Skyblivion

Watch out, there’s a goblin over there! Have you dispatched him with a deceased Blade’s rusty blade? Good, we can now keep trekking through the revamped Imperial sewers dungeon that unofficial Oblivion remake Skyblivion’s devs have just shown off.

The massive Skyrim mod’s getting ever closer to the release its creators have pencilled in for later this year. Despite that looming, they’ve not opted to skip what’s become an annual cameo at fan-run Skyrim modding showcase Creation Mod Con, alongside a bunch of other in-the-works Elder Scrolls remake projects and add-ons.

I spoke to Skyblivion project lead Kyle ‘Rebelzize’ Rebel ahead of Creation Mod Con about where the modders are at in terms of announcing the mod’s full release date. “Progress is generally good, volunteer based projects are always a challenge due to people sometimes dropping out or not having as much time to contribute as in the past,” he told me. “To work around that we try as much as possible to keep the project a bit flexible and change our MVP (minimum viable product) according to the team’s capability. I’d say recent developments made us come closer to a potential date announcement, but we will be able to share more about that at a later date.”

The team also revealed that in addition to the GOG release they announced back in June, a release via Nexus Mods is also locked in and there are plans to offer the mod for free via Steam too. I’m intrigued to see how that last one might differ from the other two.

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Anyway, the modders showed off the opening 15 minutes of Skyblivion in this latest showcase. Big spoiler alert – the sequence sees some youths in hoodies harass Patrick Stewart into freeing Nirn’s ugliest prisoner before departing to go and voice a sentient poo in the Emoji Movie several years down the line.

I’m not joking about it being Patrick Stewart that does this, as shown a recent dev diary, Skyblivion’s Uriel Septim is his regal spitting image. As for the iconic series of corridors in which he’s shanked up while you decide whether you’re going to default to a sneak build for the hundredth time, Skyblivion’s devs said they’ve opted to keep things “closer to the original experience” at the start so players can get up to speed with the mod’s combo of Skyrim and Oblivion mechanics.

Though, lest you forget this is remake rather than a remaster, something the modders have understandably been keen to stress since the official Oblivion remaster rocked up through a flaming gate earlier this year, there are plenty of the sort of tweaks and touches that’ve left me generally more curious to play this interpretation than Bethesda and Virtuos’ efforts.

As you battle through the caves, there are goblin cave paintings and brief glimpses of the White-Gold Tower to ensure the background’s more than a plain brown mush. They’re subtle elements, designed by modders Anna Khudorenko and Penrutet respectively, but I’m hoping they’ll keep the experience feeling a bit fresher than the remaster’s intentionally minimalistic reskinning.

That said, the fresh addition I dug most from what the modders showed off here is the first look at the Imperial Mausoleum, a hall in the Arboretum where Emperor Stewart’s body will now be interred once he meets his demise. The Skyblivion crew tell RPS this was designed by Gabriele Floris, aka Kazuhide. They’ve lent their two architecture degrees to shaping the mod’s version of Cyrodiil’s capital, with real life mock-ups for a restoration of the Roman Emperor Augustus’ mausoleum being cited as the inspiration for Uriel’s resting place.

This Septim tomb’s just one aspect of what you can expect from the mod’s total revamp of the city. “We’ve really set out to entirely remake the Imperial City to be the grand cosmopolitan city it is known as in lore – that means every district is substantially larger and more detailed,” Rebel tells me.

Skyblivion’s still looking for volunteers with the skills to help get it over the line.

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