Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
I don’t get why some people think Skyblivion is some threat to Bethesda Elder Scrolls games at all. Mods are always going to be more niche than fully marketed and funded maintained commercial storefront releases.
Skyblivion is going to be limited to what the latest Skyrim release engine supports while this remaster has Unreal Engine 5 stapled on top as the graphics renderer. They added new voice acting. People are developing mod toolchains for the remaster. It’s more substantial than the vast majority of remasters we’ve seen
I don’t think many people believe that Bethesda views skyblivion as something that will compete for market share. I think it’s more of a surprise to people that in an age where so many major companies are quick to go after modders, Bethesda has not only allowed skyblivion to exist but has also officially acknowledged their work in a positive light.
God so many people on here act like Todd Howard personally killed their child. It’s fucking insufferable. You guys don’t crucify other companies like this when it comes to mods. This only happens with Bethesda who is realistically one of the only companies that has supported mods in the mainstream. Games can also be good without mods. Get over yourselves and just enjoy a fucking game.
What are people complaining about? It can be modded.
Shut up I’m entertained seeing all these ignorant people who don’t know what they’re talking about crying.
People are complaining because Bethesda didn’t launch the game with official mod support. Meaning it doesn’t have a “mods” option on the main menu. Bethesda hasn’t said they have a problem with mods or will go after anyone that uses them. But everyone is acting like this means Bethesda suddenly hates mods. Skyrim launched without official mod support too, but somehow it managed to be a successful game on top of having a massive modding community. People just want to complain for the sake of complaining.
The vast majority of games don’t have official mod support. Fuck them for sometimes officially supporting it, I guess.
The remaster is good. I hope Skyblivion is good. More games for consumers, the better. People here are commenting as if Bethesda has a responsibility to handhold the entire modding community. They are just doing their thing to make some money with employees that want to get paid and also make good games. Bethesda has had some downs but also some ups. This remaster is an up so I enjoy more Elder Scrolls.
I am looking forward to playing the Remaster. It sounds like they’ve fixed pretty much everything I didn’t like about the original Oblivion - like the awful level up system. Hopefully they rebalanced the “difficulty” in a good way too. Last time I played Oblivion I remember higher difficulties being boring because it mostly meant even the weakest enemies would take a billion hits to kill.
Skyblivion will be fun to play too.
I have been waiting so many years now for Skyblivion that I am not going to bother with the Remaster. And to be honest, something with the Remaster and UE5 feels off visually.
The Skyblivion Teams attention to detail and love for the project makes me believe that it will also be the superior version of Oblivion.
We can eat both
I’m not paying 55€ for a remaster of Oblivion. I’d rather wait for Skyblivion. Or Bethesda needs to push the remaster in my hands free of cost.
sounds PR stunt-y
OK but still good
I mean… It’s soooo little lol it’s a copy of a game… It’s like me printing a good job certificate to pay my car mechanic. It’s almost worse… Than nothing.
That’s a pretty shitty comparison, considering the Skyblivion team didn’t work on the remaster. And why don’t you let the Skyblivion team speak for themselves? Because they’re quite happy.
It’s not a stunt if it’s a good thing
Agelord, you dropped this /s
I disagree. Of course it’s a PR stunt, but it’s a good thing for everyone involved. Bethesda gets positive PR and the mod team gets a free copy of a remastered version of the game we all love.
I disagree. Of course it’s a PR stunt
If you disagree, then why do you call it a stunt?
Because it can be a PR stunt and be s good thing.
That’s not disagreeing then: “It’s not a stunt if it’s a good thing”
Anyone play Fallout London? I couldn’t rollback the pointless update that cockblocked the mod. This time, they just make an attempt to squeeze out money before skyblivion offers the option.
Unless Bethesda actually fully embraces and supports the modding community, I’ll never buy another one of their games.
their eula for oblivion remastered forbids modding
Source? Iirc it just said that modding wasn’t supported, not forbidden
Does it really? That’s batshit.
I’m pretty out of the loop on that sort of thing, but the games come with inbuilt game editors to make your own mods really easily right?
The point is that they shipped an update that was mostly pointless, or even completely pointless on PC, that basically blocked the release of a huge scale very anticipated mod days before the release date.
