If I recall correctly the team behind Skyblivion was (or still is) in contact with Bethesda throughout the development and had no problems with the latter in regards their work. Heck, Bethesda itself posted about the mod on their site in 2023.
They’ve been aware of Skyblivion for years and there’s no indication they’re interested in killing it.
That goodwill can change in an instant, especially if they are releasing a competing product, and especially if the legal team gets in the loop rather than the development staff.
Can it change? Sure. There’s just no reason to expect that based on Bethesda’s approach to modding until now. I’d rather base my expectations on their past actions rather than assume the worst just in case.
We can already see it with stuff like the Beamdog remasters. People insist that it is totally better to play BG2 with these five mods, that launcher hack, etc. And everyone except for the usual suspects just say “Buy the Beamdog release. It has almost everything you want and is zero effort”.
Also, the mere existence of a fan project (that will never release in a satisfactory manner…) shows that Bethesda is super mod friendly and blah blah blah.
How does it not? It is the same game map, same missions, even the same character names. You just know the corporate bros would hate an alternative to their paid remaster that is basically the same thing.
skyblivion is great marketing, and it’s free to let them keep going for now. Keep people excited about a new oblivion, and then kill the only other option besides yourself. I actually think it’s more likely than not that there is a last minute reversal.
Also, Skyblivion will, at worst, only cut into their PC sales. The official remake will be the only option available on consoles due to the nature of the mod.
Maybe they aren’t, but what about the company that is doing the remake? They might argue it will hamper their ability to meet estimated sales and overall profit.
That’s true. It’s still on Bethesda, but yeah they could have an agreement. Skyblivion has been in development longer than this though I’m sure, and Bethesda was aware of it and said it was OK, so I’m assuming there’s no agreement like that. If there were then Bethesda would have done something that will make them look really bad, which they do tend to do so it is a possibility.
At the end of the day Virtuos are just a contractor - Bethesda are the ones with final say in the matter. Despite all their flaws they never really showed to be hostile towards these kind of projects (or at least I haven’t seen them act that way) so there’s no reason to automatically expect the worst. That’s just my opinion though.
For all their faults, Bethesda may be the most mod-friendly AAA studio out there right now.
I can vaguely recall a single instance where they shut someone down, and that was over re-used audio assets from an older game. That was almost certainly about contractual licensing obligations to voice actors.
Did they even shut them down back then? I might be thinking about a different situation but I remember one of the other remake mods (was it New Vegas on Fallout 4 engine?) where they simply told the team they can’t use the original audio. The cancellation of that mod happened months later and didn’t even have anything to with that issue, I believe.
Either way, this kind of scenario is something I skipped over in my initial question since banning reuse of assets in different engines is a legal thing. I mostly meant them blocking/killing projects for no “serious” reason.
Still, it was a good idea to mention these kind of issues as well.
Yeah, I don’t remember all the details myself, so you’re probably right. I was basically trying to support your thesis that Bethesda getting nasty over mods would be something entirely new and out of character. The only example someone could even try to point to had a bunch of other (better) explanations than “mod bad, Bethesda mad.”
I actually thought about including this case in my original post but I have tendency to waffle way too much and in the end decided against it to keep things shorter. It is a useful example to mention so thanks for that.
The way skyblivion has been implemented avoids all this. They have made it very clear they are not in any way using original assets or providing the game. They are mods that utilize both Skyrim and Oblivion game files and you must have both for it to work. It is modding those game files, not providing them.
Earlier this month our Jim called upon Bethesda to remake Morrowind rather than Oblivion. “You cowards,” Jim wrote, calling Morrowind a “special game, where a beautifully unique fantasy setting is locked away behind technology and interface design that has aged particularly badly”.
