Shivering Isles made Oblivion's world design actually weird again

[EbonyWarrior]

I've been replaying Oblivion after spending like five years in Skyrim and I just hit the Shivering Isles and man, I forgot how much that DLC just commits to being genuinely strange. Like, Skyrim has good atmosphere and the civil war stuff is fine, but everything in the base game feels kind of... safe? Predictable? Whereas the Isles are just unapologetically bizarre. The whole thing with Mania and Dementia, the architecture that's actively hostile, Sheogorath himself being exactly as unhinged as he should be.

It makes me realize how much Skyrim's design philosophy is basically "make it feel real and grounded" whereas Oblivion at its best was willing to say "what if we just made something completely unhinged." The Shivering Isles feels like what Apocrypha should've been, honestly - a place that's genuinely alien instead of just a library with tentacles.

Anyone else think if we ever got an Oblivion remaster, the Isles would be the part that holds up best visually? Everything else in Cyrodiil looks pretty dated but those twisted landscapes and the Daedric architecture still hit different.

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

I think you're onto something with the "unhinged vs. grounded" split, but I'd push back a bit on Skyrim not having that weirdness. The Shivering Isles is absolutely peak TES strangeness - that's basically the point of a Sheogorath realm - but Skyrim's got its own flavor of it that's just more subtle. Apocrypha, yeah, is basically a library, but places like Blackreach or the Soul Cairn actually do that alien architecture thing pretty well. The problem is they're tucked away in DLC and late-game content instead of front and center like the Isles.

That said, the Isles commit harder. The whole thing is designed around the fact that Sheogorath is completely divorced from mortal logic, so nothing has to make sense - the landscape actively wants to kill you, the NPCs are all varying degrees of unwell, the quests are absurd. Skyrim's weird stuff is still grounded in being weird - it's weird-within-the-world. The Isles are just weird for weirdness's sake and it works because that's literally what Daedric realms should be.

As for the remaster thing - yeah, Shivering Isles aged better than most of Oblivion, but honestly I think it's because the surreal art direction covers up a lot of the technical jank. The geometry is strange enough that you don't notice it as much. Cyrodiil's generic fantasy forests and roads feel dated because they're trying to look "realistic" in a way that doesn't hold up.