Oblivion Remastered update adds an unexpected new difficulty option

A new Oblivion Remastered update has just been unveiled, and while it's currently only available in Steam beta, it'll soon bring some much needed improvements and fixes to all players. Update 1.2 also looks to expand Oblivion Remastered's difficulty options, with a new 'Journeyman' difficulty tier.

Oblivion Remastered really did remind us all how good Bethesda RPGs used to be. While I personally enjoyed Starfield and Fallout 4, I wouldn't categorize either as an all-time great. Even though the original Oblivion passed my younger self by, this remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4 is yet more evidence that Bethesda's more recent work isn't of quite the same calibre as its older games. I've had a blast exploring Cyrodiil, but I have suffered from a couple of annoying quest bugs and performance issues in my time. Thankfully, update 1.2 takes aim at dozens of them, as well as introducing the Journeyman option for those wanting to either increase or decrease Oblivion Remastered's difficulty.

Sitting between Adept and Expert, Journeyman is now the fourth-hardest difficulty setting you can use. For context, difficulty settings only impact how much damage you and your enemies receive from attacks - every other aspect of one of the best RPGs around remains untouched. Bethesda says this new difficulty tier "will act as a better bridge between 'Adept' and 'Expert.'"

Some of Oblivion Remastered's weirdest crashes have also been rectified in this new update. No more will your game crash when "fighting Jyggalag," "paralyzing an already-paralyzed NPC," and participating in several other obscure gameplay scenarios.

17 separate quest issues have been fixed in this update, which means fewer bugs or broken quests stops - or "mages loading without clothes," in the case of the Necromancer's Amulet quest…

This'll be music to everyone's ears, but loads of graphics and performance enhancements are arriving with update 1.2 as well. A few demanding locations that caused frame rate drops have been fiddled with, water should no longer disappear when fast traveling, and developer Virtuous says it has generally "reduced the frequency of hitches in the open world." Lovely stuff.

Oblivion Remastered update 1.2 is available to try right now in its Steam beta build, but will soon roll out to the main version of the game on all platforms. Virtuous hasn't set a date for its full release, but we'll let you know when it does. You can read the full patch notes here.

For more, check out our guides to the best fantasy games and the best open-world games you can play on PC right now.

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