Key Details About the Remake
- Development Studio: Virtuos is developing the remake. Known for supporting major titles like Horizon Forbidden West and more.
- Engine and Technology: The game will use a hybrid engine approach combining Unreal Engine 5 with Bethesda’s original Creation Engine, promising modern enhancements while preserving gameplay mechanics.
- Platforms: Expected on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC. Likely to be included in Xbox Game Pass at launch due to Microsoft’s ownership of Bethesda.
Relation to Other Projects
- Separate from Skyblivion, a fan-project recreating Oblivion within the Skyrim engine. The lead developer of Skyblivion will continue working on this project regardless of an official remake.
- Multiple insiders have corroborated these rumours, suggesting a significant shift in plans after initial hints during Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
How do you think The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion holds up to other games in the series?
How exactly does combining UE5 and the Creation Engine work?
Why?
The Bethesda that made good games is dead and gone. It’s just several shareholders and Tom in a trench coat wearing its skin like a poncho hoping you won’t notice the smell.
People are going to buy it. It’s going to have “Mixed” reviews and support will be dropped by 2026. It’s going to be a broken, buggy mess on release, break modding and be an overall weak experience.
Why buy it? It’s gonna suck.
Possibly unpopular opinion: You shouldn’t be allowed to refund Bethesda games. You should just be told that any reasonable person would know better than to buy a post Fallout 4 Bethesda game within a year of launch and you should not be covered under any refund policy.
You’re right, that is a shit opinion.
“We need to go back!” - Tom Howards
To me this sadly is a clear sign that Bethesda has peeked.
They’ve re-released Skyrim a billion times, now they’re re-releasing Oblivion, no news if The Elders Scrolls 6 development has even started yet, and Starfield is a hot mess.
Feels like they’re milking out the last possible drops of profit out of their IPs before closing down…
The only hope is that they keep rereleasing so much they end up back at Morrowind. Except they’ll probably ruin it.
Engine and Technology: The game will use a hybrid engine approach combining Unreal Engine 5 with Bethesda’s original Creation Engine, promising modern enhancements while preserving gameplay mechanics.
Uh-oh…
Hi welcome to my YouTube channel today we’re making a v10 out of a small block Chevy and two random lawnmower engines?
Guess we’ll continue the Bethesda bug memes indefinitely but I wouldn’t have it any other way .
Yeah this sounds seriously disgusting.
I can understand the intent of “we want to allow people who knew how to mod the old game to be able to develop for the new game.” but Oblivion was 8 years ago. This game might get released in time for the 10th anniversary. Who is going to go back and update 10 year old mods?
You can have good modding support working off a base of UE5, just use full UE5 instead of a weird frankenstein of the two engines mashed together.
18 years…
…jfc I am so old
I’m for it.
The Creation engine is showing its age. Starfield was graphically attractive. But load screens everywhere.
And how do you think a combination of both engines would look like? This smells like a disaster with the worst of both worlds.
Hybrid engine part makes the whole thing sound like bullshit.
That was my thought too to be honest, I don’t even know how they’d go about doing that, or even why.
Do you have experience with the Unreal engine?
You know that an engine is just an engine, and it can be modified.
For example, these thousands of games were made in Unreal.
The amount of work that would be needed to combine two completely and fundamental different engines makes it unrealistic in my eyes. Engines are huge and complicated beasts, they can’t be put into a blender and mixed together.
It honestly doesn’t seem that bad, as long as the scripting and rendering parts of both engines are sufficiently encapsuled. It only gets hard if the engines exchange data bidirectionally, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. Of course you won’t get goodies like UE5 physics, but that seems to be their goal.
Unreal is great, that’s the point. Why should it have to work along with the bs that is the creation engine? I honestly don’t see any value in keeping it alive.
Probably the scripting engine being something the devs are really familiar with.
And how many of those are some odd combination of Unreal and a heavily altered Gamebryo engine? What I expect to happen here is to see a lot of jank with a lack of moddability - the worst of both worlds basically.
