izigame.me

After about five or so hours I can say that this game is a pretty good remaster. The display options and controls are up to par for modern games, including DLSS and framegen features if you want it, ray tracing, and uncapped frame rates (although there doesn't seem to be an option to disable ray tracing?). A lot of the audio is kept faithful to the original, a lot of it just sound straight lifted from the 2006 game which I don't mind personally. The score is virtually unchanged so if you liked the original score it's back for this game too.
The interface is leaps and bounds an improvement over the 2006 game although more keyboard integration would be welcome like using E to accept message boxes (like confirm popups and such) or A and D to increase/decrease sliders. Using enter to confirm is very inconvenient. I also don't like how all of the menus are now under the tab key, and despite there being a dedicated inventory key I think tab should be that key because it was in the original. System options should be under the escape key like all other games. This is a default choice I don't really understand the logic behind. On top of that tab does not default to any specific screen, it just stays on the one you were last on. So if you were changing settings and then pressed escape the next time you press tab it would open the settings again, not the inventory. Maybe I'm bothered about nothing here but I feel like this is just a confusing design decision and have rarely ever seen it work in any game. You can rebind some of these controls but the way they have it set up by default makes it very tedious to set it up in a different way that works. You also cannot rebind the confirm key (enter) which is my main gripe.
Visually the game looks stunning, but some of the NPC face models and actors look rather uncanny. I'm not a big fan of the more draconic look to Argonians, I wish they'd kept the more lizardfolk inspiration from the original but it's a minor gripe I can get used to. The Khajiit also look quite different, but I'm less miffed about that since they still look like big cat people more or less. All the races look good it's just some NPCs are a little disturbingly uncanny. The lighting is phenomenal, atmosphere is on point. Every area is completely revamped with new models and textures befitting a game of this era.
The gameplay is honestly where I'm mixed. The character feels a bit more floaty to control, I don't know how to explain it. In the original game, if you ran and then stopped you would stop immediately, but in this remaster you stop after like 0.2 seconds instead. It's not as precise, and I don't like that. Could be because of frame gen or just a UE5 thing, either way I'm not a huge fan but after a couple hours I've gotten used to it.
I like the vision of the combat, but the one-handed melee attacks being a 3-hit combo with a break between them now makes things a bit awkward in first person because it's hard to really tell which part of the combo you are on when you just see your hand swinging. It's much easier to see in third person however. It's also annoying how the combo lingers for a really long time, like several seconds, so you might think the combo is over and reset but even after waiting and even blocking you will still do the last final hit and then be in recovery for about a second before starting the new three-part combo. The tactile feedback on combat is very good now though, enemies react to your physical hits and the blood splatters add a visceral visual feedback on your blows - both very needed additions.
We have a sprint button now, I don't dislike this but I can't figure out if it's toggle or not. I've had a few times where I'd sprint, stop, and then expect to run normally but still end up sprinting.
The leveling system is revamped to a mixture of Oblivion and Skyrim. You choose 7 major skills that are easier to level up and contribute more XP to the next level. Instead of the old system where leveling a skill governed by a certain attribute allows you to raise that attribute during your level up sequence, you can now allocate a maximum of five out of a total twelve"virtue points" into any attribute of your choosing upon leveling up, even ones that have nothing to do with your class. I think this system is infinitely better than the 2006 version and should have been what the original went with in the first place.
Performance-wise I'm running a 4070S in 1440p with the game on High settings and getting pretty consistent FPS in smaller interior cells and cities, while outside in the overworld it tends to stutter quite frequently as things load in and the FPS drops significantly to around 55-60 with framegen and DLSS. While that wouldn't be a problem, it's the constant and inconsistent dipping that irks me. Your mileage may vary, I did not do much performance tweaking in the game and it's very possible there are optimizations I didn't try or may have missed. I'm on an i5-12400F and 32gb of RAM running on an SSD for more context.
Overall, would I recommend it? If nothing I wrote about is a dealbreaker and if you have not played the 2006 version, I would give it a very easy yes recommend. If you have played the 2006 version and love it like myself, I would give it a tentative yes. Nothing here fundamentally is that much different from the 2006 version outside of the leveling system which can easily be fixed and improved with mods. If you like the feel and charm of the 2006 version, maybe wait for a sale on this one. The original is still a masterpiece, this one isn't too much different so don't stress about getting this one if you own the original.