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Like everyone else, I was caught off-guard by Bethesda shadowdropping The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remake on all of us in April. It had been an open secret that they were making the game for years, faithfully recreating the entirety of Tamriel in a modern engine. It only took a few seconds to realize that the game looked gorgeous, but the burning question I had as I waited for the massive download to install on my PC was simple: Was it still buggy?

Welcome to Gamify My Life, our new weekly column here at Popverse, where I'll dive into all the things in gaming that keep me up at night. Sometimes it will be current gaming stories (like the surprise release of Oblivion last month) while other times I'll talk about the games that made me a gamer. When I can, I'll even use my 10+ years of covering gaming to dive into the background of what makes the video game industry work. Think of this as a heavy dose of me fanboying over my favorite things in gaming with a sprinkling of Insider Baseball for good measure.

I have incredibly fond memories of playing Oblivion during my university days, though it would be more accurate to say that I have fond memories of breaking Oblivion as I rampaged across the empire. And it was an easy game to break because it never tried to keep you on any sort of guide rails. Once you escape from the sewers and are entrusted with finding the bastard son of Emperor Uriel Septim VII, the game acts like a parent teaching their child to ride a bike; it lifts its hands from the seat and lets you coast away until you inevitably crash into a parked car.

Walking around Cyrodiil was like walking around a minefield of opportunity; quests were hidden just out of view, but so was the potential to find something the developers never intended. I distinctly remember watching as my horse took to the sky like a wingless Pegasus moments after an Oblivion gate opened like it would rather defy the laws of physics and nature than go in there. There were also quests that got buggy if you approached them from an unexpected angle, which obviously was what I wanted to do.

That might not have been Bethesda’s intention when they released Oblivion back in 2006, but these bugs were a big part of the charm of the game. They were a sign that the developers were trying something wild and new. They were pushing the boundaries of what could be done in a video game. Their ambition showed in every unexpected flaw that didn’t get ironed out before the game shipped because they were impossible to find them all. The game is too big, too grand in scope and scale to ever hope to try to polish fully.

So, back to my initial question: is Oblivion still buggy? I’ve not spent a huge amount of time with it, partly because I’m still trying to work through my massive gaming backlog and because I have a nearly two-year-old stomping around the house, but I can confirm that many of the bugs you might recall from the original Oblivion release are still there. As soon as Emperor Uriel was slain and my character approached the exit to the sewers, the game promptly crashed. When I got it up and running again, I was chased down a river by an invisible mud crab before I reached a town where several NPCs were arguing but their dialogue overlapped in a way that made it impossible to follow anything.

Needless to say, I was greatly relieved. The wrinkles and imperfections, the signs that the developers were straining desperately to achieve something great rather than settle for merely good, are there. Perhaps not as frequent or as obvious, but they’re there and I love them. These bugs, big and small, feel like part of the fabric of the game.

Is Oblivion still the groundbreaking game that it was when it was released nearly 20 years ago? That is certainly debatable. The open-world genre has come a long way thanks to games like The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but the thing that gives Oblivion a special place in history – and my heart – isn’t what it managed to achieve. It is how it strained to become something bigger than what felt possible at the time and how it challenged you not just to accept the occasional visual or gameplay bug but to embrace them. Approach the game creatively and you could be rewarded with the unexpected.

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.