Bethesda to announce THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION REMASTERED tomorrow

Bethesda have confirmed they will be making a big announcement about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered tomorrow, April 22nd 2025, at 11am EST, 8am PST and 4pm BST. This follows weeks of speculation and leaks about the game, and widespread rumours the game would be "shadow-dropped" (released with absolutely no preamble or warning) today.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was originally released in 2006 as, obviously, the fourth game in that venerable series, following on from Arena (1994), Daggerfall (1996) and Morrowind (2002). Only one additional game in the mainline series has been released since then, the infamous Skyrim (2011), although The Elder Scrolls Online (2014) has kept some attention on the franchise. Bethesda have confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI (no subtitle confirmed) is their next project but no release date has been mooted.

Oblivion was noteworthy for its very impressive graphics (for the time), its status as a unit-shifter for the Xbox 360 console (the game was later also released on PlayStation 3), its huge open-world environment, outstanding and quirky side-quests and its employment of top vocal talent, including Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. The game eventually saw some criticism for its weird levelling mechanics, the tiny pool of voice actors (often leading to two NPCs with identical voices talking to one another) and the irritating Oblivion Gates, which had a tendency to crop up and interfere with whatever side-quest the player was trying to do at the time. The game was also seen as too much of a standard fantasy, after the extremely weird Morrowind; Skyrim was seen as a more halfway house between Oblivion's conservatism and Morrowind's bizarre experimentation. Finally, Oblivion was the first high-profile game to feature paid DLC, in the form of the infamous "horse armour" upgrade, which some players despise to this very day. Still, Oblivion was well-regarded for its atmosphere, rich assortment of weaponry, interesting bestiary of enemies and its extremely epic conclusion.

Given the number of times that Skyrim has been upgraded, remastered and re-released, fans had been speculating for years about the same attention being given to Oblivion, giving it broadly shares similar technology and a graphics style to the later game (Skyrim's Creation Engine being only a moderate development of Oblivion's GameBryo Engine). Bethesda themselves always seemed cool on the idea, saying they'd rather spend time working on a new game and pointing to numerous fan projects doing similar things. Oblivion has had mods available for many years to improve its mechanics and graphics, to a point.

However, Bethesda may have been slightly disingenuous, having outsourced development of the remaster to Virtuous Studios whilst maintaining oversight from afar.

News broke in 2023 that Bethesda were planning remakes of both Oblivion and Fallout 3 as far back as 2020, as well as considering a Dishonored 3 from their subsidiary studio Arkane. Dishonored 3 never happened - Arkane instead released Deathloop and Redfall, and are now making a video game based on the Marvel character Blade - leading to scepticism about the other claims. These were emphasised by the impressive and sterling work done on the unofficial fan remaster Skyblivion, which was of a very high quality and had committed to a 2025 release, leading to speculation that Bethesda might consider that project for an official release.

Based on the (mostly credible) leaks, Oblivion Remastered will include expansions Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles (and, yes, the horse armour) and will release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, and will be available on Game Pass on both PC and Xbox. The game's graphics have been reworked from the ground up, possibly in Unreal Engine 5, with significant visual upgrades. The UI, combat and levelling also appear to have been reworked for a more modern feel. To what degree other elements have been upgraded is unclear; Skyblivion has redesigned every fort, cave and dungeon in the game to be larger, more expansive and more unique, but it's unclear if Remastered has gone that far.

It's also unclear if tomorrow will be an announcement about the remaster or just the actual straight-up release of the game. We will need to see how that unfolds.

SKYBLIVION developers re-commit to 2025 release

The developers of fan mega-mod Skyblivion, which seeks to update venerable fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) to modern-ish standards, have re-committed to releasing the game in 2025, as they originally promised two years ago. The project is almost feature-complete, with developers and testers now able to run through entire quests, as they have demonstrated in a new video.

The original idea behind the project was to remake Oblivion in the upgraded Creation Engine of its successor, Skyrim (2011). However, the project stalled after several years and was relaunched before the pandemic under new management. The title is somewhat misleading, as the game now features improvements from later versions of the engine and features from other modders, including better 4K textures and enhanced lighting. The mod is also not a straightforward remake, as it redesigns and enhances some areas of the games, for example replacing the identikit caves with different designs based on their descriptions (i.e. mines and random caverns no longer look identical) and making the infamously tiny forts larger and more imposing. The city of Leyawiin, which was massively scaled back in development, has been returned to its original, imposing design straddling a major river with a drawbridge to allow ships to pass.

The creators have kept in touch with Bethesda during development to confirm what they can and can't do: they've kept the original soundtrack and even added to it with new material, but have had to re-record all dialogue for legal reasons (presumably the need not to pay Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart lots of money again). This will probably be a boon, as Oblivion infamously had a tiny voice cast, and it wasn't uncommon to stumble across three people with the exact same voice talking to one another, which was weird.

Playing the mod will require the player owns copies of both Oblivion and Skyrim. As noted before, the plan is to release the mod before the end of 2025 via Steam, GoG and Nexus Mods. A console version is currently impossible due to the massive size of the new files (which outsizes the limits Bethesda put in place for console modding).

In 2023 it was rumoured that Bethesda were considering their own remaster of Oblivion, which sounds like an exercise in futility compared to the scale of Skyblivion. It'll be interesting to see if that project is actually something that's happening.