The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered review

You’re a long way from mud, crab

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda.

• Developer: Virtuos, Bethesda Game Studios
• Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
• Release: Out now
• On: Window
• From: Steam / Game Pass
• Price: £50/€55/$50
• Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 10

The moment you’ll most feel like an adventurer in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is right before you leave the main menu and its music behind - the majestic fantasy epic that music promises doesn’t really exist. This isn’t Lord Of The Rings. It isn’t even Eragon. It’s David Lynch in a codpiece recreating the frying pan scene from Bottom starring three NPCs having an unscripted punch-up because one of them decided to steal an apple.

Oblivion Remastered is easy on the eyes and familiar to contemporary thumbs, but it works because it’s ultimately a humble, even self-depreciating act of modernisation. It brings Oblivion in off the streets, gives it a haircut, buys it a new suit, but makes no attempt to sober it up. In fact, it flings open the liquor cabinet.

If you’ve played Oblivion before, encountering familiar NPCs has the air of spotting former celebrities who fled the country and got plastic surgery, hoping they’d never be recognised again. Forget the Nine. Nevermind the Daedric princes. The one true cosmic power in Cyrodiil is a chattering, many-faced idiot god named the 2006 Gamebryo Engine; eternal weaver of stupid stories. Oh, look. It’s talking to itself about mud crabs again. The clay-faced uncanniness of each guard and shopkeeper is lent a loving spotlight. Erratic behaviour is not only left alone, but made much funnier in contrast against newly lush environments. Unreal Engine’s fidelity acts here as a comedy straight man, essentially.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda.

If you’ve not played Oblivion before - welcome to the circus, great to have you. Skyrim but with charm, is my personal in-brief here. Skyrim without delusions of grandeur. Occasionally, Skyrim but with quests that make you smile instead of leaving you feeling empty and a little insulted, but I’ll get to that in a bit. This is an open world RPG less about map size or quantity of journal entries (though it is big) and more about its eating, sleeping, nattering idiots. In this, it’s both wonderfully detailed and legendarily inept.

Hey, you. You’re finally awake after preparing shaders for forty five minutes. Do read James’s performance breakdown while you’re waiting . Emperor Patrick Stewart has been dreaming about you, you lucky sod. Depending on how bungo you go with a new character creator powerful enough to spawn its own horror subgenre , this may explain why the emperor is ready to die. Dark forces are coming to the land, many people disagree with this situation, and the ruler believes you’re key to stopping the whole affair. One prison escape and assasination later, you’re standing before the sewer grate to freedom.

Step through, and you can either follow prophetic map markers to story’s end, or pick a direction and start walking. Become a magician and craft your own spells. Become a warrior and seek glory in the capital’s arena. Pick locks. Steal books. Brew potions. Chat up the locals. Go dungeon delving. Join a murder cult. Perform heroic deeds and have every NPC in an infinite mile radius comment on those heroic deeds for the next fifteen hours. Go for a nice stroll in the countryside and murder fifteen rats and twelve goblins before stopping for lunch.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda.

Behold: a ‘don’t walk on the grass’ sign next to a pair of grass-stomping boots in your exact size, and sprawling, bucolic fields just waiting to be stomped over. The soul of Oblivion is defined by the barriers between freedom and transgression. There are places the game invites you to explore freely, and places it still invites you to explore but puts a locked door and a guard in front to make you feel naughty doing it. The citizens of Cyrodiil each have personal space, property, and lives, and all are yours for the disrespecting.

But transgressions - both yours and the engine’s - mean nothing without an established baseline of normal conduct first, and that’s this remaster’s greatest trick. By whacking up the verisimilitude dial, by making you believe that much more in every flickering flame or dancing shadow or rapturous sunrise, everything that actually occurs in Cyrodiil becomes that much stupidier. Indeed, the game’s best questlines incorporate this guilty joy of being somewhere you shouldn’t, doing something destructive. It is pre-empting chaotic player inserts like GTA 5 ’s Trevor in anticipation of the player’s most chaotic instincts.

If I’ve made Oblivion’s appeal sound entirely like an accident of vomiting systems and code, that’d be doing a disservice to some genuinely great quest design. The game’s sense of humour extends past its existential wobbliness to its writing. While there’s undoubtedly deliberate world building here, Cyrodiil feels more like a sandbox for housing tabletop RPG tropes. It’s far less insistent than Skyrim, for example, in immersing you into a culture or a period in history. It’s more interested in brainstorming wouldn’t-it-be-fun-ifs. Wouldn’t it be fun if an entire village got turned invisible by an idiot wizard? If you had to get yourself arrested to get information out of a prisoner? If you bought a haunted house without knowing? Simple objectives become twists, and sometimes twist again.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda.

The combat is still wank though, although it’s honestly hard to mind too much. There are enough magic weapons and spells, potions and poisons and scrolls and other tricks here to keep it entertaining. Fights are at their best when you force yourself to get creative, at their worse then you’re just sword-and-board wailing on someone, although there’s definitely a little more oomph to melee duels thanks to impact and enemy reaction tweaks. Again, it feels a little besides the point to criticise any individual element of Oblivion in isolation, tasty soup made from expired ingredients that it is. Oblivion doesn’t try to be the star of the show, anyway. That’s your job. The game just dresses the set for you.

So, I think this is basically for two types of people: those who played Oblivion back in the day and think they’ll get a real kick out of the updates, and those who just can’t deal with the way classic Oblivion looks and controls. It’s a game for the curious, for the nostalgic, and for those that want to be part of meme-stuffed zeitgeist moment. It’s that last point I imagine Bethesda are banking on, barging themselves back into cultural relevancy on the back of Virtuos’s hard work like the cheeky gits they are. If you’re hungry for a gorgeous medieval open world to get properly lost in, you’re still much better off with something like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II . But if you ever wondered what Skyrim would be like if it was less existentially grey by every metric, there really isn’t a substitute for the undeniable charm that Virtuos have so cannily preserved here.

This review is based on a code provided by the publisher.

Find out how we conduct our reviews by reading our review policy .

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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