Oblivion needs the jank. It needs the NPC who walks into a wall for three hours. It needs the Adoring Fan’s infinite respawn. It needs the moment you realize you’ve been carrying 200 pounds of alchemy ingredients for no reason. These are not failures. They are the fingerprints of a development team working at the edge of what hardware could do, writing a love letter to a fantasy genre that was already dying.

Risks and Considerations