Bethesda Thinks Fan Remaster of Oblivion Is 'Very Special' and Supports It

https://kotaku.com/bethesda-oblivion-remastered-skyblivion-mod-support-1851778773

by hn_acker • 1 year ago

101 88 1 year ago

tmpz22• 1 year ago

Bethesda knows support for the official remake would go down the toilet if they did anything but praise for the unofficial remake. Its hard to take Bethesda on good faith on this.

Wobbles42• 1 year ago

I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They may or may not be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but at least they ARE doing the right thing. That decision was made by a set of humans, and likely at least some of them are well meaning.

In any case the corporate entity as a whole is not conscious. A strictly behavioralist approach is appropriate there. If it does the good thing it gets the carrot, if it does the bad thing it gets the stick. We can't win it's heart and mind because it has neither, so we have to settle for keeping it's behavior in line.

voidfunc• 1 year ago

It's a lesson more companies should learn (looking at you Nintendo), the revenue hit from a fan-made IP clone is likely negligible. People want the official stuff usually as well. The PR hit from attacking creator fans is way worse.

chii3• 1 year ago

while i do give them benefit of the doubt, the support for the skybilvion fan remake is in effect a way to sell and market an old game (skyrim's sale has been on the decline but for these fan projects).

The moment such a project might affect sales in some way (that i am unable to imagine right now, but is possible surely), they will backpedal and find ways to take it down.

happytoexplain• 1 year ago

I know businesses often bring it upon themselves, but this "fucked if they do, fucked if they don't" attitude needs to be carefully applied. It leaves no room for anything, really, and it's exhausting.

washadjeffmad• 1 year ago

It's not unwarranted. With the recent popularity of remakes and rereleases, there's been tension between fans, their multi-year/decade labor of love projects, and the studios hoping to remonetize dated franchises.

A friend and old-school RuneScape player told me he was quitting over this: https://www.ibtimes.com/runescape-devs-backtrack-hd-mod-ban-...

Bethesda signaling their blessing might not have happened if others hadn't made such spectacular messes of their own relaunches.

crop_rotation2• 1 year ago

Yes nobody is doing good deeds to stab themselves. Not sure what your point is here?

formerly_proven2• 1 year ago

Regardless, the remaster appears to have been rushed out due to increasing leaks, no? It's hard to believe that with the technical issues the release was actually intended to land in April 2025, instead of fixing issues until March 2026 and releasing it as an anniversary remaster.

VTimofeenko• 1 year ago

It's an Elder Scrolls game. Technical issues are part of the product spec.

formerly_proven2• 1 year ago

True! On the other hand, performance appears to be quite bad and there seem to be tons of very obvious visual glitches with transparent objects, foliage etc.

It using the UE5 renderer of course means the usual reservations of that engine also apply - it will most likely never run smoothly, as Unreal Engine games invariably have more or less severe stuttering.

lupusreal• 1 year ago

In some ways, the bugs are part of the charm. Sometimes anyway. Having to run esoteric commands to fix broken quests in a years old game isn't so endearing.

no_wizard• 1 year ago

Bethesda is notorious for buggy software releases. They could spend 10 years on something and it would likely have tons of bugs still.

thatguy0900• 1 year ago

This one does feel extra infuriating though, since it still has bugs that were fixed by fan made bug fixing mods from the original game. It doesn't really even feel like they try to fix bugs

tjpnz• 1 year ago

Bethesda farmed the remaster out to another studio and the issues are mostly performance related. They chose to utilize Unreal Engine 5 for the graphics[0] which means you get all the stuttering and uneven frame times present in most games using it.

0: I recall reading somewhere that the game uses a really old version of Bethesda's proprietary engine too - but only for physics.

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

How can you leak a 20 years old game?

accrual• 1 year ago

GP is referencing how rumors of the remaster were spreading a few days before the official announcement. There were some early topics on Reddit at least.

Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

Bethesda never releases games. They release mod sdks. Beta versions.

The only good fallout after the first two is the one they weren't involved with. And it was the mods for skyrim that made the game.

AIPedant2• 1 year ago

My controversial opinion is that Fallout 2 is by far the worst mainline Fallout game: it was obviously written by sexist 90s teenagers, the humor is plain awful, and most of the game is incredibly tedious, especially the dungeons. It’s also by far the buggiest Fallout. I think people give it points for ambition + a desire to take Bethesda down a peg, without actually playing it. Alternatively, they last played when they themselves were 90s teenagers so they’re looking through 30 years of rose-tinted glasses, and never noticed how misogynistic the script is.

Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.

AIPedant2• 1 year ago

I think the remaster may have been an experiment with Unreal Engine on top of Bethesda’s scripting / etc. I love Starfield, it is my favorite BGS game by a wide margin, but Creation Engine 2 is very difficult to work with - the Creation Kit is intolerably slow, I imagine BGS rank and file got very frustrated. Creation also lags with fancy lighting / fog effects, and might not ever support PS5[1], so I can see why Bethesda would explore the option for the next Elder Scrolls.

I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.

[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.

i80and• 1 year ago

Anecdotally, playing Oblivion Remaster made me nostalgic for Creation. I have a beefy card and ample RAM, but it just runs like crap and I don't think it looks that much better than e.g. Starfield or Fallout 76

jemmyw4• 1 year ago

Bethesda doesn't think anything. Some people in leadership there think this. It would be very nice if they codeified what "support" means and the circumstances around it into company policy so that fans know what is what while that policy is in place (and who to blame if the policy is abandoned).

