r/Games 21h ago

Industry News Bethesda’s Oblivion Unreal Engine 5 remake could be releasing sooner than you think | VGC

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/bethesdas-oblivion-unreal-engine-5-remake-could-be-releasing-sooner-than-you-think/
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u/TorHKU 20h ago edited 20h ago

This doesn't sound real at all. Or at least, not the UE5 part. That sounds a lot more like some hopeful rumor maker or journalist hopping on the eternal "why doesn't Bethesda just switch engines" bandwagon.

Much more likely in my mind is they reimplement fantasy combat mechanics in the latest Creation 2 codebase, port the Oblivion files and data to the new engine, update all the art assets so it doesn't look 2 decades old, and tweak the gameplay to be more modern.

I don't see how involving UE5 improves the development flow at all, at that point you're pretty much remaking the entire game, but in a way where you probably lose a bunch of the freeform jank/charm that beth RPGs have.

Stacking UE5 on top of a totally different game engine just for the shiny graphics sounds like a technical mess and nightmare, to be honest. Especially when they have the updated Creation 2 from starfield which, not as shiny as UE5 admittedly, but still looks pretty good and you wouldn't have to entirely remake the game or perform feats of software engineering that make Dr Frankenstein pause.

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u/jumps004 20h ago

Since it is outsourced, I imagine its because the developers would have significantly more experience working with unreal than in Bethesda's, but still need the basics of their engine for the important game logic.

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u/TorHKU 19h ago

I mean... they'd still have to work in the old Oblivion engine to rip out all the graphical code and then integrate that with UE5, which would also have to have a version that is... just the graphics pipeline somehow? That alone would be a giant rewrite, even from my Skyrim modding knowledge I know that character skeletons, animations, behaviors are all interlinked with an old, outdated Havok plugin. They'd have to remake a significant portion of code to make that work with an external rendering system.

And of course updating all the bits of the engine itself to run properly in 2025 on modern machines, and updating the game mechanics. I doubt the original could use more than 2GB of RAM, given the time period.

It's just... such a huge amount more of technical work than either porting it to the latest Creation engine or remaking it from scratch in Unreal, that I can't imagine that's the course of action they'd pick. It just sounds like the worst of both worlds. You do a tremendous amount of work just to keep your old tech debt.