One of my friends who posts here told me it would be sweet if I tried out an AMA here so here goes.
I have been a programmer for the mod since 2019 and have been working on the project I would say almost every other day, except for holidays of course. Working on the game has been really exciting and I’m really proud to be a part of it and I really really can’t wait for people to start playing it! It’s honestly such a cool mod and we have an incredibly talented team of people who have been working on this thing nonstop.
Anyway, cheers for having me and thanks for the questions!
Snort_Owl [they/them] - 7day
What brings you here of all places?
I’m really looking forward to skyblivion. I thought the remaster would quell my desire but it was such a disappointment it only hardened my resolve to play.
39
Skyblivdev - 7day
I got into a drinking game with one of your posters who is also my friend. After losing they told me it would be cool to chill out here and do an AMA. I haven’t revealed them yet because they’re most likely sleeping, might be a cool surprise for them once they wake up to see this. Lol.
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Awoo [she/her] - 7day
I got into a drinking game with one of your posters
This would have required a poster here to logoff which is
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Skyblivdev - 6day
Speaking of drinking, someone on the tine brews their own mead so when the time comes and we release the project we’re all going to be drinking home brewed mead and having a party. Looking forward to that.
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Blakey [he/him] - 6day
This would have required a poster here to logoff
what a disgusting pervert, hopefully they get banned
12
CommunistCuddlefish [she/her] - 7day
How have you maintained the zeal and discipline to work on it so consistently for 6 years? That's a long time!
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Skyblivdev - 7day
We just really love the Elder Scrolls.
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CommunistCuddlefish [she/her] - 6day
:waow-based:
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segfault11 [she/her, any] - 7day
what's your favorite bean based dish
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Skyblivdev - 7day
Hmmmmm I really like a bean salsa that I had at TGI Fridays once. I don’t really eat beans often.
15
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
omg careful don't wanna be saying that shit in these parts! All joking aside thanks for what you do. Spending time on a communal project just because you like it kinda just... Confirms some of the most important ideas in communism, so I'm all for it. A commie world would still have games and art and you're living it:)
I wish I was an elder scrolls fan so I could respond in a more meaningful way but this's what I got.
11
Skyblivdev - 6day
I don’t think Elder Scrolls would exist under a communist regime and I’m more of an anarchist myself, but thanks for the positive feedback!
8
Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided] - 6day
there's at least one Soviet Lord of the Rings tv movie, there's no reason we can't have high fantasy and communism. Socialist-realism TES might fuck.
7
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
Well, I don't mean Marxist communism specifically! It confirms the bits Marxists and anarchists have in common, so thanks regardless:)
7
Keld [he/him, any] - 6day
Ban
6
razgriz [none/use name] - 7day
When are you doing Fallout New Vegas?
27
Skyblivdev - 7day
Hahahaha. I’ll pass this on to the leads.
20
BadTakesHaver [he/him, they/them] - 6day
what's your favorite dinosaur
26
Skyblivdev - 6day
Allosaurus
20
keepcarrot [she/her] - 6day
Same. It's a sportier handier t-rex lol
16
qcop [none/use name] - 6day
Have you read "Marx at the arcade" by Jamie Woodcock? Great book on the gaming industry, its workers and its consumers
25
Skyblivdev - 6day
Never heard of it.
9
qcop [none/use name] - 6day
I’d encourage you to read it, it provides nice insights especially as someone working in the industry.
5
Awoo [she/her] - 6day
Actually I do have a question. Which part has been the hardest or longest or most problematic component for the project?
25
Skyblivdev - 6day
Initially trying to bridge the gap between being able to access Skyrim and vise versa Oblivion but this was too much of a challenge that needs more time to accomplish. I think we will eventually get it to work but for the time being we have shifted our focus elsewhere.
28
vovchik_ilich [he/him] - 7day
When the full thing is out, what character will you make? What's your playstyle?
Also, how do you handle the expectations for this project? People have been thoroughly excited about it for years, must be hard being so close from release. Do you feel pressure?
24
Skyblivdev - 7day
So obviously we are all very used to delay delay delay… things feel different this year however, the project has been coming along for over a decade but we have so few loose ends now that I really do see it being released in 2026.
Of course things happen, this is a passion project that we aren’t getting paid for so besides this we also are busy with the jobs we go to in order to survive and pay rent. Because of this there’s gaps in development time, especially the holidays, but that isn’t to say that it slows down in any sort of capacity. For most of us this has been the project we work on any moment we have free time. And we love it.
23
Skyblivdev - 7day
Oh forgot to answer the first part of the question. I do love me an orc and 2 handed strength playstyle with a warhammer
21
Dort_Owl [they/them, any] - 6day
No questions, but I wanted to say thanks for your hard work and it's very cool to know someone who works on Skyblivion is a lefty. Hell yeah.
23
Aradino [they/them, comrade/them] - 7day
I don't have any questions related to the project, but I hope you're having a good day
23
Skyblivdev - 7day
Thank you! You too!
