Skyblivion’s World Is Nearly Complete, Bringing The Skyrim Mod’s Launch Even Closer
A whole new world is coming to Skyrim.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has already been out for more than a decade and ported to every platform imaginable, but that doesn’t mean you’ve seen everything it has to offer. Rather than just add new content to the game, one group of intrepid modders is replacing the entirety of Skyrim with an earlier entry in The Elder Scrolls series, and it’s on track for release in 2025.
Work on Skyblivion began in 2016. The fan-led modding project uses Skyrim’s engine to recreate 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, letting players experience the classic RPG with all the technical improvements added in Skyrim. In a video released on the final day of 2024, the Skyblivion modding team announced that eight of the game’s nine regions are implemented, those most still need some work to be complete and playable, and the mod is scheduled to release later in 2025. Only the Nibenay region on the map’s eastern edge remains.
Skyblivion is nearing completion with its release expected later in 2025.
Technically, the team says that it’s finished the “landscaping” process for most of the game, meaning that the geography and other visual details of outdoor spaces are in place. However, some will need further visual work and navmeshes — which allow NPCs to interact with the environment — still need to be completed. Interiors still need more work than outdoor spaces, and details from plants to structures to weapons need to be created. In order to release Skyblivion legally, the mod team can’t simply reuse assets from Oblivion, so they all need to be recreated from space.
Beyond the world and visuals, there’s still a lot of work to be done to turn Skyblivion into a playable game. The team has around 200 quests from Oblivion to implement in the Skyrim engine, and only six remain to be started. Beyond that, plenty have been started but not completed, but at this point, nearly all the game’s major quests exist at least in a first draft form. At the beginning of 2024, there were more than 100 quests remaining to even begin work on, so the team is in the final stretch as 2025 starts.
The landscapes of Skyblivion are largely complete, but there’s still plenty of work to do before release.
Though work has been progressing quickly, there’s plenty to be done this year. The Skyblivion mod team is still accepting new volunteers to bring the project over the finish line. Help is still needed on NPC AI, interiors, navmeshes, and more. The team is also looking beyond the mod’s release. When it launches, Skyblivion will contain only the Oblivion base game, not any of its DLC expansions. However, the team is considering keeping the project going past launch by implementing some or all of the game’s DLC content in the future.
Skyblivion is without a doubt one of the most ambitious Skyrim mods ever developed. While plenty of mods bring new environments and quests to the game, Skyblivion is attempting to essentially launch a full game within Skyrim. In some ways, it’s similar to last year’s Fallout: London, a fan-developed expansion for Fallout 4. The difference is that rather than adding entirely new quests, Skyblivion recreates content originally made by developer Bethesda. That does provide a complete guideline for the mod to follow, but it also means that the finished product will inevitably be compared to Bethesda’s own work — a considerably higher bar than most mods have to clear.
While Skyblivion is expected this year, it doesn’t yet have a solid release date. Given the amount of work still yet to do, it will likely be a while before a playable version of the mod is available. Regardless of when it launches, Skyblivion could help make the wait for The Elder Scrolls VI, which is still an indeterminate number of years away, a bit easier to handle.
