Skyblivion Lead Comments on Nearly Official Oblivion Remaster

Here at Wccftech, we have followed the long development of the Skyblivion project for over eight years. For nearly a decade, an ambitious team of modders has strived to recreate The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the engine of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Ever since early 2023, we have known that the team was targeting 2025 as their tentative release window for the total conversion mod. Later that year, though, the infamous FTC vs. Microsoft trial leak revealed that Bethesda had plans to make an official Oblivion remaster (as well as a Fallout 3 one, interestingly).

I was already in touch with Skyblivion project lead Rebelzize, having interviewed him in late 2022 about the modding and remastering potential of NVIDIA's RTX Remix platform. Needless to say, I immediately reached out again to gauge his reaction to that leak. Back then, though, he didn't really buy that it was true. I pointed out those were official documents, so the project might have been canceled or delayed, but it was surely in existence at some point.

For a while, it seemed like the Oblivion remaster might have been canceled. Throughout 2024, there were no further leaks or rumors. Everything changed in 2025, though, as the first concrete leaks appeared, revealing that Virtuos had worked on it using Unreal Engine 5. Over the last few weeks, insiders have begun saying that Microsoft could be planning a shadow drop—a game announcement and release at the same time—at some point in April.

At last, visual evidence of Oblivion Remastered materialized yesterday when fellow Internet sleuths found the game's first screenshots on the developer's website. Just a couple of hours later, Skyblivion lead Rebelzize shared a brief comment on X, having dealt with the fact that it was all real:

The real remake is the friends we made along the way.

To be clear, this changes nothing for me. This always was a passion project and still is until the end. For the community, it is a win-win as you get twice the amount of Oblivion this year. All love and no hate towards the people who made the official remaster.

Later yesterday, I spoke briefly with him to get an expanded reaction:

It looks like a cool take on it and totally different than what my vision was. Looking forward to trying it myself. Luckily, this thing was all about passion from the start, and it still is. I've gotten more out of this than I ever imagined: friends, experience, and it made me realize I wanted to work in the gaming industry, which I ended up doing, and at the end of the day, it only exists because Bethesda allowed it, so I guess if the official remake is real, it's good that we were still allowed to exist at all. Gonna focus on the release of our own version and stay positive.

For what it's worth, I think there's definitely space for both Skyblivion and Oblivion Remastered. The former might not be as visually impressive (although I'm sure at least some of the new Skyrim graphics features can be ported to it), but it will feature both cut content and new content, as well as other gameplay changes. From what we know of the official remaster based on the leaks, there should be some gameplay changes to make it more modern, but no restored or new content. As Rebelzize put it, users can choose between two versions of Oblivion, and that can only be a good thing. By the way, I've also asked him whether the plan is still to launch in 2025, and the answer was yes.