15
Des [she/her, they/them] - 6day
No questions, but as someone who has made a hobby out of customizing games (using mods) and appreciates the hard work done by modders to allow me to do so
eventually i got so good that I started beta testing, making patches, content, etc. but i haven't published an actual mod in almost 15 years I am purely a consumer
Mods keep me playing games despite some efforts by corpos and bad actors to crush it. sometimes it feels like the only two (mostly digital) things on the internet that are true hobby spaces where people can be creative without mandatory monetary gain: mods and fanfic. Both spun from something people love and want to expand upon. i will fight for both to the bitter end (even though I don't read fanfic)
so thank you for working so hard on this project with your team and I hope to check it out one day.
21
Skyblivdev - 6day
Thank you so much! Without the fans projects like this would never happen.
13
Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them] - 7day
How has the Oblivion remaster affected your project?
Also, as a fellow game dev who has been working on a project for a similar length of time, how do you maintain enthusiasm and prevent burnout?
20
Skyblivdev - 7day
I’m not going to lie, when we heard rumors that it was a thing we felt a little unease but when the full project came out I think that took a day of wind out of our sails, also because we were playing our free copies, thanks Bethesda!
In all truth we didn’t expect the game to be what it is. We all expect a “remaster” or “remake” to be like a cash grab akin to Dark Souls 1 remaster where they ruined the lighting and put the gama all the way up, that’s what I and many were expecting. Not a full blown remake of the game that improves it vastly and makes the experience so much greater.
It was scary at first but then we also realized that that game was born out of love and admiration for the original so it gave us a morale boost. Also the team at Bethesda called us behind the scenes and we even got to talk to Todd Howard (I don’t know how well he’s received in your community) but I thought that was nice.
But yeah, it’s a different game and different to what we have been working on for decades, but the fact that the remake far surpassed everyone’s expectations made it that much better for us to focus on doing the same with ours.
23
darkmode [comrade/them] - 6day
we even got to talk to Todd Howard (I don’t know how well he’s received in your community)
Todd Howard has proven himself an exceptional salesman and will be allowed to assume the role of a humble bureaucrat in a provincial or county media firm after an appropriate rehabilitation period.
tbh tho I'm shocked they reached out and were so cool with you it feels so rare these days from giant studios
14
Euergetes [none/use name] - 6day
Hwat in the goddamn
i just watched that update video! fully support the decisions to push those features beyond initial release many such cases where something looks good/kinda works for a preview but is unpractical for full implementation. shame the spell making modder peaced out before their shit needed adjustments
Question: what is the level of collaboration between your team and beyond skyrim cyrodiil on the Imperial City? are yall gonna use the same tileset once its done?
19
Rikj000 - 7day
First of all, thank you and your team for the amazing voluntary work you're doing! <3
I've got 2 questions for you :)
Hope I don't come over rude with this one, but with the Oblivion Remastered release, what is still the benefit/point of Skyblivion? :o
From the Skyblivion website's FAQ, I've understood that Skyrim won't be accessible in Skyblivion, could you explain why this is the case? I'm interested in understanding the technicalities behind it :) Since with Skywind also being a thing, it would be awesome imo to have a single game with Skyrim + Skyblivion + Skywind in one, perhaps slowly adding more until all of Tamriel is combined in a single massive game. But if that would not be possible, I'd be interested in knowing why :)
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Skyblivdev - 7day
So I wish you’d rephrase the first question better, I know you mean no offense but to say “what is the point” of a project a decade in the making just because of the remake is a bit crude. I somewhat answered this under another comment but to expand a bit further, this is a passion project that has its own unique approach to the project. It isn’t just improving shaders and lighting it’s much much MUCH more than that like creating our own concept art, new 3D models, using the already established lore from the entire franchise to add more depth to this mod.
We love the remake because it’s great but our project was never intended to compete at all with it and I think this sentiment that “well Bethesda did it better, give up now?” has been played out to its fullest.
Let me ask you this: if you were working on a decades long project with hundreds of other members, would you hang it up?
Also with Skyrim not being accessible it’s really down to a variety of issues that we could develop if we had the time but as it stands. We had a lengthy discussion about this because this was one of the main objectives and the one we advertised the project on, that being the idea you can travel to and from oblivion to Skyrim vice versa. There’s difficulties and a lot of crashes that are involved that let’s say, we had maybe a year or two left of development time then we could accomplish it. I do think the devs on the backend will be able to work something out though because there are people who still want this to work out, as do I, but for the time being with our timeframe it just isn’t possible and our focus is working on the game itself.
17
Rikj000 - 6day
Thank you for your extensive reply :)
And sorry if question 1 came over a bit rude.
I guess I'd be frustrated with Bethesda if they did that after so many years of pouring in my own time/effort, but I think it's commendable that you guys took the communities feedback from it, and kept on working on your own thing.
Also nice to hear that there is hope for a Skyriel (full Tamriel in Skyrim's engine) in the future! :D
3
Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided] - 6day
microsoft gaming is BDS, a fan mod isn't.
6
altkey (he\him) - 7day
Was there any hype in dev chats or downloading spree when young scrolls posted their ZOOM album with Xedilian track having an explicit "My bitch is 4k like SkyOblivion" positive reference to your project?
