{"id":50,"date":"2025-06-04T15:22:33","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T14:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/?p=50"},"modified":"2025-06-04T15:22:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T14:22:33","slug":"new-dialogue-oblivion-remastered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/new-dialogue-oblivion-remastered\/","title":{"rendered":"New Dialogue in Oblivion: Remastered: An Adventure in Digital Media Archaeology"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is written by Sean Roberts<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Like a condemned outlaw rudely awakened in their dungeon cell by an unexpected visitor, gamers were surprised last month by the release of a remaster of Oblivion<\/em><\/a> (2006). The original was released nearly 20 years ago as the fourth instalment of the Elder Scrolls<\/em> series, a medieval high-fantasy role playing game that promised players the ability to create their own heroic character and go on adventures across a massive open world.<\/p>\n

I remember my first time playing Oblivion<\/em>, escaping from the game’s starting dungeon to my first glimpse of the open plains of the fictional continent of Cyrodiil. I spent a few minutes just staring at the expansive view and the gently swaying grasses. The last month has seen hordes of fans posting screenshots from the higher-resolution remaster, recapturing that sense of awe and excitement. I suspect that the feeling is more than just about high pixels and fancy lighting effects, but a sense, perhaps only recently recreated in series like Dark Souls <\/em>or Legend of Zelda<\/em>, of excitement and wonder: there is adventure waiting for me over that hill.<\/p>\n

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Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion: Remastered (2025). Bethesda.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a researcher who studies games, remasters and remakes provide a unique opportunity to understand more about a game. What is kept (and what is discarded) reflects how games and the gaming community have changed over time. As a linguist, I\u2019m particularly interested in the dialogue within games, and the identity of who gets to speak. This connects the game\u2019s design to wider changes in society.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, my colleagues and I recently compared the remake of Final Fantasy VII<\/em> to its original<\/a>, concentrating in particular on the character of Jesse. While the remake gave her ten times more dialogue \u2013 a very positive change in a medium that has struggled with representing women in less traditional roles – a lot of this extra talk had shifted from demonstrating her knowledge as an explosives expert to girly flirting with the main character. So, two steps forward, one step back.<\/p>\n

The remaster of Oblivion <\/i>is slightly different: more like a very fancy new coat on the same old skeleton. Still, the trailer suggested that the developers had re-recorded, and even added new dialogue. This intrigued me, since our previous study found that the original Oblivion <\/i>gave nearly twice as much dialogue to men as to women<\/a>. Furthermore, women are less likely to get more emotionally charged dialogue, leaving the juiciest parts for men. This kind of bias has been the norm for many games over the last 30 years, though the proportion of female dialogue has been slowly increasing over time.<\/p>\n

So, I wondered if the new dialogue had attempted to tip the scales. However, researching game dialogue is difficult \u2013 the raw text is often hidden in arcane code, or in a variety of formats, or just very difficult to obtain<\/a>. That\u2019s why, together with my colleague Stephanie Rennick<\/a>, we\u2019ve been creating the Video Game Dialogue Corpus<\/a>, a suite of tools and resources for anlaysing video game dialogue. We\u2019re currently up to about 10 million words of dialogue from 60 games over the last 30 years.<\/p>\n

Delving into Oblivion<\/em>\u2019s data dungeons<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Digging into the game code, I was surprised to find that the raw data that drives the dialogue and quest plots is the same format as the original. This provided an adventure in digital media archaeology, like digging down through strata of modern buildings laid on ancient foundations. Elder modders exclaimed waves of nostalgia at seeing these archaic files<\/a>, suggesting that there’s a kind of digital heritage of games.<\/p>\n

I extracted the list of dialogue and cross-referenced it with the original list, archived in the Video Game Dialogue Corpus<\/a>. I also needed to filter out dialogue that was cut from the game <\/a>(e.g. special greetings from NPCs on holy days were recorded but never made accessible to the player), various pieces that belong to DLCs, debugging dialogue, and alternate versions of a line. Just like an archaeologist needs to use their knowledge of the historical context to interpret their findings, I was struck by how much context a game researcher needs about the game to understand its nuances.<\/p>\n

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Screenshot of Oblivion: Remastered (2025) Sound Files. Courtesy of Author.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I found 572 \u2018new\u2019 lines of dialogue in the remaster that were not obviously duplicates of lines in the original. Of these, 57% were for women and 43% were for men \u2013 a reversal of the balance in the original.<\/p>\n

For example, the original contained dialogue for innkeepers when asking to stay for a night, but not all combinations of gender and species were recorded evenly in the original: the original contained twice as many lines for male Bretons as female Bretons. However, the remaster adds many lines of dialogue for women so now the proportion is reversed. Even so, I noticed there are still no dialogue lines for this role for Redguard women, Khajiit men or Argonian men.<\/p>\n

Many other changes also seem to relate to generic NPC dialogue like greetings, often rebalancing the world in a similar way. While there is a lot of concern over representation in main characters, addressing background characters is also welcome, since we found that gender bias is equally prevalent in main and minor characters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Despite these changes, the number of lines given to women in the game overall has not really changed: from 41% in the original to 40% in the remaster. Looking at the overall change for each group, we see that there is more balance for some groups, but less for others (the dremora only have a very small number of lines).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
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Percentage of dialogue lines recorded for women in Oblivion (courtesy of author).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

So, Oblivion<\/em> is not a perfect game. This won\u2019t be a shock to anybody. In fact, the \u201cjankiness\u201d and imbalance is one of the things that many players love. The dialogue mini-games are a bizarre attempt at capturing the dynamics of conversation<\/a>, and reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw recently compared the melee mechanics to \u201cwatching police body cam footage of someone struggling to open a broken cutlery drawer<\/a>\u201d. Ultimately, greater diversity and representation will come from games made in the future rather than rebalancing older titles. We\u2019ll continue to delve into these weird and wonderful worlds, and into the data that underlies them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post is written by Sean Roberts, Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy.\u00a0 Like a condemned outlaw rudely awakened in their dungeon cell by an unexpected […]","protected":false},"author":7146,"featured_media":54,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26],"tags":[29,31,32,27,28,30],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-video-games-research","tag-bethesda","tag-digital-media-archaeology","tag-game-dialogue","tag-oblivion","tag-oblivion-remaster","tag-video-games"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/digital-humanities-and-culture-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}