How To Install Oblivion Remastered Mods

Bethesda finally revealed and launched The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, one of the games industry's worst-kept secrets for months, and caused a few ripples in the mod community by publishing a post that said Oblivion Remastered mods aren't supported. That's a slightly vague statement, as it only means that Bethesda has no plans to develop and support an official Oblivion Remastered creation kit like the studio did for Skyrim or some of its other games.

However, Oblivion Remastered still allows for mods, even without a creation kit. You can download and run Oblivion mods or try to make your own without any kind of penalty or fear of a ban. The game just might not run properly, hence Bethesda recommending players disable mods if their game crashes for no other discernible reason. With no creation kit, though, this means mods are specific to PC only for the time being.

If you feel like adding some extra content to your copy of the game on PC, here's how to download mods in Oblivion Remastered.

How to download mods for Oblivion Remastered

Like so many other Bethesda games, Oblivion Remastered's main modding scene is centralized on Nexus Mods. Nexus Mods is the premier destination for all major mods across any game that either officially or unofficially supports them. While Oblivion Remastered doesn't officially support mods, this doesn't mean that you can't add them to your game.

To download a mod for Oblivion Remastered from Nexus Mods, you're going to want to check the mod's official page for specific instructions on how to install it. For most mods, though, you can go about installing them in one of two ways. We'll discuss both options below.

Download mods through a Mod Manager

The first and arguably simplest way to download mods for Oblivion Remastered is by using a Mod Manager. Nexus Mods has its own official Mod Manager called Vortex, which you can download and use to manage all of the mods you download from the site. If you download Vortex or any mods from the site, you'll need a Nexus Mods account.

With Vortex, go to any mod's page on Nexus Mods and tab over to the "Files" section underneath the mod's title. If the Files section has an orange button labeled "Mod Manager Download," then you want to click that to begin the download.

After the download is completed, you should see the mod appear in the Vortex application on your PC. From there, you can make the mod active by clicking on it and the next time you boot up Oblivion Remastered, the content of the mod should be available.

As a note, the early mods in Oblivion Remastered don't seem to support any Mod Managers, including Vortex. However, as time goes on, this should change once modders figure out more ways to add mods to the game.

Manually download mods to your PC

The second and modder recommended way to download Oblivion Remastered mods is by manually installing them on your PC. If you visit a mod's page on Nexus Mods and view the "Files" section, you'll almost always see an orange button labeled "Manual Download." This indicates that the mod is downloaded as a file on your PC rather than going directly into a Mod Manager.

After you press "Manual Download," wait for the mod to download. Once it's been downloaded, you then need to go into File Explorer on your PC and find the main game folder for Oblivion Remastered.

If you downloaded on Steam, your game folder should have this type of address:

• DriveLetter:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Oblivion Remastered\

If you downloaded through Xbox Game Pass, your game folder should have this type of address:

• DriveLetter:\XboxGames\The Elder Scrolls IV- Oblivion Remastered\Content\

Once you find that game folder, extract the zipped folder of the mod you downloaded into the main Oblivion Remastered game folder. You can do this by right-clicking on the zipped mod folder, choosing "extract," and then browsing your files to find the main game folder.

Some mods will also require you to paste the mod's ".esp" file into the "Plugins.txt" folder within the main game folder. As we mentioned earlier, be sure to read through the installation instructions for any mod you download and follow them carefully to ensure your mod works properly. Nearly all mods will have download instructions on the mod's homepage.

Those are the two main methods you'll use to download mods in Oblivion Remastered. Over time, the process should become easier, as it's essentially the wild west on Nexus Mods right now without official support from Bethesda. You might also run into some issues downloading mods and getting them to work, as unofficial mods can be highly unstable. Hopefully, modders continue to work on these problems and the modding scene for Oblivion Remastered thrives as much as the original game's scene.

Speaking of the original game, modders are uncertain about the ease of porting old Oblivion mods to the remaster, and whether it's even possible, as questions persist regarding how these changes might interact with Unreal Engine 5. However, they have discovered that it's possible to open Oblivion Remastered's files in the Oblivion Construction Set, a mod creation and management tool that lets creators modify the original game's files. Some modders said that, even while they wait to figure out how to create new assets and enable mods, they should still be able to work with existing assets--for example, tweaking existing Oblivion classes instead of making brand-new ones.

In the meantime, if you're just getting started in Oblivion for the first time or need a refresh, check out our Oblivion Remastered walkthrough for everything from tips on combat skills to how to navigate factions.