You may remember that for years before its official unveiling and subsequent Beyonce Drop onto Game Pass, the official Oblivion Remaster was the subject of much industry speculation.
Rumours swirled for years about this mysterious project, at one point believed to be a full-blown remake with ‘Soulslike combat’ (heaven forbid). And nobody took more notice of those pervasive reports more than, perhaps, the Skyblivion team: the ambitious project over a decade in the making that is re-imagining every inch of Oblivion in the Skyrim engine.
In the modding scene mini-documentary published today by our very own video team, we get a glimpse into the rollercoaster of emotions felt by Skyblivion devs as a potential rival project – commissioned by Bethesda themselves – threatened the relevancy of their own fan-made game.
“It was not set in stone whether it was a ‘remake’ or a ‘remaster’, so we were concerned” recalls Dee Keyes, Skyblivion’s former world designer. However, the mood changed upon Oblivion Remastered’s release: “it was a huge relief because we realised ‘oh, they’re doing something completely different’. They’re doing a very faithful remaster, and we were going for something more remade from the ground up”.
And it shows, too. It’s clear from the numerous Skyblivion Dev Diaries that entire cities have been meticulously re-designed and expanded by the mod team, often bearing little or no resemblance to the original layout. It may seem fanciful to think that a hobbyist project can rival or even surpass the scope and quality of an official release, but if Skyblivion pulls off what it is promising, then it will genuinely represent a much more comprehensive overhaul of Oblivion than the official Remaster, which is literally the original game with an Unreal 5 derived graphical overlay – a product of “engine blending”. Meaning it looks fresh and modern, but it is still the same game with all of the same foibles underneath.
And it’s still physically impossible for boats to reach the sea from the Imperial City, something which Skyblivion goes out of its way to fix, as an example of how well thought out and lore-friendly its changes are.
But Dee left the project very publicly some weeks ago, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, citing mismanagement issues and a belief that too much time was being spent on producing, among other things, slick dev diaries while the project remained in a far less polished state.
Our doc covers this, as well as the wider issue of the commercialisation of modding – with one professional developer, game designer Sean Noonan (ex-Ubisoft, Cloud Imperium) opining that some large modding projects feel more like “mock business opportunities… rather than something fun”.
For Skyblivion’s part, we contacted their senior team for comment and received this response to the claims repeated in our piece, courtesy of Heavy Burns, Skyblivion Implementation Lead:
“Its my view that these things are best discussed internally and its upsetting that Dee decided to air anything publicly without coming to myself or the team. Many of the statements in his post are either misrepresented or just untrue which makes it especially upsetting. We are all volunteers at the end of the day and nobody is ever expected to crunch or offer the project any time or effort that they do not wish to. We’ve always maintained that every dev should put themselves and their lives before the project and it was no different in dee’s case. We wont release Skyblivion until we’re confident Skyblivion is finished, and that’s always been the case.”
You can check out the full video above, or over on the Eurogamer video channel, which you should be subbed to anyway because it’s good and not rubbish.