Engine and Technology: The game will use a hybrid engine approach combining Unreal Engine 5 with Bethesda’s original Creation Engine
I have a bad feeling about this. Somewhat ironically, UE4 seemed to be much more stable than 5, but maybe it’s my aging computer (now 7 years old). I’m only slightly optimistic.
Two things I wonder are how mod support will work for it, and whether they’ll make some adjustments to the imperial capital. In the opening cinematic, you see a guard walking on the wall, the camera zooms out and the city just looks tiny
Oblivion is an excellent game. I’m not sure how much an official remake can bring to the table. Maybe a Skyrim-esque UI would be welcome.
What I’d really want would be a Morrowind remake. The world design and writing was beyond excellent, but the mechanics side had quite a bit of jank and the UI wasn’t the best. Would love a mildly Oblivionised Morrowind. Just don’t Skyrimise it - Oblivion had just enough RPG stuff, while Skyrim at times feels more like a story-action game rather than a RPG.
My problem with oblivion is a lack of controller support and I hate the system of needing stamina to attack.
Once I just ran around waiting for stamina to regenerate then attacked and repeated. It was really annoying. I felt like I was playing the game wrong.
Maybe a Skyrim-esque UI would be welcome.
Oh hell no. Skyrim’s UI without mods was absolute garbage and worse than Oblivion’s vanilla UI.
Personally I’d rather have a Daggerfall remake but I guess that’s what The Wayward Realms is going for already.
Skyrim’s UI without mods was absolute garbage and worse than Oblivion’s vanilla UI.
I don’t understand this. The UI is almost identical between Oblivion and Skyrim, and Skyrim’s is easier to actually read because it’s just a simple modern font in white text on semi-transparent black instead of trying to look like a scroll with handwritten fonts like in Oblivion. And the most popular UI mod for both (and also all the fallout games) mostly just makes the font smaller so you can fit more text on each screen with a few slight tweaks to the overall layout of the info. It’s not a huge difference.
I don’t understand this. The UI is almost identical between Oblivion and Skyrim, and Skyrim’s is easier to actually read because it’s just a simple modern font in white text on semi-transparent black instead of trying to look like a scroll with handwritten fonts like in Oblivion.
Huh?
Oblivion’s UI was not great,
And the most popular UI mod for both (and also all the fallout games) mostly just makes the font smaller so you can fit more text on each screen with a few slight tweaks to the overall layout of the info. It’s not a huge difference.
SkyUI literally made the Skyrim UI closer to that of vanilla Oblivion.
The mod SkyUI has sorting and more info in the list of items itself so you don’t have to scroll to an item to compare stats. Those two features alone, make it infinitely better. It’s not just “smaller text”.
I hope they don’t embark on a purge of all the original versions across the web, as is the trend at the moment from likes of Blizzard, and shackle old titles with new restrictions.
So the community loves Morrowind but they remaster Oblivion?
Because that’s an easier cash flip. They’d have to do actual design to update Morrowind to modern gaming sensibilities without corroding it. Oblivion just needs a facelift and some number tweaks (and a whole suite of bugs fixed as usual).
They’ll slap sone UE5 lights and filters on and charge 70 dollars for it, I’m betting.
This could also be the pilot project to see if it’s possible before tackling something more intense.
Morrowind has a lot of jank that people love. I personally don’t want a polished Morrowind experience.
If you love the jankiness of Morrowind, then I would say you’re not looking for a Morrowind remake. Without specific examples, all the jank I’m remembering is fondness for weird design and/or unbounded behavior like weird spell-hacks.
I love oblivion 😭
Because Todd, I guess.
Maybe they’ll make the province a jungle like it used to be in lore
It was probably never a jungle, it may have been subtropical but was likely never a jungle
I hope Skyblivion isn’t affected by this.
Remakes are a cheaper way to make AAA games but how good it will be depends on whether it aims to remaster the old game or be an actual remake as a modern game.
