We may still be closer to living on Mars than we are to playing a copy of The Elder Scrolls VI, but you don’t have to wait that long to enjoy a new adventure in Tamriel. Well, maybe not an entirely new adventure, but a considerably prettier version of an old one. Skyblivion, a project to mod all of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into its successor Skyrim, just released a new video showcasing the recent progress on its game, and it’s still on track for a release in 2025.
The new video centers on the city of Chorrol, a location Oblivion players will likely recognize from early in their time with the original game. As you’d expect from this kind of overhaul mod, Chorrol looks essentially the same as it did before in layout and general vibes, but with the benefit of Skyrim’s much-improved graphics. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that characters no longer have Oblivion’s signature squashed Play-Doh faces.
Given the relatively peaceful state of Chorrol, the quests shown off in the video aren’t the most exciting parts of Oblivion. One, Fingers of the Mountain, involves stealing a book from a corpse and choosing who to give it to. The other, taking place in open fields, involves thwacking a bunch of goblins with your sword. Not exactly thrilling stuff, but it does show just how far along Skyblivion’s recreation is. Despite not being the best that Oblivion has to offer, both Fingers of the Mountain and Fields demonstrate that at this stage in the project, some quests are fully implemented, including their rewards. At the end of Fields, the player receives Chillrend, a sword enchanted with ice magic, which has been reworked to function as it did in Oblivion, rather than using the stats from the weapon of the same name in Skyrim.
As it walks through these two quests, the new video shows how much Skyblivion’s fresh coat of paint seems to improve the experience of playing. On top of the bump in fidelity, using Skyrim’s combat animations makes the demo’s fight against a horde of goblins look much more dynamic than the version in the original game.
What’s even more impressive is how Skyblivion reworks the entire environment the game takes place in. While it’s less obvious in the brief shots inside Chorrol early in the trailer, the difference between Oblivion and the overhaul mod are huge once the player heads into the wilderness. The boost in quality to visual elements like textures and shadows is huge, but the biggest difference might come from Skyrim’s ability to render landscapes out much further from the player. While in Oblivion, vistas in the distance quickly turn into low-resolution fuzz, heading to the top of a mountain and gazing out at the horizon — as the video takes a few opportunities to do — reveals a much better view in Skyblivion. A view from the edge of the Cloud Top ruins during the Fingers of the Mountain quest shows Cyrodil looking better than it ever did in Oblivion, with a river winding through the forest receding into the distance.
Cloud Top itself looks better, not just because of Skyblivion’s updated graphics, but because the team is also reworking some locations to add more visual interest. While Cloud Top is little more than a smattering of stone pillars in the original, the fresh look at Skyblivion renders it convincingly as the ruined tower it's meant to be, completely with an overlook for that impressive view of the landscape below.
We’re still a ways out from Skyblivion’s release, and a few minor bugs in the trailer, like glitchy skin textures on an NPC, show that there’s still work to do — though maybe it would be more authentic to the Oblivion experience with a few rough edges left unsanded.
Oblivion has always been a mildly disparaged transition between the janky brilliance of Morrowind and the crowd-pleasing polish of Skyrim. It’s impossible to say how much the improvements Skyblivion is bringing could do to make it a better experience until the mod is actually released, but so far it’s looking promising, and it will be a technically impressive feat no matter how it turns out.
