Guide To Enable Steam Overlay in Oblivion

Vanilla Oblivion lacks a lot of features and has a ton of bugs including the one where your steam overlay doesn't work when you're in-game. This guide will help you get steam overlay working in no time so that you can chat with your friends and track playtime while you're playing Oblivion.

Locate your Oblivion Install Folder

We will be installing a few mods to get our steam overlay working and for that we need to find our oblivion install folder, to do that:

Go to your Steam Library and click on Oblivion:


Click on the settings icon:


Click on Installed Files and then browse:


This will take you to the installed folder of Oblivion.

Installing OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender)

For this guide, we'll be using OBSE to enable Steam Overlay.

To install OBSE, head to the following link on Nexus Mods: OBSE on Nexus Mods[www.nexusmods.com]

Click on Manual download and download OBSE's 7z folder:


Extract the downloaded folder using 7zip or WinRAR and you'll find the following files inside the extracted folder:


Now, copy and paste the following files into your Oblivion game directory:

- obse_1_2_416.dll
- obse_editor_1_2.dll
- obse_loader.exe
- obse_steam_loader.dll
- Contents of Data Folder into Data folder in Oblivion Game Directory.

Now rename OblivionLauncher.exe to OblivionLauncher.exe.bak and obse_loader.exe to OblivionLauncher.exe

This ensures that you'll be launching OBSE along with Steam which helps us in getting our overlay working.

Your Folder should now look something like this:


That's it, we installed OBSE and now let's deal with the steam overlay.

Installing Steam Overlay Enabler

For this, we need to go back to Nexus Mods again and download the following mod manually: Steam Overlay Enabler Mod on Nexus Mods[www.nexusmods.com]


The mod may tell you to use Mod Organiser 2 for it but ignore that. OBSE works perfectly with it.

It will download another .7z file which you need to extract. After extracting, you'll find the following files inside it:


Copy and paste the two files into Oblivion game directory.

Your final folder will look something like this:


We're done with the installation of all the mods necessary.

Launching the Game

Now we're done with the installation. All we need to do is open our game and hold Shift+Tab to check if the steam overlay is working or not

For me, following the steps I told got the Steam Overlay working for me.


However, certain features like Screenshot and game recording do not work but you'll be still able to track your playtime and chat with friends while in-game.

I checked it and it doesn't break the game so it's a safe method to play the game.

Thanks for reading my guide. Please leave a rating if it helped you.

[uphillmage23]

no longer worls

[nativecoruscant]

I can confirm that (sadly) this doesn't work as of May 3, 2025. I'm running Windows 11 Pro 24H2 build 26100.3915 :(

[Gordon Ramaswamy]

Steam overlay support is a bit messy since we are installing a mod for it and not doing it natively. You can use xbox gamebar for screenshots though.

[The1freeman1]

does anyone have any idea to why my screenshots randomly decided to not work anymore?

[4K_240hz_MLED]

Well the Steam screenshots don't even work properly for Oblivion anyways lol

[Gordon Ramaswamy]

Yes, I did it on 24H2. Only downside for me is that screenshots and game recording don't work but rest of the steam overlay works.

[4K_240hz_MLED]

will this work for Windows 11 24H2? i'm on 23H2 and the stupid update tool is trying to force me to switch to 24H2

[Chika]

Bethesda is allergic to alt-tab

[Haru Moritaka]

It's a pity, but the overlay still won't open for me.

[Gordon Ramaswamy]

Yeah alt tab thing seems to be more of a game issue and can't be fixed. I can't do any livestreams or do any recording with this game anymore.

I don't see this issue going away unless they make a remaster