19
Skyblivdev - 7day
Oh that, haha. Yes. There was. The group chat was filled with gifs and memes and I felt the odd one out for not knowing ANYTHING beforehand but I thought it was cool nonetheless. Big fan now of course.
15
Awoo [she/her] - 7day
I don't have an interesting question really I just want to say that I've been waiting to play it and thanks for all your work.
19
Skyblivdev - 7day
Thank you!
17
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 7day
I don't have any questions for you but if you have any questions for me AMA, i'm a vegan chef (but i'm not vegan)
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segfault11 [she/her, any] - 7day
what's your favorite bean based dish
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LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 7day
Oh I can't answer that r/n since making papadams (lentil crackers) has blown my mind open to the bean cracker and nugget possibilities, there's too many good choices and too much I haven't tried
I think some top bean focused favorites though would be like a beany chili, a good bean filling for burritos, chickpea curries are always good if you consider it a bean. GREEN BEANS are a huge favorite tosses in garlic, salt, pepper, and onion powder and roasted hot hot until starting to brown, but they're like, more a vegetable than a bean. Idk
I really need to experiment though because there's all kinds of fucking indian street foods and stuff using beans, plus I'm only just now getting into crackerizing and nuggetizing them. I made some creole seasoned black eyed peas the other day and pureed them and mixed with with flour, cornstarch and baking soda, pressed those into crackers and deep fried them, and mmmm they were soo good (hard to get consistently crisp though, you gotta get them REALLY flat, and they went stale quickly).
The next thing I wanna do is basically that, I posted some youtube video recently of bayou bean balls and they look dope, like a bean hushpuppy 🤤
13
Skyblivdev - 7day
My wife is vegan!!!
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GenderIsOpSec [she/her, kit/kit's] - 6day
7
communism @lemmy.ml - 6day
The obvious question is why are you a vegan chef but not vegan yourself?
5
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 6day
My job is vegan chef so i cook the vegan food but i'm not a vegan because idk the animal slaughter is already happening and my personal choice of what to eat isn't going to do shit and any arguments otherwise conflict with the general agreement that you can't just vote with your wallet to affect anything under capitalism so that's pretty much it. I eat food that I think is good, if we do a communism and enforce veganism I guess i'll stop and have fewer problems than most but i'll really miss eggs because they're kind of an autism sensory "i can always eat this food and stomach it" thing if I'm having appetite issues which is sometimes frequent
5
Kefla [she/her, they/them] - 6day
idk the animal slaughter is already happening and my personal choice of what to eat isn't going to do shit and any arguments otherwise conflict with the general agreement that you can't just vote with your wallet to affect anything under capitalism
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is such an insidious thought-terminating cliche which could be used to justify all sorts of shit you would no doubt condemn, like buying from Israeli companies for example.
7
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 6day
okay so we CAN vote with our wallets? Im not going to change how i feel but i am going to go to bed gnight
6
Kefla [she/her, they/them] - 6day
Have you ever heard of a boycott? Do you smugly dismiss BDS as "voting with your wallet"
Im not going to change how i feel
Pure liberalism, shut the fuck up then. A view which cannot be changed by reason is a view worth nothing.
8
Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided] - 6day
speaking only practically and not to the issues at all, boycotts only work when they're organized and you'd have to look real hard to find one that worked as boycott-only and not backed up with a strike, community organizing (Montgomery), or some escalatory threat.
shoutout to any vegans in charge of booking the catering for their office, that's a better analogy for someone doing BDS by scuttling a contract that would've gone to HewittPackard or Coke.
3
Kefla [she/her, they/them] - 6day
boycotts only work when they're organized
This is organized. People who are involved with this boycott call ourselves vegans and there are a hell of a lot of us, and now tons of shelf space in stores, restaurant demand, etc which would otherwise be dedicated to brutalizing innocents is instead dedicated to not doing that. That's really understating the matter, the vegan movement has gotten so much more shit done than even most vegans are aware of. On what grounds do you call it disorganized or ineffective? What have you done for animal rights, aside from advocate against them?
7
communism @lemmy.ml - 6day
There literally are organised boycotts of the animal ag industry. There are local campaigns to switch to vegan catering at offices, universities, etc that gain traction and sometimes succeed in making policy. The average westerner consumes huge amounts of animal products, over the course of e.g. a year it does add up to a significant amount of money not given to the animal ag industry especially with the volume of people that are vegan.
I think the main reason though is to prefigure a communistic mode of food production and consumption though where we are not at odds with nature. You could argue that we shouldn't feed the homeless because they'll go hungry anyway even if we give them one meal, but should we not prefigure a mode of existence where we care whether our neighbours live or die? Should we not try? The animal ag industry is completely unsustainable—we are not talking about hunter-gatherer peoples hunting, or foraging eggs, or whatever. We are talking about capitalism cramming as many chickens as possible into a cage with a floor area the size of a iPad, stuffing animals full of growth hormones, destroying entire ecosystems just to meet western beef demand. Because the average global southerner doesn't eat that much meat anyway—it's an inherently expensive form of food as meat has to eat plants, so instead of growing plants directly for human consumption we have to grow plants to feed animals who burn most of the plant energy instead of giving it to us when we eat them. If we are to envision a communistic mode of food production, where food is produced to best meet human needs, and we don't ceaselessly produce for the sake of profit, it is at the very least going to be far more vegan than we currently are. Why not try practising it?
