This week, Bethesda shocked fans (or at least fans who don’t follow the rumor mill) with the surprise release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The project pays its respects to a 2006 RPG classic by giving it an Unreal Engine makeover and peppering in a few tasteful quality of life improvements. It’s somehow both a major overhaul and the exact same game, filled with the same charming quirks that have fueled YouTube compilations for decades. For many fans of the original game, it’ll likely be a definitive remake that gives us a final word on a classic.
But it won’t be the last time we see Oblivion remade. For over a decade, a group of dedicated fans have been working on a full scale remake of Oblivion within Skyrim, dubbed Skyblivion. Though it may seem like Bethesda just ate that project’s lunch, I find myself more interested in it than I was before after the comparatively unambitious Oblivion Remastered.
Anyone who has followed the project since 2012 will tell you that the road to Skyblivion has been complicated. It is entirely being handled by TESRenewal, a volunteer-based modding community that is working on it purely for the love of the game. I can’t say that the goal is simple, but it is straightforward: recreate the entirety of Oblivion in Skyrim: Special Edition‘s engine. Every city, every character, every quest — it’s all being redone by hand. That’s a daunting task as is, but it’s been even harder to pull off than you might think. That’s thanks to Bethesda’s long history of refreshing Skyrim every few years, a move that has wiped out the team’s entire progress from time to time. TESRenewal has remained undeterred during those hardships, starting over with newfound determination rather than giving up.
That development story has always made Skyblivion compelling, but I’m seeing it in a new light following the release of Oblivion Remastered. By comparison, Bethesda’s official double dip is largely a by the books remaster that feels more like a sensible business decision. Sure, it looks great and features some welcome quality of life improvements, but it doesn’t do much to make me see Oblivion in a new light or appreciate it differently. It’s a faithful remaster that provides a good excuse to replay an already great RPG with most of its bizarre bugs in tact. You could play the 2006 version and largely walk away with the exact same experience, minus a folder of pretty screenshots.
It has left me asking what I really want from a remake. My answer used to be that I want one to make a game feel the way I remember it, and Oblivion Remastered fits that bill. But the more game studios rely on projects like this to buff up their financial quarter earnings, the more my position has evolved. These days, I want a remake to deepen my relationship with a game. I want it to change how I see it in some way or add a new dimension to my interpretation of it. That’s largely why I love Square Enix’s polarizing Final Fantasy 7 remakes. They dare to reinterpret the 1997 RPG, starting a conversation with the game rather than mimicking its voice. I know people who absolutely detest Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and feel that it misunderstands the source material, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. It just means that there’s a new reading to debate. Oblivion Remastered doesn’t have that going for it, and I imagine that the majority of old fans who play it will find it agreeable.
Skyblivion, on the other hand, takes a much bolder approach that’s more what I want from a remake these days. It isn’t just out to bring the original game up to speed with modern ones through superficial graphic updates. It sets out to ask: What would Oblivion look like if it were made in Skyrim? That’s a legitimately compelling question. Skyrim has long been praised for revolutionizing the modern open-world genre, but much of its groundwork was established in Oblivion first. How would rebuilding the latter in the former’s image underline that fact? Will it feel entirely new, showing us just how different these two games really are, or will they feel identical and reveal a much smaller chasm between them? How will Oblivion‘s historically buggy state change in a new engine, and what will that tell us about what Bethesda accomplished when it made the jump to Skyrim. These are questions that stand to change the way we appreciate both games.
What has me even more excited is that fact that Skyblivion is inherently an act of deep reinterpretation. It is showing us what The Elder Scrolls looks like through the eyes of modders, a community that has always treated the series as a clump of clay to be molded. That’s an entirely different perspective than what we see in Oblivion Remastered, a game built from a massive studio focused on introducing a critical piece of its history to a modern audience. The priorities of those two forces are going to be worlds apart. One needs to sell millions of units to may off its production costs, while the other comes from fans who want to see a dream realized. How will each shape what Oblivion looks like? We’ll now get to compare and contrast that directly thanks to Oblivion Remastered. Bethesda didn’t make Skyblivion redundant; it’s poised to be more vital than ever when it finally launches.
I get the sense that Bethesda understands that, too. The studio has been nothing but supportive of TESRenewal, giving the project its blessing and gifting the team codes for the remaster. It’s a far cry from the adversarial relationship we saw between Nintendo and the team behind AM2R in 2016, a fan made Metroid 2: Return of Samus remake that was shut down to make way for Nintendo’s own spin on it. There should be space for fans to offer their own take on a game, because that work isn’t a replacement for an official remake. Those two ideas can, and should, work in harmony, giving us a fuller picture of a game and the many lens through which people understand it.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is available now on Xbox Series X/S and PC. Skyblivion is currently in development and scheduled to launch in 2025.
