The Oblivion remake is real!

[gimmedope]

One thing I don't understand is the apparrent use of Unreal engine 5 as a renderer. Like, why? I love UE5, I have it and do things with it myself. But why mix these two different engines together? I know Unreal can look great relatively easy. But let me tell you, you can also absolutely wreck your performance just as easily too. Been there, done that. Even though my computer isn't the most modern one either, so there's a bit of a struggle at times.

 

The Creation engine never had an issue with being too ugly if you ask me. Graphics wise, Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield don't look bad at ther respective release times. And with the use of mods, those games still look pretty good even years after release. Maybe not the most modern look, but still pretty great. So using the Unreal engine purely for graphics is strange to me because it shouldn't be necessary.

 

Pretty much any decent engine can look good if you have the people who know what they are doing. But even the best engine cannot make shoddily made assets look amazing.

 

So why not use a more modern version of the creation engine? That way, modding would most likely be more familiar and established.

 

Or why not try and gamble by going full Unreal 5? For modding tools, you might have to put in more effort to support it, but it could be a risk worth taking.

 

But by mixing those two engines, I see a risk of still having the Creation engine jankiness, combined with the performance hungry UE5. And all of that might have worse modding support than both of those engines would have on their own. So I find that a strange decision.

[oblivioner]

On 4/16/2025 at 4:03 PM, chocula said:

Not sure what your point is.

 

Someone bought BG3 in early access for me as a gift, because they knew I'm a big fan of BG1 and 2. I would never buy a game in early access. During EA I played it a lot, exploring different classes, subclasses, playstyles, etc. When the release version came out, it was fun enough, until I got to the final boss fight. By that time I had had enough of the tedium of the turn-based combat (it's not a good sign when it's possible to play a game, get up and walk away for several minutes and when you get back the game is still playing with itself). In any event, I stopped playing during the final boss fight because every time I thought "OK, finally" the game said "No, sorry, there's more." When I find myself asking "Isn't this thing over yet?" (which happens a lot with Skyrim/Fallout mods because amateur mod makers are, as a group, even less skilled at level/quest design than pros are), that's when it's time to hang it up. I prefer the more sandbox type of game like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout, not to mention BG1 and 2, to the linear play of BG3.

 

Oh, so the issue is that you don't like TTRPGs as a whole.  I play the game with the same people I play TTRPGs with, so the fight downtime wasn't ever an issue. 

Also, a decent trick to enjoying dnd 5e is "don't play str-based melee"  Larian partially solved the issue with their crazy definition of "improved weapon" and weapon skills, but the core imbalance of the system, that magic users are outright better, still largely remains.
 

[RedHeadAngel]

I have a question for all the Oblivion players. What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

[Miauzi]

Vor 14 Minuten sagte RedHeadAngel:

Ich habe eine Frage an alle Oblivion-Spieler. Was werdet ihr tun, wenn Bethesda die anderen Versionen des Spiels von Steam nimmt und ihr gezwungen seid, die neue Version zu spielen, auch wenn sie Mist ist?

 

I'm waiting for the release of "Syblivion" – otherwise, I simply don't care about any other "Oblivion"!

 

The original game regularly causes me to "freeze" at level 40... in other words, the game simply stopped. Reloading made it "playable" for a few seconds before it stopped again. A small bug fix worked back then – so I simply gave up on it 10 years ago!

 

 

[Count Chocula]

1 hour ago, oblivioner said:

 

Oh, so the issue is that you don't like TTRPGs as a whole.  I play the game with the same people I play TTRPGs with, so the fight downtime wasn't ever an issue. 

Also, a decent trick to enjoying dnd 5e is "don't play str-based melee"  Larian partially solved the issue with their crazy definition of "improved weapon" and weapon skills, but the core imbalance of the system, that magic users are outright better, still largely remains.
 

I play a lot of TTRPGs. Not sure what TTRPs have to do with this, other than the fact that BG3 is based on the rules of a TTRPG.

 

Let's say a GM advises  a TTRPG player to not play a STR-based melee character, but the player really wants to play, say, a Barbarian. Then the GM says "Because, you know, sometimes melee characters can get stuck with nothing fun to do in certain combat situations." The GM might as well say "I'm not really a very good or clever GM 'cause I don't really know what to do about that." And I have seen that situation a couple of times in game or two, where combat was against flying enemies or enemies up in the rafters of a tall building, something like that, reducing the Barbarian to shooting a bow and negating their Barbarian abilities. Once in a while. that's OK.

 

The point of my comment is on how long true turn-based combat takes if it has a lot of actors, in any event.

