Oblivion Remastered kept the acting gaffe where its master speech trainer says ‘Let me do that one again’ and repeats their line—It’s even lip-synced now
I was convinced Oblivion Remastered would satisfy my childhood nostalgia when, in the middle of its official reveal, Todd Howard declared with a slight grimace that the devs had made sure to preserve its “charm.” That is to say, those baffling bits of jank and strange NPC behaviours that still make the original one of the funniest games ever made.
But even I’m pleasantly surprised by just how much jank Virtuos and Bethesda left in. Fans have been very excited to find that the devs have even left in a now-legendary flubbed take, where High Elf actor Linda Kenyon speaks, says “Wait a minute, let me do that one again,” and then delivers the line a second time. Bonus irony: the line comes from Tandilwe, the Imperial City’s master speechcraft trainer.
Which is, frankly, great. It’s one of those little testaments to the original Oblivion’s ambitions and limitations from all the way back in 2006. Before TES 4, Bethesda had used voice acting in its games pretty sparingly—in Morrowind NPCs just had a few barks (mostly people just being tremendously xenophobic at you) and only a few important scenes were voiced. Oblivion’s dialogue was all spoken.
Problem was, Bethesda hadn’t quite figured out the best practices for that kind of thing in the early 2000s, so the game’s limited pool of actors were just given a load of practically context-free lines in alphabetical order, which goes a way to explaining why some of the game’s acting is so uncanny.
After that the devs had to cut all that dialogue up and insert it, and sometimes they accidentally left re-takes in. Tandilwe’s flubbed line is far from the only one in the game, too. Here’s a compilation of iffy reads from the original game that I’d bet my bottom dollar are still in the remaster (I can’t check for myself yet because I haven’t gotten far enough in for these lines to trigger).
I love it, and not even in an ironic way. That the devs went so far to leave the basic weirdness of Oblivion untouched is excellent. That game is defined by the oddities that emerged when Bethesda’s ambition ran up against the limits of technology and game design in 2006. Taking them out would give you something that, well, just wouldn’t be Oblivion.
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