RPG has moved on a lot since 2006, and Bethesda’s Starfield shows that they haven’t really learnt the lessons. Switcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Gate 3 have all taken RPG forward particularly in a narrative sense. Starfield felt like.old hat and focused on a big empty world.
While I’m sure some people will enjoy an Oblivion remake, it’d really need to push things forward to be worth playing. The Witcher 1 is being remade and they seem to be approaching it as an attempt to bring it up to be more on par with the Witcher 3. That is the kind of approach that would make an Oblivion remake interesting. Not just a port and asset update. So we will need to know the actual details to judge.
But ultimately people just want the next Elder Scrolls game. I just hope they learn the lessons from Starfield.
The problem with Starfield is that it lacks the core essence of what made Bethesda games great. It was a huge open world sandbox in a way, very simulation heavy with NPCs having their own daily schedules & routines, lots of player choices on how to approach things. But they streamlined and got simpler and simpler. Starfield NPCs do the same thing 24/7, some may walk between two spots but most don’t even have a home where they COULD go to after whatever they work at. Dialogs are 90% pointless fluff and got more and more childish and less serious with each game. Speaking of which, the games generally got way more child friendly and less serious. It feels like Star Wars going from the odd humor here and there to one joke to another, which just ruins the whole experience.
CP2077 is a terrible example btw. That game was hot garbage on release and especially the story issues or the lifeless empty world obviously are still there.
Yeah I feel like cyberpunk didn’t really do anything mechanically revolutionary with the narrative. It was incredibly written imo but felt pretty linear outside of dialogue choices with some options for growing attached to a romantic side character.
To me, BG3 definitely set a new high water line when it came out for what can be done in a modern rpg.
At this point I think the greater issue is that fans didn’t learn from Starfield (or FO76, arguably FO4/Skyrim too at least enough for a trend line if you care about the RPG aspect of it). Why would Bethesda ever change course if they continue raking in money? It really seems like people aren’t even waiting for reviews.
I was going to say that it’d be a coin flip on if this actually has the same re-occurring bugs that the UOP fixed, though I see that it’s going to be 3rd-party so that may change the odds a bit.
The magic system is better than the one in Skyrim, which is a low bar to clear. I was always disappointed by the rudimentary quality of the NPC AI in Oblivion because of the incredible (as it turns out, literally) promises Bethesda was making before release. I remember reading about it in a game magazine and being enthralled with the possibilities… Then it turned out to be what it is. Morrowind was the first video game RPG that I truly, deeply immersed myself in and the quality of that immersion depended on a highly textual approach combined with a world that often surprises and makes demands of you, while also giving you a great deal of leeway in how you negotiate its challenges. After that, Oblivion felt like a failed attempt to move away from relying on writing, and Bethesda has confined itself to failing in that direction ever since, while importantly never failing to make plenty of money doing so.
I liked the story and experience of Oblivion despite all of this, even though it felt like a very limited realisation of its own creative aims. I have high hopes for Skyblivion still, and will look forward to seeing a more lovingly, thoughtfully crafted rendition.
I only played Skyrim until about two months ago. I actually got either daggerfall or Morrowind ages ago bundled with a graphics card but never got it working on my machine back then. About 2 months ago, I played oblivion for the first time* and… Mostly enjoyed it. It’s clear Skyrim had a lot of quality-of-life improvements (empty bodies/containers labeled, dungeon runback after completion, lock picking, and some other things) but also did away with some cool stuff (verticality in levels (springheel boots, athletics, acrobatics), meaningful water level bits, ability scores, and more) that I missed a lot going back into Skyrim.
*I will say I did play through the tutorial of oblivion like 1.5 or 2 years ago and hated it so much I uninstalled. Carry weight and not understanding a number of things made me not like it. I think watching videos of people playing gave me more background on the game, lore, and perhaps most importantly mechanics that made it much more enjoyable. It would not surprise me if other skyrim-only players had similar experience.
Good to know they still just want to release old games again with no effort being put into doing something new.
A whole separate studio is doing this. What?