If someone had 3 eyes, would they trink?

The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.

Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.

Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.

Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.

I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.

As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.

It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.

I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.

I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.

Something like this would probably work well:

I can’t begin to understand the religious-minded, but I do know from there being a lot of Catholics in my area that he was well-regarded by many, and people mourn his passing the same people mourn influential figures in other aspects of life they care about. Regardless of the ups and downs of the church, I am under the impression that he was pushing it further in the right direction, at least, and people are sympathetic to that, so I feel that is still worth acknowledging despite whatever ongoing negatives come with any religion.

Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done. If they C&D it later this year, there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on. Basically I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not Microsoft/Zenimax would want to kill the project to boost their own profits, but rather if they even could at this point, and I think the answer is no. A few years ago may have been a different story, but that ship has sailed.

It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.

It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.

The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.

But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).

My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.

My only thing is that Oblivion does not play well on newer hardware. It was a bit of an ordeal to try to get it running well on my PC where I have two monitors, since it only runs on whichever monitor is primary and only if in Fullscreen mode. And don’t even think about alt-tabbing to check Discord, or it just crashes.

If it got the OpenMW treatment, I’d be thrilled with even that.

Agreed, though one would think they’d have taken steps to C&D Skyblivion the very moment they decided to move forward with their own project if that was their intent. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise to let Skyblivion keep going this whole time if they saw it as a threat to their profits, since the mod is pretty close to completion at this point.

I’m guessing not likely, if only because we’ve already seen mod compatibility take a hit for less drastic engine updates (Skyrim vs Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 vs Fallout 4 next-gen). The work they’re doing seems more extensive than those examples, so I wouldn’t expect old mods to work, but maybe they could be recreated or converted through community effort.

As another user already said, this remaster is being done by an outside studio, so it shouldn’t be significantly affecting any ongoing work at Bethesda.

While Todd Howard is full of shit half the time, I do believe him when he talks about their development roadmap. When Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, it was under the disclaimer that it was not an active project for the team at the time, and would not enter full production until Starfield was done. Starfield released in fall of 2023, so Elder Scrolls 6 should have been in full development for about a year and a half now.

That is still the big question for me. I am all for modernizing the engine and don’t care if that means Unreal Engine 5, but if it doesn’t have comparable mod support to other Bethesda games, I feel that will end up hurting it pretty badly.

But as long as they don’t pull a Blizzard and replace the original game with the remaster, the original game and all of its mods will still be there to be enjoyed, at least. And maybe that means we might someday see an OpenOblivion similar to OpenMW if all else fails.

Don’t think we know yet. Based on earlier leaks, the thought is that Unreal Engine 5 is involved somehow, but there is uncertainty about whether or not it is full-on in UE5 or if UE5 is just being used as a rendering layer. If Bethesda’s own engine is still used as the core of the game, we don’t know if that means simply reworking the original Oblivion code, or if they updated everything to the latest version used for Starfield.

What we can assume is that, even if the original engine is used, there will need to be a good deal of work done to update it regardless, since it is still a 32-bit application that would need to be rewritten for proper 64-bit support. And a lot of the game mechanics, physics, movement, etc. would need to be updated to work with the UE5 rendering layer if that is indeed how it’s working.

I don’t expect they would, since Skyblivion already has their blessing and the team has been working with representatives from Bethesda to make sure that everything they’re doing continues to be kosher with them.

The Skyblivion devs also released a statement recently that they are also looking forward to the release of this remaster, and believe that there is enough love to go around for both projects.

Basically, Oblivion fans are going to be eating well this year. If the official Oblivion remaster is underwhelming, there will still be Skyblivion to look forward to.

Generally no, but it depends on how you handle the interaction.

This whole situation seems a bit odd and I can’t help but feel like we’re not really getting the full picture. But at a surface level, if someone takes what is really just a misunderstanding or miscommunication and turns that into a character assassination against you without giving you the chance to explain yourself, that is not something you should feel obligated to just accept.

But it depends a lot of how you handle it. If you just take the opportunity to fire back and make this a “them” problem, knowing they have some mental disability that could have caused them to misread the situation, that would be ableist.

What you could do is simply respond along the lines of “I can understand why you’d feel this way if what you believe is true, but I think I didn’t explain myself clearly, and that’s on me.”

Why is that? It’s being done by a different studio entirely that specializes in ports and remasters.

This is definitely a ground-up remake, not a port with original code.

It’ll happen. I don’t think it’ll be good, but it’ll happen.

This remaster was made by a different studio, not Bethesda, so I do believe them after they said that TES6 is now in full production following Starfield.