“Our cities, interiors, dungeons and environments are larger and filled with a lot more detail than anything in Oblivion, and in many cases Skyrim too,” K Rebel continues. Rest assured, though, that we are approaching this as fans of Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls games.” “If we didn’t, you might as well replay the original Oblivion. “We are definitely taking some creative freedom here and there,” project lead K Rebel tells me over email.

This mixture of realising unused ideas and adding modern sheen to areas left fairly basic is part of the Skyblivion team’s philosophy. Others, like the Fall Forest, have been expanded and enriched with more foliage and areas of interest, with the Skyblivion team guessing at what the original designers might have aimed for with more technological grunt at their disposal. Seen in a recent dev diary, areas like the city of Leyawiin have been fully redesigned based on unused Oblivion concept art, bringing to life ideas that could never be realised in the original game. In a way, the Skyblivion team is treating Oblivion like a sketch, and painting in new details drawn from a number of sources. But the reality isn’t that the team of volunteers making it simply wants to upscale the 2006 game we already know – they want to make the dream version of the game that Bethesda’s developers had in their heads back when they came up with Oblivion. Skyblivion is a mod that’s very easy to explain: it’s aiming to bring the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion into the engine used by The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

Oblivion map compared to skyrim