The History Of Skyblivion As Told By Its Developers

thegamer.com:

Oblivion streamlined The Elder Scrolls series, opening it up to a whole new audience across PC and console, paving the way for Bethesda’s now-flagship series best known for Skyrim. Yet going back, it’s interesting to see that it has also fallen victim to age, becoming difficult to get into much like the games it built on—that’s something that the Skyblivion team is seeking to remedy with its reimagining of Oblivion in Skyrim’s updated engine. Think of it like what Black Mesa is to Half-Life, only on a much larger scale.

“[The original project lead] Zilav started working on a port for Oblivion at the end of 2012 or the start of 2013,” Skyblivion lead K Rebel tells me. “You could download it through the forums, but it was completely broken. That’s how I first heard about the scope while I was working on Skywind, a similar remake of Morrowind.

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“It was a hot mess. Everything was missing, everything was broken, everything crashed. It didn’t look anything like Oblivion. But the seed had been planted. What drew me to the project was a message on the forum from a fan who was asking about Skyblivion. He asked, ‘Where can I download it? What can I do? When can I expect X or Y to work?’ And Zilav said that he was the only one working on the project and that there was nobody to reply to, no team, no leader, no modellers, nobody. Everyone was working on Skywind.”

So Rebel got to work with Zilav, aiming to take that empty husk of a build and get the wheels moving. That first build was taken down by Bethesda for breaching copyright, but work had already begun on a more ambitious project, one that would build up a team of modders aiming to rebuild a classic to match the