First it was a rumor, then it was pretty much confirmed by a leak: There's a remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion coming.

I just hope they didn't remaster all the ugly out of its mugs.

There are unwell people on the internet who will try to convince you that every RPG before 2020 was full of hot people, but it's not true. Oblivion is so known for its ugly NPCs that a few years ago we asked Chris to go look for the ugliest Oblivion faces he could find.

The first batch of NPCs Chris encountered were pretty regular-looking. Not realistic—they have a certain Mr Potato Head quality—but normal, if you suspend disbelief and accept that they're all a little too similar-looking.

Later, however, Chris met Jorck the Outcast—that's him in the screenshot above—and that's definitely a dude who could have success at the World Gurning Championships. Chris described his stretched face texture as "fleshy salt-water taffy."

I like Jorck and the other oddballs in Oblivion, and I also like that even its prettier NPCs are still just regular-looking folks (I threw a variety into the gallery below). I look a bit weird myself, and when I go outside my apartment and see other people's weird faces, I know that all is well: I have not woken up in a Twilight Zone world where everyone is hot except me. Only some people are hot, as it should be.

Some might object and say that there is no need for a fantasy RPG to reflect the real world's full spectrum of chin indeterminacy and eyeball ratlikeness, but there is also no need for it to be populated by bombshells. I suppose it comes down to what sort of fantasy you're after.

Oblivion is a game in which, forgetting about his quest to find ugly NPCs, Chris broke into the house of a glassy-eyed dude named Salomon Geonette and robbed him while he slept—picking the pockets of his full-clothed sleeping body—and then stood outside his house for 13 days waiting for him to go on a trip, just to see what would happen to him. (Wolf killed him.)

I'm not sure what kind of fantasy that represents, but it isn't one that should take place in a world full of hotties, if you ask me.

None of the leaked Oblivion remaster screenshots show closeups of NPC faces, but we do have a clue about the direction the developers might've gone, because a character that appeared in Oblivion also appeared in Starfield.

Here's the Adoring Fan in Oblivion and in Starfield:

They do have similar features, despite the Starfield version not being an elf, but as much as I try to see the character on the right as a more realistic version of the character on the left rather than a sultrier version, I don't think I can do it.

The likeness is totally lost. The round face, the low forehead, the texture between the upper eyelids and arched eyebrows that's so stretched it looks like a botched facelift… with none of that preserved, the guy on the right looks like an actor people pretend isn't hot but actually is. He'd play British gangsters and playfully flirt with Amelia Dimoldenberg in a chicken shop.

Maybe it just isn't possible to modernize old characters without making them hotter. I suppose we'll find out soon: If the rumors are true, the Oblivion remaster is very near.

The oxymoronic single-player MMO Erenshor, which has slowly been becoming a Steam superstar since 2023, will likely never be any less of an enigma – and that's a great thing. The Truman's Show spin on games like Runescape and World of Warcraft won't get multiplayer anytime soon, its solo developer says, and proudly strange games get to see another day.

"I do not plan to add multiplayer," Burgee Media said succinctly during a recent Reddit AMA. Also in the thread, they tell people it's "unlikely" they'd be able to implement local multiplayer, either, and the same goes for co-op.

Erenshor "was designed from the ground up for single player (also meaning it wasn't designed with any networking in mind)," Burgee Media explains. "Modders have already sworn to do it, and good luck to them."

As the Early Access title collects more Very Positive Steam reviews, more players seem to be getting the familiar itch to vanquish its lakeside dragons with a knightly pal, the way they would in more traditional fantasy MMORPGs.

But Burgee Media seems uninterested in "traditional" – it's too inconvenient.

"I've had this idea for 25 years," the developer says on Reddit. "Since I was 14 and couldn't play Everquest with friends, because it was too laggy."

"We only emulate the good bits around here," they joke. Ultimately, Erenshor is a strange and innovative addition to the monolithic realm of adventuring MMOs, and the genre is better for it.

"Found a new game I didn't know I wanted," says an apt Reddit comment.

Erenshor, the 'MMORPG' with fake players that's not actually an MMO at all, gets an imminent release date.

Rebellion's open world shooter Atomfall released in March among some stiff competition, landing in the same month as Hazelight's cooperative hit Split Fiction and a week after the massively popular Assassin's Creed Shadows. Yet according to CEO Jason Kingsley, this hasn't stopped Atomfall from becoming a success in its own right. Indeed, Atomfall has done so well for Rebellion that Kingsley is considering making it into a series.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Kingsley was asked whether he thought he and Rebellion's CTO Chris Kingsley had got the scale of its projects, including Atomfall, just right. "I don't think we got it just right," he responded. "I think that one of the things Chris and I want to do is repeat success. So we want to do more Sniper Elite, we want to do more Zombie Army, we want to do more Strange Brigade."

To this, Kingsley added: "Now it looks like we want to do more Atomfall."

Kingsley didn't reveal specific sales figures for Atomfall, though we do know that it reached two million players as of mid-April. But he did say that it was a bigger success than Rebellion expected. "We've done a lot better than our mid-range estimates, actually," he explained. "It's nice when marketing comes back to you and says 'yep, we underestimated our high-level success."

According to Kingsley, a crucial part of Atomfall's success was featuring it on Microsoft's Game Pass service. This is partly due to increasing discoverability, and having Microsoft's assistance. "They brought their skills and their scale to bear on our small project, and it's done really, really well for them, so they got a good deal, we got a good deal out of it as well."

However, it's also because releasing on Game Pass provides some guarantee of a financial return. "Without going into details, they guarantee you a certain level of income, regardless of what it will sell for," Kingsley added.

Yet while Atomfall performed above expectations for Rebellion, making a sequel remains a question of pragmatism rather than will. "Can we find the resources to do it? I don't know. The idea has always been to have two thirds sequels and one third new IP pushing the boundaries."

But pushing the boundaries is expensive, and Kingsley says any attempt to do so must fit with Rebellion's approach to managing budgets and its position as a developer of midsize games. "We don't deliberately fit into this mid range, but that's what we can do, and what we can do successfully. We literally can't afford to spend 200 million on making a game. We just don't have 200 million."

I'm pleased that Atomfall has been a success for Rebellion, but I will also admit to being slightly surprised. I played through the whole game last month and, although I had a reasonable time with it, my feelings largely chimed with Fraser's review.

"Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are only surface deep," he wrote back in March. "That shallowness is probably Atomfall's defining feature: it's chock full of systems and obvious inspirations, but it rarely digs into them and struggles to find anything to set itself apart."