 

And on topic, I think, like Miauzi, I too will play Skyblivion (should it ever be released) and until then, if I want to play Oblivion, I will just play Oblivion and mod it into a more modern game.

[DrunkenCow]

3 hours ago, RedHeadAngel said:

What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

 

Delisted games can still be downloaded, installed, and played from Steam if you bought them before they were delisted.  At least if Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim Legendary are any indication.

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

39 minutes ago, DrunkenCow said:

 

Delisted games can still be downloaded, installed, and played from Steam if you bought them before they were delisted.  At least if Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim Legendary are any indication.

 

I can confirm that they did not delist the old games.

[MisterMoist]

4 hours ago, RedHeadAngel said:

I have a question for all the Oblivion players. What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

 

In the hypothetical world where this happens - I would use my gog copy (which is superior to the steam version). If all digital storefront copies were purged and my drm-free gog installer didn't work anymore, then I'd use my physical copy from 2004. I have at least 4 copies of the game between all of the releases. It would take several acts of god to stop me from playing the original.

[FauxFurry]

5 hours ago, RedHeadAngel said:

I have a question for all the Oblivion players. What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

I have the original PC release on disc and a freshly installed I/O drive. I also have a Good Old games account that I can play that PC release with. It would not affect me in the slightest (outside of some annoyance with it on principle).

[FauxFurry]

2 hours ago, DrunkenCow said:

 

Delisted games can still be downloaded, installed, and played from Steam if you bought them before they were delisted.  At least if Mass Effect 2 and Skyrim Legendary are any indication.

My still playable delisted licensed games can attest to that. 

[Count Chocula]

Does any chicken little have any evidence that purchasers of a game on Steam or GOG can no longer access that game after it has been pulled?

[Vader666]

8 hours ago, gimmedope said:

One thing I don't understand is the apparrent use of Unreal engine 5 as a renderer. Like, why?

 

Most likely because it wasn't done by bethesda game studios.

Using UE5 makes quite a lot of sense from a buisness point of view.

[FauxFurry]

25 minutes ago, chocula said:

Does any chicken little have any evidence that purchasers of a game on Steam or GOG can no longer access that game after it has been pulled?

There has been nothing but evidence against it so far, especially the latter.

GOG exist to aid in archiving games as a specialty platform on which new games are occasionally sold though that is not the primary function. It took almost a decade for Doom 2016 and Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen to end up there, for goodness' sake. 

[MorMorTheEgg]

34 minutes ago, chocula said:

Does any chicken little have any evidence that purchasers of a game on Steam or GOG can no longer access that game after it has been pulled?

I can think of only like three times that a game has been delisted from Steam *and* removed from libraries. And when it happens, you get a pop up that you have to interact with to dismiss. As a general rule, Steam does not remove games from a library without good reason. And it's basically antithetical to GOG's reason for existence.

[Count Chocula]

47 minutes ago, MorMorTheEgg said:

And it's basically antithetical to GOG's reason for existence.

Yeah, that's a good point (which FauxFurry also made).

[Wandering_Mania]

7 hours ago, RedHeadAngel said:

I have a question for all the Oblivion players. What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

The Oblivion Remake, does suck, they changed things and 'modern dayed' it. I ain't no "Body Type 1" I'm MALE!

Not to mention the removal of modding the thing(as far as I've heard). Which was the whole point of BGS games in the first place, them being 'Modder's playgrounds'.

 

But I got it on Steam already, and if the delist, or pull it from sale; It wouldn't be the first game that has done that, and I still have access to. The 'Roller Coaster Tycoon' games, had that done, and I can still play 'em on Steam.

Also 'Alpha Protocol' was pulled from sale, and delisted by Sega over the 'Flock of Seagulls' song during the boss fight with Constantine Breako; And I can still play that on Steam as well.

 

So to put it simply; BGS would have to pull it from people's libraries, and that would go over as well something like this:

Spoiler

 

 

[MalibuBattleBarbie]

7 hours ago, RedHeadAngel said:

I have a question for all the Oblivion players. What will you do if Bethesda pulls the other versions of the game from Steam, forcing you to play the new one, even if it sucks?

Speaking hypothetically, if it happened, I'd be disappointed. Technically, almost nobody "owns" their games any more.  They purchase a license that allows them to play it, after accepting a terms of service document that pretty much tells them they have no rights to assume they own anything. But the nice thing about mods, is that the games don't have to suck if the right team of modders don't want them to. What makes Skyrim re-playable isn't just the game itself. It's the creative minds of the modding community that breathes the life into it. But I also think a large part of why that happens, depends upon the building blocks of the game, the assets, and what frameworks and tools are available for a modding maven to build with.

