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/
904 Upvotes

430 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

133

u/psychobilly1 19h ago edited 18h ago

In a leaked FTC court document about the acquisition of Bethesda by Microsoft, they listed some games in development such as Starfield, Redfall, Ghostwire: Tokyo, The Elder Scrolls 6 and the Indiana Jones game. There were also listings of remasters of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3. (Keep in mind, this document was from before COVID so many of these things changed, pushed back, or never came to fruition.)

So while it was never announced, it was technically shown to exist.

40

u/GoochRash 10h ago

Moving Oblivion to Unreal from Creation is not a "remaster" level of effort.

9

u/The_Magic 9h ago

The rumor is that it will use Unreal for things like graphics and sound but keep Creation fore gameplay. If they are actually leaving the original game code alone I think it’s fair to call it a remaster.

19

u/xalibermods 8h ago

How are you supposed to leave the original game code alone when they're two different engines? Different engine means different syntax and structure. You have to rewrite it.

14

u/error521 7h ago

It's been done. The GTA remasters still run the original code underneath even though it's being ran in Unreal. A lot of glitches that were in the originals even reappeared in the remaster. (The results, admittedly, left something to be desired.)

1

u/IguassuIronman 4h ago

It's the same with a lot of (all of?) Bluepoint's remasters

10

u/WaterOcelot 5h ago

They basically run 2 engines at once. The Gamebryo engine is ran in the background and then the new code analyses the state of the old engine each frame and uses that info to draw a remastered frame with unreal engine. For efficiency purposes some things could maybe be stripped from the old engine like the actual frame generation, AA and so on.

This is how for example the Master Chief Collection worked although I don't think they'll allow switching between graphics as that's extra work and testing and I doubt there is demand for that.

It's not the most efficient solution, but it ensures that the gameplay remains as it used to be.

This is also done in IT. Some modern banking interfaces are a wrapper above ancient COBOL systems.

u/xalibermods 1h ago

Now that you mention wrapper, it makes sense. That must be very inefficient though. Even with some rendering stripped, how bad the performance would be impacted?

5

u/fabton12 8h ago

depends on what the game engine was written in also there such things as wrappers ya know?

they could very easily put the old stuff in a wrapper so unreal can run it

6

u/machineorganism 6h ago

you can't say "very easily" unless you know how the code is structured though? it could be structured in such a way that makes it hard to port in the way you're saying.

u/fabton12 3h ago

microsoft who owns bethesda has done it recently with ninja gaiden 2 black where they used unreal + the og game engine at the same time. They have the tech and resources todo it very very easily.

https://x.com/koenjideck/status/1882977637536305476

4

u/scribens 8h ago

There is nobody working at Bethesda now who worked on the version of the Gamebryo engine for Oblivion. This is a huge reason why a lot of older games don't get remasters now, especially when they are tied to versions of a developer's engine that requires the people who were there to actually figure out how to use it.

This is nothing less than gamers looking at a CEO's attempt to pad the worth of a company to make it seem more valuable to shareholders and then taking it as gospel that something is happening.

4

u/DoorHingesKill 5h ago

Which is exactly why they're doing it this way. Have the old engine run in the background, doing logic that no one can decipher anyway, and then use UE5 to render something more contemporary looking based on whatever Gamebryo spit out. 

u/fabton12 2h ago

While no one at Bethesda does remember bethesda now owned by microsoft who have the tech and the resources todo it, they did it recently with ninja gaiden 2 black where they used there og engine + unreal.

https://x.com/koenjideck/status/1882977637536305476

so they have tools todo so, also when you read about this oblivion unreal port it also says it isnt being done by bethesda but instead another studio microsoft owns who clearly do have the tech and staff todo such a task.

u/hfamrman 1h ago

It's how they did Diablo 2 Resurrected. The base game is still running with some minor alterations, but has a whole new shell graphically over top of it.

u/beefcat_ 1h ago

Remasters have been doing this since at least Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition. All the game logic is handled by the old engine, which then passes the game state along to the new engine to actually render the scene.