The argument is that they like profiting off their mod creators, but they try to squeeze the community for more money every time they can, like with the paid mods nonsense, and also don’t give a shit about them.
Ok. Thanks for taking this stand, your service is appreciated.
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They’re just playing games within games, people! Trying to delay the release of Skyblivion by getting the devs to start another 200 hour playthrough!
Jokes aside, I hope the remaster is good.
It’s not great. I haven’t run into a single bug yet. How is this even a Bethesda game?
Literally unplayable!
No bugs? In my bethesda game?
Literally
unplayable!That’s unacceptable!
I thought about that. It’s developed by a non-Bethesda studio in a non-Bethesda engine. Where are the bugs going to come from?? Unplayable.
well, it’s still oblivion running but without the graphics engine that’s been replaced with ue5
So it is! I didn’t realize that, super cool. I assumed it was all ported to UE5
Why would anyone think that it would be taken down? The one thing Bethesda is good at is encouraging people to mod their games. It’s the only reason why I didn’t give up on them as a company after those two disasters called Fallout 76 and Starfield. (But to be fair my patience is running thin. ES6 and FO5 both have got to be absolute smash hits.)
eehhh they allow modding, but do nothing to support it.
Nothing? What about the development and free public release of the Creation Kit?
Uhhhh didn’t they try, and fail at monetizing creation kit mods? and how many REAL mods come from it?
It’s still a thing unfortunately, one could argue they’re attempting to make modding profitable for modders, but of course they get a cut too.
Totally, this is why Bethesda games are so good for mods.
I hear they just gave everyone on the Skyblivion mod team a copy of the remaster.
You know, I think I did hear that somewhere.
Point still stands.
Always be suspicious of corporations.
They’re just trying to delay the release of Skyblivion even further by making sure the devs all end up spending the next couple of weeks playing the remaster instead of working on their own project. That way Bethesda can maximize the monetization period for their version and hopefully convince a couple of fence sitters to just give up the wait and drop some cash on the remaster.
What is the point of this cynical comment in this context. Everyone is winning here.
It goes against the corpo nature to do something that doesn’t earn them money. Their hierarchy of needs has only one point: income. Even this serves them in some way, even if it’s not apparent.
Okay? Again, who are you serving by choosing this specific forum to shout that messaging? I know you aren’t OP, so consider that the royal “you”.
It’s just tiresome is all, and I’m on the “boo, capitalism” side of things. It’s like the folks who turn every thread tangentially related to Microsoft into a Linux advertisement. Or the involuntary ejaculation of a vegetarian when the subject of diet comes up. Like, yes, these folks are probably correct about the things they are saying; you’re never going to be wrong to consider the angle being worked by a corp. However, it’s infantilizing to suggest that people are unaware that a corporation wants their money. That’s a given, and without additional commentary, it’s a positively useless statement that only serves to make people tune out the messaging, even in contexts where it IS desirable to bring it up (such as when a company is doing shady shit in pursuit of your money). Releasing a mediocre graphical remaster of a title that people have nostalgia for hardly qualifies as “shady shit” in my book. Lazy, sure, but not shady.
“We beat you to it bitches. And while you’ve spent 9 years on your labor of love and and made nothing from it, we will make tens of millions. Here’s a couple copies of our shittily optimized remaster just to rub it in :)”
Sincerely Todd
Yep, its a massive corpo style flex, ‘kill them with mandated kindness’ type of move, grin for the cameras as we demean you.
The Skyblivion devs are almost certainly in mental shambles right now, but they have to put on the happy face.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this has either never worked in software, or for a large corp, or both.
I mean:
1.) It’s Bethesda’s IP
-
The “remaster” was not just a paint job. That took a whole damn team, a very hard working team, to rebuild the game in UE5.
-
Skyblivion will probably continue development despite it.
-
Yeah they spent years working on a remaster just to dunk on a small mod team. Next time, Bethesda should ask for fan’s permission to work on the franchise they literally own! /s
Yeah they spent years working on a remaster just to dunk on a small mod team.
Yes, that literally is what they did.
If Skyblivion had released first, even for free, far more people would be going… wait, why would I pay for yet another Bethesda remaster… when a free one already exists?
