Bethesda wants you to suggest ideas for Oblivion Remastered, so get over there and tell it to add more shortcut slots and a difficulty between Adept and Expert

It is the year 2025 and Bethesda wants you to tell it how to improve Oblivion. Such is the strange and rich new world we've been plunged into by last week's release of Oblivion Remastered, which fixed some parts of the original game's jank, lovingly preserved others, and introduced some entirely new bits of its own.

Now Bethesda is calling on players to suggest where it (or at least, where developer Virtuos) goes from here. In a channel on its Discord called #oblivion-suggestions, players are pouring in with ideas, beliefs, opinions, and notions.

Some of them are things that, call me a pessimist, I don't think are ever going to happen, like the few people asking if Bethesda could do them a solid and just wholesale port Skyrim's combat system over to Oblivion. Others, though, seem like excellent ideas. Of the suggestions that people are making, one of the most popular is an adjustment to Oblivion Remastered's difficulty, and I couldn't agree more.

Though I've been enjoying the game, the fact is that Oblivion Remastered is, well, a little easy on its default difficulty setting of Adept. I hardly take damage from anything and I struggle to find an enemy I can't kill with three arrows or a couple of fireballs. But if I knock the game up a notch, to Expert, it all gets a little too much. There's no Goldilocks difficulty that feels good to play, and that seems to be a sentiment shared by a whole bunch of people on Bethesda's Discord—over 5,000 of them, actually, judging by a quick search on my part, most of whom mentioned something about the gulf between Adept and Expert being too vast.

But it's not just difficulty that people are nattering about. There are all sorts of quality-of-life changes they want, too (and so do I). Sorting your inventory by type rather than just weight, value, or alphabetically? God, yes please. It'd make finding potions and ingredients much less of a chore. Selling multiple items at once? Absolutely. Showing your encumbrance in loot menus? Almost a necessity. Oh, and just as a personal favour, if someone at Bethesda or Virtuos could see their way to adding way more shortcut slots, I'd appreciate it. Eight just isn't enough.

So if you have suggestions of your own, head on over to Bethesda's Discord. I'm encouraged by this. The thing is, the channel is deliberately separate from the bug reports section. Bethesda doesn't just want ideas for fixes, it's open to making further changes to modernise Oblivion without compromising its mad soul. I'm very curious to see if these suggestions get adopted in future updates, and curious if it means we might see even bigger changes (new DLC?) later on down the line.