Summary
Enchanting inOblivion, as those playing throughthe remasterare quickly discovering, is a bit of a headache. You need to fill your inventory with soul gems, finagle a soul trap spell or enchantment, and then fill those soul gems to recharge your gear. The problem is that enchantments run out very quickly in Oblivion, so you’re constantly forced to repeat those steps just to ensure that you can deal an extra bit of frost damage, and you might end up wasting a larger soul gem by filling it with a mudcrab anyway.
“Soul gems are thematic but create terrible gameplay,“u/0L1V14H1CKSP4NT13S posted to over 4,000 upvotes. “I would much rather have a generic system where souls are worth X-to-Y ‘soul’ and each soul gem of its type holds X-to-Y ‘soul.’ Have a grand soul gem, but there’s nothing around except scamps? Capture ten scamp souls and [fill] that grand soul gem! But no, I get to run around with five different types of gems in my inventory, so I don’t accidentally put something worth less than a grand soul into my grand soul gem.”
“It’s A Mechanic I Mostly Ignore”
It’s so frustrating that some players, like u/Cloud_N0ne, outright want the next Elder Scrolls to “get rid of having to recharge enchanted weapons”, since they “never use them because having to stop to re-fill them is just not fun”.
But there might be an obvious solution lying in one of the older games. As u/Inculta666 noted, “They should recharge over time, and you could use gems if you need [an] emergency refill”, much like how it worked inMorrowind(which is very close to beating its peak player count,so hop on). Your enchantment skill in that game also impacts the number of uses you have, which directly addresses a problem many have with how quickly gear runs out of charges in Oblivion. But that would mean TES6 returning to the old skill system.
As many have pointed out, the best way to circumvent Oblivion’s enchantment system is to grab Umbra (a sword with the soul trap enchantment) andAzura’s Star (a reusable soul gem).
If Bethesda wants to look forward and try new ideas, then u/Rad_Dad6969 has a simple solution of their own: “You should be able to charge an equipped weapon with a soul trap”. It would certainly cut out the rigmarole of filling soul gems, making soul trap a far more intuitive spell, though they also suggested that it should only apply to weapons with inlaid soul gems. If Bethesda keeps with the more customisable gear ofFallout 4andStarfield, then that would certainly tie into its new systems.
Failing all of that, we haveThe Elder Scrolls Online, which simplifies all soul gems into one category… soul gems. Rather than tiered souls, they’re all identical. It’s a little streamlined, which, as we keep seeing,annoys fans, but it does make the system a little less fiddly.