I prefer Morrowind’s UI to Skyrim’s, even with SkyUI mod:
It’s more fun to have individual item icons than just text or generic icon just for item type
Those classic brass borders are beautiful
Choosing one of multiple reply options work more reliable in Morrowind, in Skyrim when playing on PC you often click one option and it still picks the wrong one because you didn’t scroll enough
Overall, this whole system was obviously designed for consoles and it doesn’t really work well on PC even with mods. I don’t really remember Oblivion’s interface, but the one in Morrowind’s is something that I think definitely needs less “fixing” than Skyrim’s for example. And I don’t think it aged bad at all. Also hotkey system was great, I really miss it in Skyrim, potions are way less fun when you need to go through a bunch of menus every time you want to drink one.
My computer’s specs are just under the minimum for new games released these days. It will probably be able to handle Skyblivion, but almost definitely not the remake. So that’s the one that has my attention
That’s because they’re classy and understand that the two are totally different projects. Skyblivion is impressive but that doesn’t even remotely mean that an official remaster/remake isn’t worth having.
well we dont really know anything about it outside of the leaks, as far as I’m aware. the most I know is that the game will run on the original engine but have graphics handled by unreal engine running on top, or something to that effect
I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.
The remake is being handled by a third party, and it’s unclear so far what they’ve been allowed to do besides replace the graphics rendering with Unreal Engine 5. It’s all reportedly still Creation Engine under the hood.
Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim, it’s likely that it will have all the bugs of the original.
Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim
IIRC Bethesda lets mod creators own the rights to their mods so Bethesda can’t just roll in the bug fixes into the actual game without the mod creator’s permission. I know the Skyrim unofficial patch is ran by a team (Arthmoor) obsessed with DMCA’ing other people as well as just being dicks in general. Some of the “fixes” aren’t really fixes and just what the team personally thought how the game should be.
I totally agree. Morrowind gets a lot of hate for it’s combat (some deserved), but most of the time it’s people not understanding what it’s trying to do. You don’t complain in BG3 when an attack fails, and that’s the same thing Morrowind was doing. It cared about character skills, not player skill.
Yeah, if you create a scrawny character who has never held a blade, grab a dagger, run into a dungeon until you’re exhausted, then try to fight then you should miss. The later games, especially Skyrim, not caring about the character makes every playthrough feel the same and no one has a unique experience.
Morrowind needed animations to convey what was happening, but the foundation is very solid. It’s just the technology at the time limited it and it didn’t communicate what it was doing well.
The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
It’s also from the era when people were expected to read the manual while the game installed, so the game never has tutorials for certain things, most prominent being fatigue. New players tend to run everywhere, drain their fatigue meter, and struggle to hit anything or cast a spell. Just reading the manual, as the devs originally expected, solves a lot.
As long as spellcasting is still good and spellcrafting is still in. Magic was a complete joke in Skyrim and not just because it was terrible DPS compared to swords and bows. The spells were all so boring.
Gosh I hope but Bethesda’s Radiant AI in Oblivion made for some real weird and unique NPC interactions. It gave that game its charm, IMO. Skyrims is different and just porting the game to Skyrim’s Creation Engine might lose some of that weird charm.
Hasn’t this Bethesda helmed Oblivion remake been in the rumors and ‘eventually’ stage since around 2021-2022? Feel like skyblivion team has had plenty of time to get used to it at this point, but has something changed recently to make the bethesda version more relevant?
Oblivion is at least playable for newer gamers. It’s not a good experience, but it is manageable.
Morrowind, for all its immense benefits, makes everyone who entered the game scene after 2010 scream in terror. I personally never left Balmora, because it’s just a terrible experience by modern standards (graphics, character animation, controls, battle mechanics…), which is a great shame because the game seems to be great otherwise.
TES I and II, while deserving recognition, are very Doom-like in terms of gameplay, and I don’t believe an adequate remake could be made, because they are so different they can’t adequately be turned into a modern experience.
So, I guess for me all hopes are for Skywind, so I could finally walk the streets of Vivec without the need to fork my eyes.