 

I have so much hope even for TES VI, but for the first year or so, it's probably STILL not going to knock the socks off of what this community can do with TES V, a good ENB, high poly skins and some some good quest writing.

[Miauzi]

Vor 35 Minuten sagte MalibuBattleBarbie:

Rein hypothetisch betrachtet, wäre ich enttäuscht, wenn es passieren würde. Technisch gesehen „besitzt“ fast niemand mehr seine Spiele. Man kauft eine Lizenz, die es einem erlaubt, sie zu spielen, nachdem man die Nutzungsbedingungen akzeptiert hat, die einem praktisch klarmachen, dass man nicht davon ausgehen kann, dass einem etwas gehört. Aber das Schöne an Mods ist, dass die Spiele nicht schlecht sein müssen, nur weil das richtige Modder-Team das nicht will. Was Skyrim wiederspielbar macht, ist nicht nur das Spiel selbst. Es sind die kreativen Köpfe der Modding-Community, die ihm Leben einhauchen. Ich denke aber auch, dass ein großer Teil davon von den Spielbausteinen, den Assets und den Frameworks und Tools abhängt, die einem Modding-Experten zum Bauen zur Verfügung stehen.

 

Ich habe sogar für TES VI so viel Hoffnung, aber im ersten Jahr oder so wird es wahrscheinlich IMMER NOCH nicht das Niveau erreichen, das diese Community mit TES V, einem guten ENB, High-Poly-Skins und einigen guten Quest-Texten erreichen kann.

 

As a normal customer, you have never "owned" a game or any other program – because that would imply ownership of the software.

 

We all only have a right to use software – even reselling it to a "third party" is a legal balancing act.

 

And as for the current "Oblivion"... it's a 1:1 copy of the original code from the original "Oblivion" – with all its bugs.

 

So if the French software company that did the UE5 rendering of the objects for the game didn't fix the bugs in the old files... who's supposed to do it?

[zechosen]

SO here is something that needs to be a Week 1 mod asap, which is a Mesh Optimization project because Good Lord, those hands and toetips alone tanks any FPS

 

And this is just the male bodies, imagine female, creatures and random clutter?

[Dragon on the Web]

33 minutes ago, zechosen said:

SO here is something that needs to be a Week 1 mod asap, which is a Mesh Optimization project because Good Lord, those hands and toetips alone tanks any FPS

 

And this is just the male bodies, imagine female, creatures and random clutter?

Standard convention would say yes, this would lag the game - but in reality, with the Lumen engine being used, this doesn't happen as much. There's a lot of complex stuff behind why this is, but even considering that, the number of polygons here IS excessive.

[Darkpig]

17 hours ago, Wandering_Mania said:

That right there is yet another thing I'm worried about. A "remaster" that is suppose to have better looks, but releases looking worse than the original.

Because 'in engine renders', have become untrustworthy as well.

Agreed. Developers often forget that context matters. Mistakes and system limitations of the past are more noticeable in games with higher graphics than they are in older jankier games. It would be like putting a new coat of paint to an old pile of shit. A fresh coat of paint alone does not make it any less shit. If say the textures were updated that would leave things like odd object placement, seams and bad animations. All of these things were designed for janky older graphics not for shiny newer graphics.

[Wandering_Mania]

Yeah well, good luck with those mods. Because as the EULA for the remake states:

Quote

ZENIMAX HAS IMPLEMENTED TOOLS AND SOFTWARE DESIGNED TO DETECT AND PREVENT CHEATING AND FRAUD (“ANTI-CHEAT TOOLS”); THESE TECHNOLOGIES MAY SCAN ANY COMPUTER OR DEVICE FROM WHICH YOU DOWNLOAD OR PLAY THE GAME TO DETECT OR IDENTIFY ANY PROGRAMS OR PROCESSES DESIGNED TO “CHEAT,” GAIN AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE IN THE GAME.

And it also says:

Quote

[you will not] modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of the Game and/or Game Client in any way not expressly authorized by ZeniMax.

 

To make modding against the rules, and add in anti-cheat for a SP game!? WTF Bethesda!

[Guest]

so the idiots now hate modders, after they made so much money off it and kept todd employe'd, should be amusing to watch this fiasco burn

[qazwsxrfv5]

you all are getting worked up over nothing. there is no anticheat process, and the original modding tools work almost seamlessly with the new game.

[Z0mBieP00Nani]

8 minutes ago, qazwsxrfv5 said:

you all are getting worked up over nothing. there is no anticheat process, and the original modding tools work almost seamlessly with the new game.

 

It's true, apparently this remake should easily be moddable, once the process is figured out.