You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is not just a massive game in scope, but also in file size. In bringing the game to modern platforms, the gorgeous remaster has ballooned in file size – a modern courtesy allowed by the rise of digital games and higher storage capacity consoles.  However, in an interview with VideoGamer, Oblivion and Skyrim designer Bruce Nesmith recalls the massive task of forcing the 2011 Elder Scrolls game to fit on a single dual-layer DVD, limiting the game’s file size to a maximum of 7GB. In the end, the team managed to squeeze the entire game into just 4.8GB on Xbox 360. Nowadays, the Special Edition of that same game is around 22GB with all of the previously released DLC, but Nesmith still recalls the huge effort by Bethesda to make sure the game could be played directly off a single disc for all players.  “You can thank our programming and artists because they worked their asses off to get that to happen,” Nesmith explained. “You know, compression methods, optimal reuse of our assets, you know. We were really squeezing the most out of our art on Xbox 360.” Check a look at this for some heavy nostalgia Nesmith revealed that it was “really tricky getting it [Skyrim] to work on the two consoles” with the infamously horrible PlayStation 3 port being previously described as a Herculean effort to get working even in the state it was in.  In bringing Skyrim to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Bethesda not only increased the quality of its assets, but also implemented new effects such as sparkling snow shaders and other minor additions. While the core programming of the game took up very little space, the enhanced version of the epic RPG was over 4 times bigger in file size. For The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, that comparison is laughable as the newly rendered RPG massively expands the original game’s 4GB file size to a whopping 125GB. Nesmith reiterates that the vast majority of all modern game file sizes are due to the incredibly high quality of art. 3D models drive millions of polygons, 4K textures are insanely large and audio takes up “a significant space” as well.  “The vast majority of that is art,” he explained. “Whether it’s animations or textures or models, usually it’s textures. One of the things I was always slapped in the face with when I worked there [at Bethesda] was, well, ‘I wanna store all this data, is that going to be too much?’ and the programmer would look at me like, ‘that’s less than the texture on an apple. Yes, you can have your data.’” This single apple file, a seemingly unambitious asset, is larger than the vast amount of systems programming in terms of file size. With this in mind, The Elder Scrolls 6 will undoutedly be a massive game over 100GB, especially considering the file size of Skyrim. While there are compression techniques to make file sizes smaller, this comes at the cost of loading times, a reality that Nesmith has described as a “neccessary bane of Bethesda games” as the are. “Everybody who complains about them assumes that it’s done because we’re lazy or we don’t want to follow the modern thinking on stuff,” the designer told VideoGamer. “The reality is the Bethesda games are so detailed and so graphics intensive… you just cant have both present at the same time.” As the demand for better visual fidelity continues, just look at the latest GTA 6 trailer for proof of that, game sizes will undoubtedly become bigger and bigger. If Oblivion Remastered is 125GB, just how big will Elder Scrolls 6 be? The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One Genre(s): RPG 9 VideoGamer Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share