Skyblivion developer Rebelzize has dropped the first development update for the fan-made Oblivion remake since Bethesda's official remaster dropped in April, and there's a lot to unpack, including a whole new city that was cut down to a single fort in the original game, and huge expansions to the dreaded Deadlands.
In an update tantalizingly titled "The Final Stretch Towards RELEASE," (thanks, PC Gamer), a wonderfully theatrical narrator runs through some of the previously unknown details about Skyblivion, and in doing so, gives us our first-ever look at a fully fleshed-out interpretation of Sutch, which was originally planned as the eighth proper city of Cyrodiil before it was replaced by the unremarkable Fort Sutch.
In Skyblivion, Sutch has been "restored to some of its former glory," with walls and paved pathways and people, and even its own Patron Divine at the now-abandoned Chapel of Kynareth.
Oh, yes, I should probably mention that Sutch is a city in ruins, so there probably isn't a whole lot of interactivity there – at least not compared to other major cities of Cyrodiil – but there's a heck of a lot more to see than there was in the original game.
The port city of Anvil is also getting a significant rework to more emphasize its position as a prominent coastal trading hub, now sporting a much bigger central harbor basin that Rebelzize says more closely resembles the original plans for the city.
I could've stopped the video right there, and I'd still be pretty damn impressed with Skyblivion after more than a decade of development – but thankfully I didn't stop it there, because there would make me a pretty bad reporter.
What comes next in the dev update is by far the most exciting for me, and for anyone else who finds the realm of Mehrunes Dagon weirdly kind of boring – or in the more subtle words of the video's narrator, "repetitive and monotonous."
"To diversify the Deadlands, which at times were repetitive and monotonous, we've formed two distinct biomes," they say.
In Skyblivion, when you enter those big flaming gates, what lies beyond will no longer just be more flames. There will be two starkly different landscapes: The Burn, the aptly named and all-too-familiar land of fire and brimstone, and The Sever, the swampy, acid puddly, stormy Eastern half of the Deadlands first introduced in the MMO Elder Scrolls Online.
Rebelzize also added new enemies to Deadlands, including chumps like Scamps and Clannfear, as well as more formidable foes like the crocodile-headed Daedroth, Spider Daedra, and Atronach.
Finally, Rebelzize says that, in order to "further minimize the repetition of the Deadlands," there will now be eleven randomly selectable worlds behind the Oblivion Gates instead of the original game's seven, and "if time permits before release," the developers plan to rework "as many of them as possible."
There's still no release date for Skyblivion, but the developers confirmed in the new update that it's still scheduled to release on PC sometime this year, at which point I expect to fully fall off Oblivion Remastered – although I plan to roll credits on both games eventually.