Oblivion is far less playable for new players, y’all just have nostalgia blinders / mods in mind
The levelling system breaks Oblivion, violently. Nothing that awful is in Morrowind, even the “I can’t hit anything with a dagger because I’m too stupid to read” doesn’t come close
I can’t hit anything with a dagger because I’m too stupid to read” doesn’t come close
This happens 3 seconds into the game, and very few modern gamers will ever RTFM. It’s far more likely to be a hard wall to a newcomer. I wouldn’t blame them, either. Invisible stamina-based dice rolls was certainly a choice.
Oblivion’s system took time to break down - long enough to actually get players invested, at least.
Nah, I started with Skyrim, and I played Oblivion without mods. It’s not great, problematic in many places, but it is playable if you want to discover the story.
I’d love to see anything Morrowind‑related from Bethesda. Anything at all. The province of Morrowind, with its weird culture, architecture, and landscapes, is always quite an experience. To me, it’s the most interesting setting in the whole TES series
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Yeah, it’s all cool until Bethesda or their owners issue a takedown.
If I recall correctly the team behind Skyblivion was (or still is) in contact with Bethesda throughout the development and had no problems with the latter in regards their work. Heck, Bethesda itself posted about the mod on their site in 2023.
They’ve been aware of Skyblivion for years and there’s no indication they’re interested in killing it.
That goodwill can change in an instant, especially if they are releasing a competing product, and especially if the legal team gets in the loop rather than the development staff.
Can it change? Sure. There’s just no reason to expect that based on Bethesda’s approach to modding until now. I’d rather base my expectations on their past actions rather than assume the worst just in case.
It can’t if they’ve made legally binding agreements, which I would hope that they have.
Well the “product” is a free overhaul mod.
That cuts into Bethesda’s paid re-release.
Yes but they definitely don’t wanna piss off the fan base… Again.
It really really really doesn’t.
We can already see it with stuff like the Beamdog remasters. People insist that it is totally better to play BG2 with these five mods, that launcher hack, etc. And everyone except for the usual suspects just say “Buy the Beamdog release. It has almost everything you want and is zero effort”.
Also, the mere existence of a fan project (that will never release in a satisfactory manner…) shows that Bethesda is super mod friendly and blah blah blah.
How does it not? It is the same game map, same missions, even the same character names. You just know the corporate bros would hate an alternative to their paid remaster that is basically the same thing.
skyblivion is great marketing, and it’s free to let them keep going for now. Keep people excited about a new oblivion, and then kill the only other option besides yourself. I actually think it’s more likely than not that there is a last minute reversal.
Bethesda is pretty open about their support in modding.
Exactly, which is why I don’t expect them to do anything hostile towards this project - both remakes have their own goals and approaches after all.
Also, Skyblivion will, at worst, only cut into their PC sales. The official remake will be the only option available on consoles due to the nature of the mod.
Maybe they aren’t, but what about the company that is doing the remake? They might argue it will hamper their ability to meet estimated sales and overall profit.
They don’t have any rights to Oblivion as an IP. They’ve been contracted to make this game and that’s where their rights end.
It’s not about IP rights, but about contractual obligations. If the mod affects those in some way, the company might ask Bethesda to make it go away.
That’s true. It’s still on Bethesda, but yeah they could have an agreement. Skyblivion has been in development longer than this though I’m sure, and Bethesda was aware of it and said it was OK, so I’m assuming there’s no agreement like that. If there were then Bethesda would have done something that will make them look really bad, which they do tend to do so it is a possibility.
At the end of the day Virtuos are just a contractor - Bethesda are the ones with final say in the matter. Despite all their flaws they never really showed to be hostile towards these kind of projects (or at least I haven’t seen them act that way) so there’s no reason to automatically expect the worst. That’s just my opinion though.
For all their faults, Bethesda may be the most mod-friendly AAA studio out there right now.
I can vaguely recall a single instance where they shut someone down, and that was over re-used audio assets from an older game. That was almost certainly about contractual licensing obligations to voice actors.
Did they even shut them down back then? I might be thinking about a different situation but I remember one of the other remake mods (was it New Vegas on Fallout 4 engine?) where they simply told the team they can’t use the original audio. The cancellation of that mod happened months later and didn’t even have anything to with that issue, I believe.