PoignardAzur• 1 year ago

I mean, when you reach the point where they advertise the mod in dev spotlights videos, I think it's fair to say there's some institutional support, even if it's not codified.

viraptor• 1 year ago

Sure, but that means in a few years another manager can remove it and sue the creators. It doesn't matter who the current guy approves of, long term.

Lammy• 1 year ago

Bethesda doesn't think anything.

It even kind of irks me when people talk about “Bethesda” when it's really “Microsoft Corporation presents Microsoft Gaming presents Zenimax Media presents Bethesda Softworks presents Bethesda Game Studios”.

Not picking on you in particular since the same thing happens with iD Software, Github, NPM, and many many more. I feel like there's a collective lack of straightforward language to discuss the influence of this kind of corporate structure. Falling back to the singular-subsidiary name with the rest unspoken is probably exactly what they want.

jemmyw4• 1 year ago

I wouldn't know who Bethesda was owned by without going and looking it up. I personally don't think this kind of corporate structure should be allowed, too much controlled by too few.

cultofmetatron• 1 year ago

at the very least, it shows that bethseda leadership are not in the habit of alienating their fans.

tedunangst• 1 year ago

I think people understand how metonymy works.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

Even if they do, I very highly doubt that they successfully process it emotionally too. I especially dislike when news conflates leaders with nations. I think it just adds unnecessary emotions to the mix. Which, of course, is good for the news source, so I doubt I'll ever see a decline in this phenomenon.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

I hate the same about how media presents news regarding to nations. Russia attacks instead of Putin's army attacks, Brussels denies instead of EU officials deny, etc. It irks me so much, especially in a world where we pretend to do away with racism. Because what these headlines end up reinforce are just stereotypes. Which just keeps the people in their bubbles, wasting the chance of them learning something new about the world.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

It's Russia and russians that is attacking not Putin. Even Russian oposition fully supports war

esperent• 1 year ago

If the policy can be abandoned it has no meaning anyway beyond being a marketing stunt.

rendaw• 1 year ago

It feels pretty likely that it's not even company leadership? Lead dev is not company leadership, and someone higher up next week could decide they don't like it and sic lawyers on the project.

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

This is a bit different situation than Nintendo and it's not fair to compare the two. The mod requires the base game where Nintendo software is hardware coupled. Furthermore, Bethesda has monetized mods directly (the Creation Club).

jimbob452• 1 year ago

Let’s call a spade a spade. Nintendo litigates worse than any other company and they never drop prices. I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers but they do have genuine faults.

nothercastle2• 1 year ago

And they are really letting their franchises go stale recently. Pokémon is especially bad.

stevenwoo2• 1 year ago

The digital game key with Switch 2 feels bad from a the perspective of people who keep their consoles forever.

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers

I thought their customer support sucks ? In France they got a law suit because they refused to replace the joystick of their latest portable gaming machine when they had an insane rate of failure.

chii3• 1 year ago

Nintendo doesn't litigate if they believe the community project won't impact their sales/profits.

For example, wii homebrew is not taken down by nintendo, even if there has been a recent "discovery" that the wii homebrew had relied on decompiled nintendo SDKs.

Nintendo's litigious intention always has been profit driven (and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts).

mschuster91• 1 year ago

Better than Rockstar, eh? Like, these fools had had people remaster their engine and assets for all the GTA games for decades, and instead of leveraging that they go, get a ton of mods taken down and then release a "remaster" done with barely-supervised AI slop.

Manfred• 1 year ago

People in the comments act like they have been to a family party and are now nitpicking every detail of the party, speculating that granddad might not let uncle celebrate their birthday next year, exclaiming that auntie had much better cake, and discussing the clip their niece posted to Facebook of the dirty basement.

It's fine to be skeptical about the intentions of big family, but it's also fine to enjoy the cake once in a while.

eGP9jDq_nw• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/swWEA

wduquette3• 1 year ago

I'm having a lot more fun with the Oblivion remaster than I did with the original game (which I first played years after Skyrim came out).

But I will say, while the graphics are better than the original Oblivion, Unreal 5 is NOT an improvement over the engine they used for Skyrim, not from a visual point of view, at least not for me. Quite frankly, I'd much rather have Skyrim-era graphics, which are plenty good enough, and Skyrim's quick startup times, than have to wait for shaders to load as you do with lots of recent games.

genewitch3• 1 year ago

The shaders do their thing the first time you launch oblivion, and then not again. Stalker had an issue where it would recompile the shaders of you changed a setting, not sure if they fixed that.

Skyrim does load fast, though, even on switch. Which wouldn't need to compile shaders anyhow.

wduquette3• 1 year ago

Yeah, shaders aren't the problem with Oblivion; the problem with Oblivion is that when you move to a new scene everything looks like it's made of enormous triangular things until the rendering catches up, which on my machine can take five seconds or so.

If this is typical for Unreal 5 it's what I'd call a deprovement (rather than an improvement).

Bethesda Thinks Fan Remaster of Oblivion Is 'Very Special' and Supports It

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