There are plenty of problems with liberalism in the vegan movement, but as communists it is our job to politicise, to radicalise, and to make militants out of activists and workers. Veganism isn't completely wrong. Its foundation is by and large correct, and it can easily be steered into a communist political direction.
4
MiraculousMM [he/him, undecided] - 6day
I saw a news story that said the "Skyblivion team" was invited to Bethesda HQ for a day, were you part of that group?
15
Skyblivdev - 6day
Unfortunately not :(. Not because I wasn’t invited or anything but it just didn’t fit my schedule unfortunately. I think that visit though was really great for the team of devs that did go and they learned a lot and being around some of the team that worked on the originals like Daggerfall and Morrowind I’d imagine would be such a great feeling.
They did say that after meeting the Bethesda devs it invigorated their motivations to put more time into the project, time they had already set aside for the project itself. I can only imagine how inspirational that visit was not just for our team but the Bethesda team as well. I guess we all do this for the love of the game and that’s all that matters. It’s very rare for a major studio to actually consider their modding team and I really do appreciate the company for sticking to their guns on this.
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segfault11 [she/her, any] - 6day
ok i watched that update video and as someone who liked and disliked both oblivion and skyrim for different reasons i'm impressed. what i want to know is what would you say are the minimum system requirements for this? would performance be comparable to the 2011 windows release of skyrim? i have a shitty computer that can run that version of skyrim decently at medium settings (the GPU is intel UHD 630), and i'm sure it would run the 2006 release of oblivion well, but i don't think it could run any of the skyrim remasters.
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Euergetes [none/use name] - 6day
don't be afraid of the special edition (pirate it if you don't want to buy it), it's better optimized and stable so should run better despite the graphics stuff
9
TerminalEncounter [she/her] - 6day
How did yall handle the goblin civil war stuff. Where they fight over each other's staves or whatever
13
lib1 [comrade/them] - 7day
It’s looking so good already and I’m very excited to play. No questions. Just congrats on the progress
10
graymess [he/him] - 6day
I've been following Skyblivion for at least as long as you've been involved with the project, so first: Thank you so much for all your work. Second: Congratulations on the absurd amount of progress. That is so fucking impressive that you're this close to release.
I've been curious for a while now, but how prepared is the team for the final steps of QC before the big launch? I imagine the passion involved in creating this project from the ground up and seeing it to completion is excellent motivation, but even the most dedicated creators must hit a wall when it comes to the daunting task of bug fixing a Bethesda-sized game. Do you feel like you know what to expect when you get there or is it still kind of an unknown at this point?
10
Skyblivdev - 6day
I would say the closest we’ve ever gotten in the overall development of the project. A few loose ends until we can start playtesting and I want to stay optimistic and say that we will start the play testing phase sometime in the coming months. Playtesting helps us discover bugs including infamous game breaking bugs but we’re so determined to get this out there for the fans that I feel, personally, the most difficult challenges we have already faced.
I do agree that QC can be tedious but we’re so in love with the project that we really want to polish the hell out of it. I’d argue it would be less buggy than a Bethesda game at launch.
11
loathsome dongeater - 7day
I don't believe you
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Snort_Owl [they/them] - 7day
My dad works at hexbear and is going to ban you
12
Skyblivdev - 7day
Nice name, lol.
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Blakey [he/him] - 6day
eating dongs isn't loathsome, it's cool and fun:(
(I love er and get a solid kick outta your handle;))
5
loathsome dongeater - 6day
it isn't
but i am
2
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
nice
2
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
Not to be too much of a dork but "what we have left to do" feels a lot like "what is to be done", do you have a lot of filthy pinko commies on board?;)
9
Skyblivdev - 6day
We don’t really focus on politics much because we are just developing a mod so I don’t see any place where there’s time to discuss it. Todd is a billionaire but a good stand up guy so I guess the fact I like a billionaire means I can’t be part of your club lol.
9
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
Haha, fair. It wasn't a serious question.
8
Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided] - 6day
making software for free is pinko-adjacent at least and always has been. if you get the chance to point off a ledge and tell hodd toward he can go there and then push him that would be really cool.
5
Skyblivdev - 6day
In game maybe.
5
Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided] - 6day
probably fits better as a fallout easter egg, i don't get the read that TES heads have quite the same disdain.
5
AntiOutsideAktion [he/him] - 6day
How do you go from a fancy paper holding code learner that's never worked on anything that couldn't be printed on two pages of paper to someone who understands what's going on with a giant project like a video game?
I downloaded this thing and went all googly eyes and never crawled out of a single rabbit hole I tried looking into
5
BeanisBrain [he/him, they/them] - 6day
Serious respect for sticking with this project for so long. I know how much dedication and discipline it takes to stay on something like this.
4
Kuori [she/her] - 6day
seriously? did no one here learn from the last obviously fake ama
4
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
1 - sorry, which one?