Either way, this kind of scenario is something I skipped over in my initial question since banning reuse of assets in different engines is a legal thing. I mostly meant them blocking/killing projects for no “serious” reason.
Still, it was a good idea to mention these kind of issues as well.
Yeah, I don’t remember all the details myself, so you’re probably right. I was basically trying to support your thesis that Bethesda getting nasty over mods would be something entirely new and out of character. The only example someone could even try to point to had a bunch of other (better) explanations than “mod bad, Bethesda mad.”
I actually thought about including this case in my original post but I have tendency to waffle way too much and in the end decided against it to keep things shorter. It is a useful example to mention so thanks for that.
The way skyblivion has been implemented avoids all this. They have made it very clear they are not in any way using original assets or providing the game. They are mods that utilize both Skyrim and Oblivion game files and you must have both for it to work. It is modding those game files, not providing them.
can the rest of us hate?
They’re right on the money. We’re getting double the oblivion!
(you guys decide which cake is whose)
Good response. A bit offtopic but:
I prefer Morrowind’s UI to Skyrim’s, even with SkyUI mod:
Overall, this whole system was obviously designed for consoles and it doesn’t really work well on PC even with mods. I don’t really remember Oblivion’s interface, but the one in Morrowind’s is something that I think definitely needs less “fixing” than Skyrim’s for example. And I don’t think it aged bad at all. Also hotkey system was great, I really miss it in Skyrim, potions are way less fun when you need to go through a bunch of menus every time you want to drink one.
Hopefully the skyblivion team will move en masse to skywind!
My computer’s specs are just under the minimum for new games released these days. It will probably be able to handle Skyblivion, but almost definitely not the remake. So that’s the one that has my attention
That’s because they’re classy and understand that the two are totally different projects. Skyblivion is impressive but that doesn’t even remotely mean that an official remaster/remake isn’t worth having.
Skyblivion >>> remake
We haven’t even seen the remake yet.
It’s Bethesda, there’s not a lot of goodwill with them
I understand Virtuous did the remaster.
Bethesda isn’t the one remaking it
I love when people are just totally confident and wrong on things that are well known and easy to find.
From what I’ve read it’s not actually made by Bethesda, it isn’t using the creation engine and there are gameplay changes.
That information turned me from not caring to checking out what people will say when it releases.
well we dont really know anything about it outside of the leaks, as far as I’m aware. the most I know is that the game will run on the original engine but have graphics handled by unreal engine running on top, or something to that effect
I’m sure the remake will release with the same level of QA and polish that the original Oblivion shipped with. That renowned Bethesda standard of quality.
The remake is being handled by a third party, and it’s unclear so far what they’ve been allowed to do besides replace the graphics rendering with Unreal Engine 5. It’s all reportedly still Creation Engine under the hood.
Considering that Bethesda refused to roll in the community bug fixes with their rereleases of Skyrim, it’s likely that it will have all the bugs of the original.
IIRC Bethesda lets mod creators own the rights to their mods so Bethesda can’t just roll in the bug fixes into the actual game without the mod creator’s permission. I know the Skyrim unofficial patch is ran by a team (Arthmoor) obsessed with DMCA’ing other people as well as just being dicks in general. Some of the “fixes” aren’t really fixes and just what the team personally thought how the game should be.
I know they’ve said combat is overhauled to be more like Dark Souls. I don’t think we know much else though.
I’m fine with almost any changes to the combat. Oblivion’s combat felt worse than both Morrowind’s and Skyrim’s to me.
I totally agree. Morrowind gets a lot of hate for it’s combat (some deserved), but most of the time it’s people not understanding what it’s trying to do. You don’t complain in BG3 when an attack fails, and that’s the same thing Morrowind was doing. It cared about character skills, not player skill.
Yeah, if you create a scrawny character who has never held a blade, grab a dagger, run into a dungeon until you’re exhausted, then try to fight then you should miss. The later games, especially Skyrim, not caring about the character makes every playthrough feel the same and no one has a unique experience.
