Back in July, it was confirmed by UK retailer The Game Collection that Oblivion Remastered would be getting a physical edition for Xbox Series X (and PS5), but they weren't able to confirm whether the game would ship on-disc or not.
Well, they've just received stock at their warehouse of both the Xbox and PlayStation versions, and they've gone above and beyond by testing each of them - telling customers that they can still cancel their pre-orders if they're not satisfied.
The situation is this - based on the PEGI version, it includes 19.06GB on-disc for the PS5 release which allows you to play the start of the game offline before being prompted to download the rest, while the Xbox version apparently requires an internet connection from the very start (but we're still assuming it includes a similar amount on-disc).
"PS5 - Allowed us to start and play the game offline without any issues. 19.06GB on disc, rest needs downloading. XSX - Told us we needed to connect to the internet to play from the start."
This is obviously not an ideal situation in either case, but to be honest we were never expecting Oblivion Remastered to fit on a single disc considering how large the file size is on the Xbox Store (over 120GB).
It's yet another example of a physical release serving as more of an access token rather than a fully-contained product, and these days it's much more commonplace than having an entire game on a disc. To be honest, it feels like physical media has never truly been the same since the end of the Xbox 360 / PS3 era and start of the Xbox One / PS4 era.
The good news is that Oblivion Remastered isn't more expensive to buy physically than digitally, so you can take your pick in terms of which version you want. It's available to pre-order now at The Game Collection, Amazon US and many other retailers, and you're looking at paying around £39.99 / $39.99 depending on where you buy it.