oblivion's difficulty is to do the insane thing, and try all these challenge runs simultaneously. Though it might make this great remake truly unplayable, for the masochists out there, it's a tantalizing prospect.

Whether this playstyle is possible or not is up for debate, but there's no denying that a permadeath, no fast travel, no magic, no money, master difficulty, power levelled, and no healing in combat run would be one of the hardest challenges in all of gaming. Good luck!

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