2 - who cares if we're just unknowingly participating in a silly larp?
6
TheSovietOnion [none/use name] - 6day
Steven Spielberg
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Blakey [he/him] - 6day
omg Mr Spielberg I'm a huge fan, what does Harrison Ford smell like?
12
Horse {they/them} - 6day
aviation fuel and sadness
7
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
I believe it
7
Skyblivdev - 6day
Sorry that you think I’m fake?
4
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
Fwiw I don't care that you're fake;)
All joking aside it's a weird thing to bring up. Of course there's a chance you're "fake" and doing a bit but... What are the stakes here?
6
Skyblivdev - 6day
I mean wouldn’t the stakes be higher if they pretended to be a dev from a bigger company, not imitating a dev from a small mod project? But that’s just me, I think it would be a bit sad for someone to pretend to be someone else and do Q&A like this. What would that person be achieving, really?
Also let me get this straight, someone else did an AMA pretending to be a Skyblivion dev before I did? Or do people on here just pretend to someone else and stage a fake Q&A?
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Blakey [he/him] - 6day
I have no idea. I don't remember any other game/dev Q&As, so I assume they just mean another Q&A generally. Weird thing to accuse you of because yeah, why wouldn't you claim to work at Bethesda, for example?
4
oscardejarjayes [comrade/them] - 6day
Can you hide a Hexbear reference in Skyblivion?
3
Skyblivdev - 6day
Got any suggestions?
3
blunder [he/him] - 6day
Pig poop balls lmao
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blunder [he/him] - 6day
Actually at this point I think beanis is the bigger Hexbearism
8
Blakey [he/him] - 6day
Beanis is the kind of thing that wouldn't raise eyebrows for the general public but we would notice and appreciate, if you're serious:)
6
gwysibo [they/them] - 5day
if just one of the bears could have a, say, more geometric shape...
1
HexReplyBot [none/use name] - 7day
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Skyblivdev in games
Skyblivion dev here! Here to answer any questions you have about the project AMA
Update: https://youtu.be/yC6W0htYBOc
Hello đź‘‹,
One of my friends who posts here told me it would be sweet if I tried out an AMA here so here goes.
I have been a programmer for the mod since 2019 and have been working on the project I would say almost every other day, except for holidays of course. Working on the game has been really exciting and I’m really proud to be a part of it and I really really can’t wait for people to start playing it! It’s honestly such a cool mod and we have an incredibly talented team of people who have been working on this thing nonstop.
Anyway, cheers for having me and thanks for the questions!
What brings you here of all places?
I’m really looking forward to skyblivion. I thought the remaster would quell my desire but it was such a disappointment it only hardened my resolve to play.
I got into a drinking game with one of your posters who is also my friend. After losing they told me it would be cool to chill out here and do an AMA. I haven’t revealed them yet because they’re most likely sleeping, might be a cool surprise for them once they wake up to see this. Lol.
This would have required a poster here to logoff which is
Speaking of drinking, someone on the tine brews their own mead so when the time comes and we release the project we’re all going to be drinking home brewed mead and having a party. Looking forward to that.
what a disgusting pervert, hopefully they get banned
How have you maintained the zeal and discipline to work on it so consistently for 6 years? That's a long time!
We just really love the Elder Scrolls.
:waow-based:
what's your favorite bean based dish
Hmmmmm I really like a bean salsa that I had at TGI Fridays once. I don’t really eat beans often.
omg careful don't wanna be saying that shit in these parts! All joking aside thanks for what you do. Spending time on a communal project just because you like it kinda just... Confirms some of the most important ideas in communism, so I'm all for it. A commie world would still have games and art and you're living it:)
I wish I was an elder scrolls fan so I could respond in a more meaningful way but this's what I got.
I don’t think Elder Scrolls would exist under a communist regime and I’m more of an anarchist myself, but thanks for the positive feedback!
there's at least one Soviet Lord of the Rings tv movie, there's no reason we can't have high fantasy and communism. Socialist-realism TES might fuck.
Well, I don't mean Marxist communism specifically! It confirms the bits Marxists and anarchists have in common, so thanks regardless:)
Ban
When are you doing Fallout New Vegas?
Hahahaha. I’ll pass this on to the leads.
what's your favorite dinosaur
Allosaurus
Same. It's a sportier handier t-rex lol
Have you read "Marx at the arcade" by Jamie Woodcock? Great book on the gaming industry, its workers and its consumers
Never heard of it.
I’d encourage you to read it, it provides nice insights especially as someone working in the industry.
Actually I do have a question. Which part has been the hardest or longest or most problematic component for the project?
Initially trying to bridge the gap between being able to access Skyrim and vise versa Oblivion but this was too much of a challenge that needs more time to accomplish. I think we will eventually get it to work but for the time being we have shifted our focus elsewhere.
When the full thing is out, what character will you make? What's your playstyle?
Also, how do you handle the expectations for this project? People have been thoroughly excited about it for years, must be hard being so close from release. Do you feel pressure?
So obviously we are all very used to delay delay delay… things feel different this year however, the project has been coming along for over a decade but we have so few loose ends now that I really do see it being released in 2026.