This is the company that routinely releases broken buggy games, because they can’t figure out how to actually fix their engine, their games routinely have to be fixed and patched by modders… who keep trying to figure out how to monetize mods or any kind of additional content the way record labels monetize artists.
At this point, it is difficult for me to think of a game company that is more absuive and exploitative of its most truly dedicated fans… aside from Roblox.
It’s ironic that you’re looking at this from the same angle that you accuse Bethesda of. The Skyblivion team didn’t start this “labor of love”, as you correctly put it, to earn money. Yet all you can think about is how much money you think they’re missing out on. It really shows what your values in life are.
… They call it a labor of love, without the stated goal of making money…
Because if their stated goal was to make money, Bethesda would sue them into poverty induced early graves.
Isn’t that just unnecessarily cynical. Can’t Bethesda appreciate what the Skyblivion people are doing, knowing that they’ll appreciate the gesture?
Oh, well, ‘Bethesda apprectiating what the Skyblivion people are doing’ would look something like hiring the mod team to complete their work in house, as an actual official product.
… So that they could be, you know, paid for their passionate work.
Passion doesn’t pay bills.
Does… did everyone just now not remember how that was a thing that used to happen? Mod teams actually getting hired, paid?
Particularly with Valve, back in the late 90s through 00’s?
I’m just saying they could appreciate something in a “hey that’s pretty cool” way, and at the same time have no interest in them actually being part of Bethesda itself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok then, keep paying all your favorite artist’s bills with ‘appreciation’.
Its kind of ironic that all you’re thinking about is money while these modders are doing it for the love of the craft. Sure everyone would love to see a paid release of Skyblion on Steam like Valve allowed with Black Mesa, but the modders are building this regardless.
Bethseda certainly wouldn’t love to see that, they’d sue them into… ahem, well, Oblivion, if they tried.
They want them to be busy playing this and never finish Skyblivion hahaha
Honestly that’s probably true. Killing them with kindness. If they all have this for free, they may not have much motivation to continue.
I seriously doubt they’d give up this close to the end after years and years of work.
Still wildly suspicious timing.
I’m suspicious, but overall more relaxed. Only wish other companies would be a gracious
Why? Bathesda is probably THE company that supports modders the most. People will still play skyblivion when it comes out.
Bethesda “supports” modders the way WOTC “supports” D&D content creators. They profit immensely off of other people’s work without lifting a finger but also try to exploit those same creators for even more profit at every possible opportunity. Usually in such a way that it does permanent harm to an otherwise thriving community.
Starfield was the epitome of this. Rather than make a full game and let modders play around, they launched an empty, barren wasteland not-so-subtly made with extensive modding in mind. They figured that they don’t have to put effort into delivering a good product since their fans will do that for them following release.
Id also add that they’re creativitly bankrupt. They even said in interviews that they couldn’t figure out how to make Starfield a fun game until a year or so before release.
They never really figured that out, actually.
Which is scary for ES VI. If they can’t make todds “dream game” fun, what kind of souless weak sauce will the next game be?
At least Elder Scrolls has a foundation. Part of the issue with Starfield was that it was a new IP, with no real predecessors. For ES6 they can look at the past titles and see what players liked.
? So you’re saying all modders do is ruin games then?
Of course they support modders, after all, someone has to finish and patch their unfinished games! 😄
I’ve always joked about that. Why do the work when a modder will do it for you. For free
No, that would probably be Valve. Several fan mods became full games in their own right (Counter-Strike, Black Mesa). Others were mods of non-Valve games (Team Fortress, Dota 2 (sort of)).
Yes. It is also the company that tried to charge for mods.
The millionaires don’t need your to defend them.
Succeeded actually, they still sell paid mods.
I mean… if you actually care about the people who make your mods you SHOULD want them to be compensated. Even a simple quest mod or weapon mod is hours of work, if not days or weeks.
And while there is an argument as to whether Bethesda should receive a cut of that… people tend to not want to have that conversation about Valve and Steam so…
I’m pro-paid-mods, but at least the way it was rolled out the first time was pretty shit. The modders were left with a very small cut after Valve and Bethesda each got theirs, and Bethesda did basically no vetting of the content to make sure it wasn’t stolen or malware or what have you.
The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.
