Backward compatible: Many old Oblivion mods still work on Oblivion Remastered

Bethesda isn't officially supporting mods for the newly released Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But that hasn't stopped some players from discovering that many mods created for the 2006 original seem to work just fine in the new game with a bare minimum of installation headaches.

As noted on Reddit and the Bethesda Game Studios Discord, some .esp mod files designed years ago for the original Oblivion have the same effect when plugged into the new Remastered game. Ars confirmed this during some quick testing, using a mod uploaded in 2008 to easily add high-end weapons and armor to the opening jail cell scene in the Remastered version.

While players of the original game could use the Oblivion Mod Manager to easily install these mods, doing so in the Remastered version requires a bit more manual work. First, users have to download the applicable .esp mod files and put them in the "Content/Dev/ObvData/Data" folder (the same one that already houses DLC data files like "DLCHorseArmor.esp"). Then it's just a matter of opening "Plugins.txt" in the same folder and adding that full .esp file name to the plaintext list.

Early testers report that some more complex mods designed for the original Oblivion will lead to crashes or mixed results when loaded in the Remastered game. Others theorize that "the game seems to read OG Oblivion as its base, so manually adding a mod that doesn’t have new assets ... would work."

As the community continues to analyze this modding backward compatibility, other modders have already rushed to release dozens of new mods designed specifically for the Remastered version, even without official support from Bethesda. At this point, most of these seem focused on some basic UI tweaks or quality-of-life hacks to make the game more enjoyable (we're particularly fond of this one that makes slow-walking NPCs a bit faster).

More complex mods may require diving into the Unreal Engine's pak file format to replace in-game assets with new, modded versions. That means it's probably just a matter of time before we get the equivalent of the custom Mystic Elf race modded back into the newer version of the game.