You might not have noticed if your preference has been to bounce across Cyrodiil to help grind up your acrobatics skill, but when you’re riding a horse in Oblivion Remastered, you’re limited to the third-person camera.
That is, unless you fancy trying a new mod which makes this feature Bethesda briefly teased in the game’s cinematic trailer a slightly janky reality.
Yep, if you missed it, the version of the Oblivion Remastered trailer included in the nostalgia-filled ‘Then & Now’ video Bethesda put out yesterday briefly offers a glimpse of the player riding a horse away from the Imperial City in first person.
It’s something you can’t do in OG Oblivion or vanilla Skyrim, so naturally players have been left speculating as to whether it’s a planned feature that ended up not making it into the remaster for whatever reason. For what it’s worth, the trailer looks to be a mix of composed cinematic shots and snippets of HUDless first-person gameplay to me, so I wouldn’t say it offers unequivocal proof this was a feature, rather than potentially just a cool idea for a pre-rendered shot.
That hasn’t stopped modder WinterElfeas, though. It’s taken them just over a week to put together ‘First Person Horse (pre-alpha v0.0.0.0.0.0.1a)‘, which as you might glean from the name is a very early days attempt to let you take in Cyrodiil through your character’s eyes on horseback.
As you’d expect given that qualifier, it comes with some janky side-effects that will only be able to be smoothed out once more advanced modding tools are out there. Specifically, the modder notes that the camera transition when mounting up is “abrupt”, and that either making your horse rear up or just riding uphill will likely result in your character clipping through it. You’ll also be shown your horse’s name via text whenever you look down at it, just like you are when not riding it, which is a bit of an immersion-killer.
So, as I said, not quite seamless, but WinterElfeas is totally transparent about that. “Please note I will not take any requests or particularly try to improve the mod,” they wrote, “I just changed basic values which moves the camera, but sadly the player model is still there. More advanced UE modders will have to release a better version of a mod like that, I’ll take down my mod if it happens.”
Not necessarily a long-term solution, but something you can give a go as Oblivion Remastered modders continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible, so they can deliver more ambitious mods without as much jank.