For a release starting “from scratch” with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of “I don’t care who uses this support library” and “I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain” and so forth.
Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was “close enough” to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.
I dunno. I won’t at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are “defending modders” while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.
I remember one of the modders behind a UI overhaul talking about the response to paid mods, when users kept saying that a donation system was better, that in the entire time they’d been making the mod they’d only gotten like $50 in donations total.
Edit: And seeing modders use patreon now for support, and those mods still getting “pirated”, I don’t think the issue was ever about Bethesda or how they handled it.
Yeah.
There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with “game preservation”. I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.
Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with “No DRM” to boot. And… overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.
Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for “video game preservation” without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the “feel” of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are “just” writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.
The most? Nah. Yes they’re fairly friendly to modders, but there’s been other cases of publishers going way out of their way to embrace a modder or mod group. I can think of one right now where a massive localization mod team actually had their work used as the basis of the official Western release of a game.
I’d argue they’re the most vocal about it, but no. They release a half lobotomized set of tools, they keep making modder unfriendly changes to the games (recompiling the exe for no reason every time a new cc mod was released for Skyrim, which meant you needed to wait for skse to update too) including having load order broken at launch in Starfield. Also the many ways and attempts they’ve made at monetising mods with them getting a cut. Not to mention this new Oblivion game needs new tools to work with it and once again like with Skyrim VR, “modding is unsupported”, though that could just be a decision made by the Devs since they’re developed by third party studios.
I’d say Larian is actually pulling their weight tho, with bg3 modding going quite well and them frequently highlighting mods on their twitter. Also CDPR who looked at the most popular mods and added them to the base game as polished features.
Paradox games are another big one with mod support. Devs are constantly adding new variables and shit for modders to access.
What about gestures everywhere suggests that I should ever fully trust a company?
Huh?
So it’s a remaster, not a remake?
Technically, it IS a full remake since they used an entirely different engine (UE 5) instead of revamping and upgrading the original. But according to everything I’ve read and seen, it’s still faithful enough to be called a remaster.
Did they actually remake everything in UE5? I thought they only use that for rendering, with all the logic still running in the original engine.
I didn’t know this was possible, but according to this comment, you are right, they literally retrofitted the entire game engine into UE 5 somehow, so the gameplay should be identical.
Yeah it’s called “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered” after all.
I’m not that deep into gaming news, I’ve heard rumors of a remake, so I’m surprised.
For all intents and purposes it seems to be a remake. It’s just stupidly named, so it makes the confusing stuff even more confusing.
All of the quests, game logic, AI (including brain dead NOC interactions), voice acting, etc, are exactly the same as in the original and are actually driven by original GameBryo engine. They only rerecorded some lines to add unique voices to NPCs of different races and made some minor gameplay tweaks. The only major changes are graphical - UE5 is used for rendering, all meshes, textures, landscapes and animations are redone. It’s more than a typical remaster like Last of Us, but not exactly a full remake.
I hope they kept all the realy bad voice lines from the original. It was part of the charm
They specifically mention this in the announcement stream and say that stuff is important for the same reason you do, so it’s all still in there, though they say they’ve also recorded new lines too. Will be interesting to hear!
It’s still creation engine with UE5 stapled on top, the only gameplay change was making the leveling system more like skyrim.
Wow that was one of my favorite parts about Oblivion. You could break it so easily
I had a wizard who was maxed out in basically ever skill except the magic skills so when I finally did the mages guild quest line I was face tanking everything
I was so over powered I started breaking the enchantment system bc I had done every important quest and could afford anything (100% chameleon was hilarious)
And let’s not forget that jumping off mountains to level up is clearly the best mechanic of all time
Maybe I’ll skip this one if they removed the good jank
That’s literally still possible. The change is that your attribute points are distributed by you after you sleep, rather than being based on what skills you leveled up in that level. If anything this allows you to be more overpowered, I’m level 5 and have 75 strength and endurance. That’s unthinkable without minmaxing.
Ah hell yeah. That’s really the only change I wanted as a kid tbh
And sold
Is it? I tried watching the reveal video, but I can’t stand listening to todd howard talk about thier games, and turned it off.
Maybe you should have watched the reveal video then
Thanks for being helpful
Source?
Kinda in between the two tbh.