Of course things happen, this is a passion project that we aren’t getting paid for so besides this we also are busy with the jobs we go to in order to survive and pay rent. Because of this there’s gaps in development time, especially the holidays, but that isn’t to say that it slows down in any sort of capacity. For most of us this has been the project we work on any moment we have free time. And we love it.
Oh forgot to answer the first part of the question. I do love me an orc and 2 handed strength playstyle with a warhammer
No questions, but I wanted to say thanks for your hard work and it's very cool to know someone who works on Skyblivion is a lefty. Hell yeah.
I don't have any questions related to the project, but I hope you're having a good day
Thank you! You too!
No questions, but as someone who has made a hobby out of customizing games (using mods) and appreciates the hard work done by modders to allow me to do so
eventually i got so good that I started beta testing, making patches, content, etc. but i haven't published an actual mod in almost 15 years I am purely a consumer
Mods keep me playing games despite some efforts by corpos and bad actors to crush it. sometimes it feels like the only two (mostly digital) things on the internet that are true hobby spaces where people can be creative without mandatory monetary gain: mods and fanfic. Both spun from something people love and want to expand upon. i will fight for both to the bitter end (even though I don't read fanfic)
so thank you for working so hard on this project with your team and I hope to check it out one day.
Thank you so much! Without the fans projects like this would never happen.
How has the Oblivion remaster affected your project?
Also, as a fellow game dev who has been working on a project for a similar length of time, how do you maintain enthusiasm and prevent burnout?
I’m not going to lie, when we heard rumors that it was a thing we felt a little unease but when the full project came out I think that took a day of wind out of our sails, also because we were playing our free copies, thanks Bethesda!
In all truth we didn’t expect the game to be what it is. We all expect a “remaster” or “remake” to be like a cash grab akin to Dark Souls 1 remaster where they ruined the lighting and put the gama all the way up, that’s what I and many were expecting. Not a full blown remake of the game that improves it vastly and makes the experience so much greater.
It was scary at first but then we also realized that that game was born out of love and admiration for the original so it gave us a morale boost. Also the team at Bethesda called us behind the scenes and we even got to talk to Todd Howard (I don’t know how well he’s received in your community) but I thought that was nice.
But yeah, it’s a different game and different to what we have been working on for decades, but the fact that the remake far surpassed everyone’s expectations made it that much better for us to focus on doing the same with ours.
Todd Howard has proven himself an exceptional salesman and will be allowed to assume the role of a humble bureaucrat in a provincial or county media firm after an appropriate rehabilitation period.
tbh tho I'm shocked they reached out and were so cool with you it feels so rare these days from giant studios
Hwat in the goddamn
i just watched that update video! fully support the decisions to push those features beyond initial release many such cases where something looks good/kinda works for a preview but is unpractical for full implementation. shame the spell making modder peaced out before their shit needed adjustments
Question: what is the level of collaboration between your team and beyond skyrim cyrodiil on the Imperial City? are yall gonna use the same tileset once its done?
First of all, thank you and your team for the amazing voluntary work you're doing! <3
I've got 2 questions for you :)
Hope I don't come over rude with this one, but with the Oblivion Remastered release, what is still the benefit/point of Skyblivion? :o
From the Skyblivion website's FAQ, I've understood that Skyrim won't be accessible in Skyblivion, could you explain why this is the case? I'm interested in understanding the technicalities behind it :) Since with Skywind also being a thing, it would be awesome imo to have a single game with Skyrim + Skyblivion + Skywind in one, perhaps slowly adding more until all of Tamriel is combined in a single massive game. But if that would not be possible, I'd be interested in knowing why :)
So I wish you’d rephrase the first question better, I know you mean no offense but to say “what is the point” of a project a decade in the making just because of the remake is a bit crude. I somewhat answered this under another comment but to expand a bit further, this is a passion project that has its own unique approach to the project. It isn’t just improving shaders and lighting it’s much much MUCH more than that like creating our own concept art, new 3D models, using the already established lore from the entire franchise to add more depth to this mod.
We love the remake because it’s great but our project was never intended to compete at all with it and I think this sentiment that “well Bethesda did it better, give up now?” has been played out to its fullest.
Let me ask you this: if you were working on a decades long project with hundreds of other members, would you hang it up?
Also with Skyrim not being accessible it’s really down to a variety of issues that we could develop if we had the time but as it stands. We had a lengthy discussion about this because this was one of the main objectives and the one we advertised the project on, that being the idea you can travel to and from oblivion to Skyrim vice versa. There’s difficulties and a lot of crashes that are involved that let’s say, we had maybe a year or two left of development time then we could accomplish it. I do think the devs on the backend will be able to work something out though because there are people who still want this to work out, as do I, but for the time being with our timeframe it just isn’t possible and our focus is working on the game itself.
Thank you for your extensive reply :)
And sorry if question 1 came over a bit rude.
I guess I'd be frustrated with Bethesda if they did that after so many years of pouring in my own time/effort, but I think it's commendable that you guys took the communities feedback from it, and kept on working on your own thing.
