Oblivion Remastered Has Disappointing News for Fans

Bethesda has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered doesn’t officially support mods. This sets Oblivion Remastered apart from some of the American developer’s other popular games, such as Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Starfield.

Following much speculation, the long-rumored remastered version of 2006’s The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion landed discreetly on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 22. Despite rolling out without prior announcement, it attracted strong engagement among new players as well as longtime Elder Scrolls fans as its Steam concurrent player count crossed 100K in just two hours of launch. On the console front, the action RPG is among the top 10 PlayStation Store games in the US at the time of writing, while also being a major day-one release on Xbox Game Pass. However, in an update that may be disappointing to some, it has been revealed that The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is missing one community-oriented feature widely available across other Bethesda games.

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In a support article published on Bethesda’s website, the studio shared that Oblivion Remastered doesn’t support mods. In other words, unlike some other games developed by the Elder Scrolls creator, the newly released remaster won’t offer players the in-game option to sort through a catalog of community-driven mods and download them. On the other hand, there won’t be any modding kit to facilitate the creation of mods for the game either. While this effectively rids players on consoles from using mods in Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, PC players may still be able to mod the game through alternative methods. However, these PC mods would understandably be few and far between due to the lack of official mod support in the fantasy game.

Over the past few releases, Bethesda has provided players access to official mods in the Creation Club and to modding tools in the Creation Kit, both of which have arrived in its games via their respective post-launch updates. Earlier, Starfield received official mod support in June 2024, quite some time after hitting the shelves in September 2023. As a consequence, fans may have been looking forward to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered following a similar pattern, an expectation that has apparently been invalidated by the latest news.

With the decision not to support mods officially, comes the challenge of keeping the players engaged well beyond the end of the story campaign. While Starfield‘s content received a boost through its various mods, it will be interesting to see how the player engagement around Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered sustains itself amid the absence of Bethesda-backed mods.