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.