Zuck has been nothing but terrible for the state of VR. Oculus was doing fine before Facebook bought them, and since then all they’ve contributed is trying to fragment the ecosystem.

At first I was like “Why would anyone want to change OoT’s art and mess with perfection?”, but I do have to admit that I have really been craving a modern Zelda game in the vein of the N64 releases, which is a formula they haven’t touched since Skyward Sword in 2011. And Oblivion just recently showed me that sometimes a new coat of paint really is all you need.

Wind Waker at least is a game that (visually) aged very gracefully and I think can still stand against newer games even now, but I’ve played it to death and just wish we had something new.

Also not to discredit BotW/TotK or anything, I think they are still great games and I also really enjoyed them, but they’re just built different. Zelda is now a franchise of 3 distinct styles, but only two of them (2D and open world) are still getting new releases.

This is the video I didn’t know I was looking for in life.

I’ve been very into Zelda rando stuff lately, but the mod support shown here just seems above and beyond what I’ve seen so far from my limited experience with Ship/2Ship.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I had thought Ship was decompiling and recompiling it into its own package, but what you describe makes more sense.

Is this similar to the Ship of Harkinian recompiles, just as a different project?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/ for any curious

Those sorts of things can absolutely happen. Newer versions of games often either patch issues on older versions or there may be some glitches that are not as easy to take advantage of when the hardware isn’t struggling as much.

The Zelda Speedruns site even maintains a list of version differences for various Zelda games which make a difference to which version is optimal to run.

Yep, even going way back, there are differences between speedrun times for Ocarina of Time on N64, Ocarina of Time on GameCube, Ocarina of Time on Wii VC, and Ocarina of Time on NSO. And that’s also not considering the native PC port recently assembled by the community.

And that’s why speedrun leaderboards always factor in game version/region and platform when measuring runs against one another.

It’s always fun when two terrible tech giants fight it out.

I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s just the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks. And it’s a pretty high-effort remaster at that.

I just think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better, when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible. It’s as good now as it was back then but it’s still a 19-year-old game.

Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.

The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.

Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.

Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.

Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.

I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.

As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.

It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.

I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.

I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.

Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done. If they C&D it later this year, there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on. Basically I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not Microsoft/Zenimax would want to kill the project to boost their own profits, but rather if they even could at this point, and I think the answer is no. A few years ago may have been a different story, but that ship has sailed.

It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.

It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.

The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.

But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).

My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.

My only thing is that Oblivion does not play well on newer hardware. It was a bit of an ordeal to try to get it running well on my PC where I have two monitors, since it only runs on whichever monitor is primary and only if in Fullscreen mode. And don’t even think about alt-tabbing to check Discord, or it just crashes.

If it got the OpenMW treatment, I’d be thrilled with even that.

Agreed, though one would think they’d have taken steps to C&D Skyblivion the very moment they decided to move forward with their own project if that was their intent. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise to let Skyblivion keep going this whole time if they saw it as a threat to their profits, since the mod is pretty close to completion at this point.

I’m guessing not likely, if only because we’ve already seen mod compatibility take a hit for less drastic engine updates (Skyrim vs Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 vs Fallout 4 next-gen). The work they’re doing seems more extensive than those examples, so I wouldn’t expect old mods to work, but maybe they could be recreated or converted through community effort.

As another user already said, this remaster is being done by an outside studio, so it shouldn’t be significantly affecting any ongoing work at Bethesda.

While Todd Howard is full of shit half the time, I do believe him when he talks about their development roadmap. When Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, it was under the disclaimer that it was not an active project for the team at the time, and would not enter full production until Starfield was done. Starfield released in fall of 2023, so Elder Scrolls 6 should have been in full development for about a year and a half now.