‘Oblivion Remastered with guns’ becomes reality as modder jury-rigs a literal Glock into the game and shoots up an Oblivion Tower with it

Back during the hype cycle for Fallout 3, a common refrain of skeptics was that Bethesda had simply made ‘Oblivion with guns’—in effect creating some kind of total overhaul mod for The Elder Scrolls 4 that subtracted the spellcrafting and added in shotguns. Sadly, what we actually got was a game about chasing Liam Neeson through 4,000 subway stations. But what could have been, eh?

But great ideas never die, they just go on the shelf. That’s presumably why an Oblivion Remastered modder named CosmicBoogaloo has created the aptly named Glock mod for Oblivion Remastered. It boasts that it is the “first functional gun in Oblivion Remastered,” and boy, functional sure is one word for it. See below for a video of our hero blasting his way through an Oblivion Tower like it’s Hard Boiled.

I continue to be very impressed by what modders can jury-rig together in Oblivion Remastered even absent an official modding toolkit. This one works, as you might have guessed, by contorting the game’s archery system into an unholy new shape. Glock is built atop another mod called Slick Archery, from a creator named Dicene, that lets you muck about with the time each phase of the bow-shooting process takes.

So Glock simply sets that time to 0 seconds—an instant maximum-draw-and-fire—and swaps out a bow model for a gun. Shuffle in the right sound effects, bullets in place of arrows and a gun holster to serve as a quiver, and you’ve successfully created the adventures of John Oblivion, cop on the edge.

I’m no modder, but even I know Oblivion Remastered is a strange franken-thing of a game: the original Gamebryo gem wrapped in a thick, luscious layer of Unreal Engine 5, so I imagine pulling this stuff off is a lot of experimentation and trial and error.

Plus, of course, a lot of pooled community knowledge: getting your Glock on in Oblivion Remastered requires a whole bunch of prerequisite mods to get everything working. You’ll need UE4SS for ObRem, the UE4SS TesSyncMapInjector, and Runtime EditorIDs for the game’s console to get it all going.

There are also recommended mods to make it run nicer: NL_Tag Remover, Auto-Hide Gear, and Returning Arrows (that one means you won’t have to scour the ground for your literal bullets to pick them back up once fired). And then? Oblivion (Remastered) with guns, just like we dreamt back in 2006.