Summary
- Oblivion fans are having a fantastic year.
- Skyblivion is shaping up to be a different take on Oblivion than the official remaster.
- Skyblivion’s art team has taken some creative liberties in improving the original’s environments.
After almost two decades of quiet contentment, fans of Oblivion are being spoiled for choice in 2025. Oblivion Remastered’s surprise release has kept these players busy for almost a month now, with the remaster maintaining a respectable peak concurrent player count of approximately 60,000 on Steam.
While I’m sure the Oblivion fandom would’ve been happy with just the remaster, Skyblivion is about to give them another re-imagining of Oblivion to sink their teeth into. It’s also clear that Skyblivion is not some pale imitation of Virtous’ remaster, but rather the modding team’s unique take on Bethesda’s nineteen-year-old masterpiece.
Oblivion Remastered is essentially Oblivion with Unreal Engine 5 pasted on top, allowing Virtous to visually upgrade the original without removing any of its janky charm. Skyblivion, on the other hand, is a hand-crafted remake of Oblivion in Skyrim’s engine.
Two Amazing Creations
At first, the remaster releasing the same year as Skyblivion seemed like a cruel joke. After all, Skyblivion has been in development since 2016, almost a decade of volunteer work invested only to be pipped by an official remaster at the finish line.
This hasn’t deterred the Skyblivion team, who assert their version of Oblivion stands apart from the remaster. A few team members were even invited to Bethesda, where they had the opportunity to speak about their experience creating the mod.
Going by the comparison screenshots released by Skyblivion, the mod does look like a unique take on Oblivion. The team has taken some creative liberties in improving some of the environments from the original Oblivion—something the relatively faithful Oblivion Remastered does not do.
For example, the realm of Peryite, supposedly a unique daedric realm, closely resembles Dagon’s Deadlands in the original Oblivion, because Bethesda didn’t have time to create new assets for a single side quest.
The Skyblivion team has addressed this, changing Peryite’s realm to reflect his role as the Daedric Prince of Pestilence. The realm now has a sickly river of glowing green sludge running through it, rather than the usual lava from the Deadlands.
These improvements have not gone unnoticed by the community. A recent Reddit thread by SomeoneNotFamous extols Skyblivion’s comparison gallery, asking, “Do we deserve this amount of love?” in response to all the Oblivion content this year.
Oblivion Remastered is a fantastic remaster, but Skyblivion is shaping up to be a full-fledged and excellent remake. There’s no official release date for the mod yet, but the plan is to release sometime in 2025.