We should finally get to play Skyblivion this year. The massive modding project that’s remaking The Elder Scrolls IV in Skyrim’s engine has been in the works since 2012, and now it’s seemingly on the home stretch.
It’s not had a full release date penned in yet, but we’ll be getting to see a bit more of it via a showcase from the Skyblivion team at a fan-run Bethesda community event called Community Creations Con – or C3 – this weekend. So, ahead of that, VG247 caught up with the massive mod’s project lead, Kyle ‘Rebelzize’ Rebel, to ask a few questions about how things are going for the project as it builds to that 2025 release.
“I am feeling good about our progress, everyone is pulling their weight and focussing on the last pillars we need to overcome [to make a release possible],” the modder tells me, “Of course, with this being a volunteer project we can’t guarantee this level of commitment throughout the year, but for now we are on the right track.”
Naturally, as rumours about an official Elder Scrolls 4 remake or remaster – something that was mentioned in an internal Microsoft document leaked during the company’s legal battle with the FTC in 2023 – have continued to crop up and circulate, Rebel and the Skyblivion team have receieved plenty of messages from fans wondering what such a thing potentially being real could mean for the modding project.
“I think whether the rumours are true or not doesn’t affect us much,” the project lead says, “If they are true I hope it will give people even more of a reason to try out our iteration of it. If it’s not true then this will be the best way to re-experience the game [with] a new coat of paint.
“At the end of the day, we are not trying to sell a game and make a profit. I dedicated 10+ years to bring this game to the fans and I feel this is a typical case of ‘ït’s about the journey, not the destination’. The fact Skyblivion is nearly in a releasable state is a miracle, as we all went into this blindly and in some cases failed our way to the finish line. There are at least four major events that could have easily wrecked the project and caused it to be abandoned, but we’re still here.
“I am just excited to be able to see everyone’s hard work pay off and as a bonus see others finally playing this. I often think about how I would have been able to release this mod years ago [if I’d had] all the knowledge we have now, but unfortunately that’s not the way life works. You achieve your goals through hard work, failure and the rare breakthrough, which we ended up doing.”
In terms of whether Skyblivion can learn anything that might help with its own release from massive Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London, which came out last year following delays – some of which its developers could do nothing to prevent – and was plagued by some pretty serious bugs prior to patches arriving, Rebel says the answer is “yes and no”.
“FOLON is a very impressive mod, but it’s apples and oranges in lots of ways,” he explains, “Distribution of the mod has always been a big discussion internally and FOLON’s release definitely made us think of alternative ways to let people access the game when the time comes.”
Finally, since I’d recently seen Bethesda Game Studios acknowledge Skyblivion’s upcoming C3 stream in a tweet from its official account, I asked the modder if Skyblivion’s team has had any communication from the studio, since Fallout: London’s leads were pretty open last year about not getting as much as they’d have ideally liked.
“We have had plenty of contact with Bethesda over the years,” Rebel says, “I’d like to think we are on very good terms with them. Generally speaking, Bethesda has been one of the most supporting communities when it comes to modding, so it only makes sense to support behemoths such as our project that in a lot of ways encapsulate everything Bethesda’s games stand for.
“We are a multicultural group of fans from all over the world that came together to make something unreasonably complicated and far fetched. It’s modding on steroids.”
As mentioned earlier, that unreasonably complicated and far fetched thing is currently set to open its Oblivion gates to players before this year’s out, so here’s hoping Rebel and the Skyblivion folks are able to navigate the tricky roads ahead on their modding adventure through Cyrodiil.