Morrowind needed animations to convey what was happening, but the foundation is very solid. It’s just the technology at the time limited it and it didn’t communicate what it was doing well.
The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
It’s also from the era when people were expected to read the manual while the game installed, so the game never has tutorials for certain things, most prominent being fatigue. New players tend to run everywhere, drain their fatigue meter, and struggle to hit anything or cast a spell. Just reading the manual, as the devs originally expected, solves a lot.
As long as spellcasting is still good and spellcrafting is still in. Magic was a complete joke in Skyrim and not just because it was terrible DPS compared to swords and bows. The spells were all so boring.
Bethesda?
Skyblivion is developed from a place of love, the official remaster is developed from a place of “money please”
Gosh I hope but Bethesda’s Radiant AI in Oblivion made for some real weird and unique NPC interactions. It gave that game its charm, IMO. Skyrims is different and just porting the game to Skyrim’s Creation Engine might lose some of that weird charm.
I don’t know you, and I don’t care to know you!
I don’t know you, and I don’t care to know you!
I don’t know you, and I don’t care to know you!
I don’t know you, and I don’t care to know you!
Get out of my way before I have you clapped in irons!
Good to see you!
I’m over here supporting Tamriel Rebuilt myself.
Skywind, skyblivion, Obwind. Idk, idc I’m all in.
I’ll wait the eternity for Oblivion support on OpenMW.
Every time I see a Luigi Saint pfp, it’s a based take.
Hasn’t this Bethesda helmed Oblivion remake been in the rumors and ‘eventually’ stage since around 2021-2022? Feel like skyblivion team has had plenty of time to get used to it at this point, but has something changed recently to make the bethesda version more relevant?
Leaked pictures / more confirmation. It’s “real” now, or at least a more solid rumor than before.
Treating them better than Fallout London’s devs got, for sure.
Two cakes.
I see they’re remaking the worst one first, good
Yeah, that’s right, my hot take is that Oblivion fucking sucks ass and needs a remake, unlike TES 2, 3, and 5
if I didn’t have to mod the fuck out of oblivion to make it playable without a spreadsheet, i’d be very mad at you.
I would certainly love to see Morrowind remake.
Oblivion is at least playable for newer gamers. It’s not a good experience, but it is manageable.
Morrowind, for all its immense benefits, makes everyone who entered the game scene after 2010 scream in terror. I personally never left Balmora, because it’s just a terrible experience by modern standards (graphics, character animation, controls, battle mechanics…), which is a great shame because the game seems to be great otherwise.
TES I and II, while deserving recognition, are very Doom-like in terms of gameplay, and I don’t believe an adequate remake could be made, because they are so different they can’t adequately be turned into a modern experience.
So, I guess for me all hopes are for Skywind, so I could finally walk the streets of Vivec without the need to fork my eyes.
Oblivion is far less playable for new players, y’all just have nostalgia blinders / mods in mind
The levelling system breaks Oblivion, violently. Nothing that awful is in Morrowind, even the “I can’t hit anything with a dagger because I’m too stupid to read” doesn’t come close
This happens 3 seconds into the game, and very few modern gamers will ever RTFM. It’s far more likely to be a hard wall to a newcomer. I wouldn’t blame them, either. Invisible stamina-based dice rolls was certainly a choice.
Oblivion’s system took time to break down - long enough to actually get players invested, at least.
Nah, I started with Skyrim, and I played Oblivion without mods. It’s not great, problematic in many places, but it is playable if you want to discover the story.
I’d love to see anything Morrowind‑related from Bethesda. Anything at all. The province of Morrowind, with its weird culture, architecture, and landscapes, is always quite an experience. To me, it’s the most interesting setting in the whole TES series
well the dragonborn dlc went back to a morrowind dlc area, solstheim
Yep, but that’s just a small piece of it. But it was nice.
To play Skyblivion, I believe you need to buy most if not all the Skyrim dlc.
It’s for SSE, which has all the DLC.
Ah. nevermind me then