Oblivion's dungeons suck, Skyblivion is making them better: 'That's where the power of a proper remake comes from'

If there's one thing I've learnt in my hours with Oblivion Remastered, it's that Oblivion's dungeons kind of suck. They're labyrinthine, exist as one of three types, and when you get to the end of them your grand prize often turns out to be, like, 5 gold and a journeyman retort. And then you have to retrace your steps to get back out.

Bethesda didn't really crack its dungeon formula until Skyrim, where you could at least be relatively sure you had some kind of prize awaiting you at the end of a long session of hackin' and slashin': an enchanted weapon, a new word for a shout, that kind of thing.

When I sat down with Skyblivion lead dev Rebelzize for a chat about the upcoming Oblivion-in-Skyrim remake, it sounded like back-porting that dungeon philosophy to Cyrodiil was gonna be a key goal of the mod project.

"I think for a lot of people that play Oblivion now, it will be frustrating at times," said Rebel, "there's just old game design that doesn't really translate anymore, and some of that is still present in the remaster from Bethesda themselves, because they've not remade it, which is a key difference [from Skyblivion], which is good for us."

It's a neat point of divergence between Skyblivion's fan-made remake of Oblivion and Bethesda's remaster, which went out of its way to retain all the strange foibles that made the OG game what it is. "We still have something to offer in that we have more or less redesigned every aspect of the game," says Rebel.

"The easiest example is something that was introduced in Skyrim… once you're at the boss chamber, the final area, you get a loop back to where you started." In original Oblivion and the remaster, by contrast, "most of the time there's nothing at the end. There's no boss or loot or anything to make that delve rewarding. Then once you've done that very unrewarding delve, you have to backtrack all the way."

Not so in Skyblivion. "That's something I've been trying to really hammer on with everyone in the teams, that we make the dungeons fun. And if a dungeon serves no other purpose than to just distract someone from what they're doing, then it can't just be a bear den—you know, with a really big black bear—at the end."

This is pretty exciting to hear, at least for me. While Oblivion Remastered is very much the Oblivion you remember from 2006 in a lush new wrapper, it sounds like the Skyblivion team is deliberately, consciously pushing things into 'remake' territory, and they're not scared to slaughter some of the OG's sacred cows if they think it'll make for a better game. "Oblivion is one of those games that look really good from a distance, because it has those really lush forests, but once you're in a forest there's usually nothing between city A and city B."

The possibility of scattering in new details, new design philosophies, new stuff is, says Rebel, "Where the power of a proper remake comes from, and where I hope we will have some relevance and staying power within internet culture and the Elder Scrolls fandom."