Also nice to hear that there is hope for a Skyriel (full Tamriel in Skyrim's engine) in the future! :D
microsoft gaming is BDS, a fan mod isn't.
Was there any hype in dev chats or downloading spree when young scrolls posted their ZOOM album with Xedilian track having an explicit "My bitch is 4k like SkyOblivion" positive reference to your project?
Oh that, haha. Yes. There was. The group chat was filled with gifs and memes and I felt the odd one out for not knowing ANYTHING beforehand but I thought it was cool nonetheless. Big fan now of course.
I don't have an interesting question really I just want to say that I've been waiting to play it and thanks for all your work.
Thank you!
I don't have any questions for you but if you have any questions for me AMA, i'm a vegan chef (but i'm not vegan)
what's your favorite bean based dish
Oh I can't answer that r/n since making papadams (lentil crackers) has blown my mind open to the bean cracker and nugget possibilities, there's too many good choices and too much I haven't tried
I think some top bean focused favorites though would be like a beany chili, a good bean filling for burritos, chickpea curries are always good if you consider it a bean. GREEN BEANS are a huge favorite tosses in garlic, salt, pepper, and onion powder and roasted hot hot until starting to brown, but they're like, more a vegetable than a bean. Idk
I really need to experiment though because there's all kinds of fucking indian street foods and stuff using beans, plus I'm only just now getting into crackerizing and nuggetizing them. I made some creole seasoned black eyed peas the other day and pureed them and mixed with with flour, cornstarch and baking soda, pressed those into crackers and deep fried them, and mmmm they were soo good (hard to get consistently crisp though, you gotta get them REALLY flat, and they went stale quickly).
The next thing I wanna do is basically that, I posted some youtube video recently of bayou bean balls and they look dope, like a bean hushpuppy 🤤
My wife is vegan!!!
The obvious question is why are you a vegan chef but not vegan yourself?
My job is vegan chef so i cook the vegan food but i'm not a vegan because idk the animal slaughter is already happening and my personal choice of what to eat isn't going to do shit and any arguments otherwise conflict with the general agreement that you can't just vote with your wallet to affect anything under capitalism so that's pretty much it. I eat food that I think is good, if we do a communism and enforce veganism I guess i'll stop and have fewer problems than most but i'll really miss eggs because they're kind of an autism sensory "i can always eat this food and stomach it" thing if I'm having appetite issues which is sometimes frequent
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is such an insidious thought-terminating cliche which could be used to justify all sorts of shit you would no doubt condemn, like buying from Israeli companies for example.
okay so we CAN vote with our wallets? Im not going to change how i feel but i am going to go to bed gnight
Have you ever heard of a boycott? Do you smugly dismiss BDS as "voting with your wallet"
Pure liberalism, shut the fuck up then. A view which cannot be changed by reason is a view worth nothing.
speaking only practically and not to the issues at all, boycotts only work when they're organized and you'd have to look real hard to find one that worked as boycott-only and not backed up with a strike, community organizing (Montgomery), or some escalatory threat.
shoutout to any vegans in charge of booking the catering for their office, that's a better analogy for someone doing BDS by scuttling a contract that would've gone to HewittPackard or Coke.
This is organized. People who are involved with this boycott call ourselves vegans and there are a hell of a lot of us, and now tons of shelf space in stores, restaurant demand, etc which would otherwise be dedicated to brutalizing innocents is instead dedicated to not doing that. That's really understating the matter, the vegan movement has gotten so much more shit done than even most vegans are aware of. On what grounds do you call it disorganized or ineffective? What have you done for animal rights, aside from advocate against them?
There literally are organised boycotts of the animal ag industry. There are local campaigns to switch to vegan catering at offices, universities, etc that gain traction and sometimes succeed in making policy. The average westerner consumes huge amounts of animal products, over the course of e.g. a year it does add up to a significant amount of money not given to the animal ag industry especially with the volume of people that are vegan.
I think the main reason though is to prefigure a communistic mode of food production and consumption though where we are not at odds with nature. You could argue that we shouldn't feed the homeless because they'll go hungry anyway even if we give them one meal, but should we not prefigure a mode of existence where we care whether our neighbours live or die? Should we not try? The animal ag industry is completely unsustainable—we are not talking about hunter-gatherer peoples hunting, or foraging eggs, or whatever. We are talking about capitalism cramming as many chickens as possible into a cage with a floor area the size of a iPad, stuffing animals full of growth hormones, destroying entire ecosystems just to meet western beef demand. Because the average global southerner doesn't eat that much meat anyway—it's an inherently expensive form of food as meat has to eat plants, so instead of growing plants directly for human consumption we have to grow plants to feed animals who burn most of the plant energy instead of giving it to us when we eat them. If we are to envision a communistic mode of food production, where food is produced to best meet human needs, and we don't ceaselessly produce for the sake of profit, it is at the very least going to be far more vegan than we currently are. Why not try practising it?
There are plenty of problems with liberalism in the vegan movement, but as communists it is our job to politicise, to radicalise, and to make militants out of activists and workers. Veganism isn't completely wrong. Its foundation is by and large correct, and it can easily be steered into a communist political direction.
