I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.

Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.

Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.

Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.

I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.

"Why is an old game good?" feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn't it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn't an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.

I can't belive people play football. That game is old as hell!

Clair Obscur came out the same time and it's probably the best RPG I've ever played, and I've played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.

How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?

Possibly because you're buying the wrong games? Don't get me wrong, I've got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it's cool....

But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.

The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven't played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.

Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something..). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you're into that kind of thing.

You're just buying the wrong games.

Go play Split Fiction, Balatro, and Hades 2.

I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there's so much of it out there.

I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can't pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.

There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.

Great art is timeless.

There are modern games that can compete, they're just few and far between.