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Sometimes, stopping the Mythic Dawn from causing a cataclysm in Cyrodiil in Oblivion can be lonely. It's you against the combined forces of a deathcult! Yes, you have some NPCs to help, but this is a Bethesda game, they're not always the finest company. That's all going to change, thanks to a new toolkit that's bringing multiplayer to the fantasy RPG.
Oblivion multiplayer is a project stemming from ReadyM, a platform designed to bring multiplayer into games where it's otherwise unsupported. The tech was built on foundations laid by WukongMP, a mod for Black Myth: Wukong, with the hope of transposing this framework across similarly sized releases.
"There's an incredible grassroots tradition of teams building multiplayer experiences for games they love," Michael Szklarski, co-founder and COO of parent company ReadyCode, says in a press release. "And ReadyM is eager to give those creators real infrastructure, allowing them to focus on imagination instead of netcode, hosting and constant breakage. ReadyM is built by modders, for modders."
In other words, this interface provides the scaffolding, you fill it out as needed for your game of choice. Going by the trailer, this modification for Oblivion is pretty robust. You can have numerous people playing at once once, causing utter carnage on-screen. Even though the clip says it's actual in-game footage, I'm somewhat skeptical of how smooth it'll be over extended periods.
We've had mods for co–op in Oblivion before, and they're always a bit tricky to use. Inserting multiple players into something only designed for one creates a lot of variables. It seems that ReadyM will be handling a lot of those, and should this add-on work as intended, it'll open up a whole other way to enjoy the classic role-playing game.
Another fine distraction while we wait for anything – literally any sort of scrap – on The Elder Scrolls 6. On the plus side, at least there'll inevitably be multiplayer modded into that, too.
