I absolutely love when a game gets shadow dropped. There’s nothing more exciting than watching a presentation that’s showing off a cool new game only for the presenters to end the show by saying, “And it’s available right now. Go!”
That’s exactly what happened with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. However, in the week leading up to the game’s announcement and surprise release, leaks about the remaster were sprouting up like a bucket full of water shot with a machine gun.
The remaster was one of gaming’s worst-kept secrets, but instead of ruining the surprise, the leaks just got everyone more excited. The leaks paired with the shadow drop make Oblivion Remastered one of the most visible games of the year, and it seems like it all happened by accident.
Feeling Like You’re In The Know
People are pretty divided on leaks when it comes to games. Some people appreciate knowing everything about a game ahead of time, while others find that leaks spoil the surprise of an announcement by presenting information in an unintended way – especially when the leaks come from bad actors out to paint an unfinished game in a bad light.
Not all leaks are created equal. Some information like the release schedules found in the Insomniac leak from 2023 or the Capcom leak from 2020 are acquired through malicious actions by outside actors that put employees’ personal information at risk. Regardless of how exciting it is to hear about whatever Spider-Man or Resident Evil plans the companies have in store, it never feels good to know that developers are being borderline doxed for it.
The Oblivion leaks, on the other hand, are on the opposite side of that spectrum. Much of the information that leaked in the week leading up to its announcement and launch came directly from files found on the Virtuos website. Screenshots of the game were easily accessible and pointed directly to the remaster’s impending reveal.
We’ve heard for several weeks from reliable leakers and industry insiders like Jeff Grubb that a remaster would be shadow dropped in April, and the images from Virtuos’ website added fuel to the excitement fire. Then, just last week, someone got the Xbox Support chatbot to tell them exactly when the remaster would be available.
There was so much buzz surrounding the remaster before it even officially existed that when official Xbox and Bethesda Twitter accounts told people to tune into a stream this week for something Oblivion-related, people were ecstatic. I watched the stream with more than half a million other people on Bethesda’s YouTube channel alone and the camaraderie in the chat was completely unlike anything I’ve seen before.
There was an air of positivity and excitement surrounding the remaster, because the weeks prior made the game feel like a mystery that fans were trying to solve together. The stream was where our theories would be confirmed, if they were ever to be. We all knew with almost certainty that the game would be shadow dropping at the end of the stream, so hearing that it was just felt like the final cherry on top. We were right, and the mystery was solved.
Having the information about Oblivion Remastered leak made for an incredibly engaging time for fans of the Elder Scrolls. It unintentionally created a huge community mystery to solve and seems to have inflated the excitement surrounding the remaster in a non-artificial way which is everything a publisher could hope for.
If the leaks were completely unintentional as it seems they were, I hope someone at Bethesda or Vituous is taking credit for them and getting promoted to head of marketing.