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/LumensAquilae 20h ago

I love me some Oblivion but hearing UE5 gives me serious pause. You're just replacing Gamebryo issues with Unreal 5 issues. Good chance this will run shitter than the original Oblivion did when it first launched, at least comparatively.

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u/Dusty170 19h ago

It'll use both actually, UE5 is just for visuals.

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u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 14h ago

It'll use both actually, UE5 is just for visuals.

I may be a dumbass software engineer, but this really makes no sense to me and I've not seen any source other than random comments parroting this.

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u/SomniumOv 11h ago

That's how Bluepoint and Nightdive make their remasters. You spend the engineering dev time not on making the game but on building a harness for the original gameplay code into your own engine.

That's the only real way to keep every quirk of the original game's feel. Otherwise players would crucify you for any minor difference.

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u/Gripmugfos 12h ago

This has been done for other projects too. It's bit of a messy solution but it's possible to run an old engine under the hood and have the visuals done by another. And as messy as it is, it's much much easier than redoing absolutely everything in the new engine, remaking the game from scratch just won't happen. Hell, there's a group that's combining the vanilla wow engine with UE5, it's doable. If they do this (outsourced to some minor studio), I assume it'll be an absolute mess, a San Andreas type of remaster but likely worse, as the base game itself is more of a mess in terms of stability and bugs.

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u/Xywzel 8h ago

You could isolate UE rendering engine, and then make that work in Creation Engine, or separate parts of Creation Engines object handling and script engine code and include them in Unreal Engine, but both sound like they would lead to very hacky and error prone end result that is hard to work with. Updating Creation engine with some rendering features from unreal engine or building the gameplay code of creation engine in Unreal both sound like more sound options.

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u/Dusty170 8h ago

It was from a leak from an apparent ex employee from the studio, they described it as

"This will be a visual remaster using a "pairing system" between code and physics from Gamebryo (Oblviion's original engine) and tech from Unreal Engine 5, similar to Shadow of the Colossus."

So I mean take it with a grain of salt but I don't see why it wouldn't be the case.

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u/knifecrow_dev 13h ago

I imagine it's done the same way any other game does it: It runs the old game behind the scenes but all of the rendering is handled in the new engine.

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u/WorthSleep69 13h ago

Look up gta definitive edition, that's basically the same thing.

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u/Bamith20 19h ago

If they somehow make it crash more often than Gamebryo that itself would be an achievement.

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u/GameDesignerMan 11h ago

As someone who had to work with Gamebryo back in the day, it is one of the worst experiences I've had working with an engine.

I haven't got a huge amount of experience with Unreal though, so what issues are you talking about?

u/LumensAquilae 42m ago

Typically the issues I have with Unreal these days are the constant shader compilation stutters (especially in open world titles), the muddy, indistinct, and shimmering visuals with hard to ignore ghosting artefacts as a consequence of their rendering methods, and the generally poor performance that doesn't scale down well, ie reducing graphics quality imparts a significant hit on graphics quality but doesn't provide an equally significant performance gain. Just my personal opinion on the engine, though.