I saw a news story that said the "Skyblivion team" was invited to Bethesda HQ for a day, were you part of that group?
Unfortunately not :(. Not because I wasn’t invited or anything but it just didn’t fit my schedule unfortunately. I think that visit though was really great for the team of devs that did go and they learned a lot and being around some of the team that worked on the originals like Daggerfall and Morrowind I’d imagine would be such a great feeling.
They did say that after meeting the Bethesda devs it invigorated their motivations to put more time into the project, time they had already set aside for the project itself. I can only imagine how inspirational that visit was not just for our team but the Bethesda team as well. I guess we all do this for the love of the game and that’s all that matters. It’s very rare for a major studio to actually consider their modding team and I really do appreciate the company for sticking to their guns on this.
ok i watched that update video and as someone who liked and disliked both oblivion and skyrim for different reasons i'm impressed. what i want to know is what would you say are the minimum system requirements for this? would performance be comparable to the 2011 windows release of skyrim? i have a shitty computer that can run that version of skyrim decently at medium settings (the GPU is intel UHD 630), and i'm sure it would run the 2006 release of oblivion well, but i don't think it could run any of the skyrim remasters.
don't be afraid of the special edition (pirate it if you don't want to buy it), it's better optimized and stable so should run better despite the graphics stuff
How did yall handle the goblin civil war stuff. Where they fight over each other's staves or whatever
It’s looking so good already and I’m very excited to play. No questions. Just congrats on the progress
I've been following Skyblivion for at least as long as you've been involved with the project, so first: Thank you so much for all your work. Second: Congratulations on the absurd amount of progress. That is so fucking impressive that you're this close to release.
I've been curious for a while now, but how prepared is the team for the final steps of QC before the big launch? I imagine the passion involved in creating this project from the ground up and seeing it to completion is excellent motivation, but even the most dedicated creators must hit a wall when it comes to the daunting task of bug fixing a Bethesda-sized game. Do you feel like you know what to expect when you get there or is it still kind of an unknown at this point?
I would say the closest we’ve ever gotten in the overall development of the project. A few loose ends until we can start playtesting and I want to stay optimistic and say that we will start the play testing phase sometime in the coming months. Playtesting helps us discover bugs including infamous game breaking bugs but we’re so determined to get this out there for the fans that I feel, personally, the most difficult challenges we have already faced.
I do agree that QC can be tedious but we’re so in love with the project that we really want to polish the hell out of it. I’d argue it would be less buggy than a Bethesda game at launch.
I don't believe you
My dad works at hexbear and is going to ban you
Nice name, lol.
eating dongs isn't loathsome, it's cool and fun:(
(I love er and get a solid kick outta your handle;))
it isn't
but i am
nice
Not to be too much of a dork but "what we have left to do" feels a lot like "what is to be done", do you have a lot of filthy pinko commies on board?;)
We don’t really focus on politics much because we are just developing a mod so I don’t see any place where there’s time to discuss it. Todd is a billionaire but a good stand up guy so I guess the fact I like a billionaire means I can’t be part of your club lol.
Haha, fair. It wasn't a serious question.
making software for free is pinko-adjacent at least and always has been. if you get the chance to point off a ledge and tell hodd toward he can go there and then push him that would be really cool.
In game maybe.
probably fits better as a fallout easter egg, i don't get the read that TES heads have quite the same disdain.
How do you go from a fancy paper holding code learner that's never worked on anything that couldn't be printed on two pages of paper to someone who understands what's going on with a giant project like a video game?
I downloaded this thing and went all googly eyes and never crawled out of a single rabbit hole I tried looking into
Serious respect for sticking with this project for so long. I know how much dedication and discipline it takes to stay on something like this.
seriously? did no one here learn from the last obviously fake ama
1 - sorry, which one?
2 - who cares if we're just unknowingly participating in a silly larp?
Steven Spielberg
omg Mr Spielberg I'm a huge fan, what does Harrison Ford smell like?
aviation fuel and sadness
I believe it
Sorry that you think I’m fake?
Fwiw I don't care that you're fake;)
All joking aside it's a weird thing to bring up. Of course there's a chance you're "fake" and doing a bit but... What are the stakes here?
I mean wouldn’t the stakes be higher if they pretended to be a dev from a bigger company, not imitating a dev from a small mod project? But that’s just me, I think it would be a bit sad for someone to pretend to be someone else and do Q&A like this. What would that person be achieving, really?
Also let me get this straight, someone else did an AMA pretending to be a Skyblivion dev before I did? Or do people on here just pretend to someone else and stage a fake Q&A?
I have no idea. I don't remember any other game/dev Q&As, so I assume they just mean another Q&A generally. Weird thing to accuse you of because yeah, why wouldn't you claim to work at Bethesda, for example?
Can you hide a Hexbear reference in Skyblivion?
Got any suggestions?
Pig poop balls lmao
Actually at this point I think beanis
is the bigger Hexbearism
Beanis
is the kind of thing that wouldn't raise eyebrows for the general public but we would notice and appreciate, if you're serious:)
if just one of the bears could have a, say, more geometric shape...
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: