Giant modding project Skyblivion, the one that’s recreating all of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as a Skyrim mod, is beginning to look like a game you can actually play. The team plugging away at this huge overhaul have released another progress video showing that Skyblivion doesn’t just look the part, it now plays it too. Quests are being implemented at last and they’ve proven it by hacking and slashing their way through one.
The quest in question isn’t a large one, to be fair. Your hero comes across one Corrick Northwode who wants help avenging his wife’s death by slaying some goblins. No problem, just head on into a nearby mine and whack them with your sword. Grab an amulet off the wife’s body and bring it back to Corrick for a reward and presto. That’s a quest. You can catch it at about the eleven minute mark in the update video up above.
Of course there are plenty of bigger and more impressive quests in Oblivion, but this quick little dungeon dive fetch quest shows that they’re making headway. Throughout the video, text asides call out other additions of note like the unique weapon the character is wielding, some secret passages within dungeons, and a bit of underwater combat.
The Skyblivion team explain how implementing quests hadn’t been stable enough to include in their builds until now. Their coding volunteers made some headway late in 2020 though, and now all of Oblivion’s 219 quests can be implemented. What lays ahead, they say, is a whole lot of manual quest implementation, though not nearly as much as if it hadn’t been for their automated quest conversion tool.
Despite the huge scope of the project itself, which has been in the works for years now, the Skyblivion team say “we are finally seeing the end of the road”. Given how much quest work seems to lay ahead, they may be seeing it through binoculars, but seeing it all the same. They also showcased many of Oblivion’s environments in a video update last September.
Not to confuse you, but the other big Elder Scrolls Renewal project Skywind—that’s Morrowind inside Skyrim—is still in the works as well. That team gave their own update on progress last August and it’s looking pretty swell too.