It might not be immediately apparent, what with its pompous music and brutal murder of Patrick Stewart, but The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is a very funny game. For some players, like PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens, it’s a big part of the attraction, and the recent official remaster kept a lot of Oblivion’s jank intact.
However, much of that comedic potential may be lost in Skyblivion, the upcoming fan-made remake of Oblivion in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, not because the developers are intentionally doing away with it, but simply due to the relentless march of progress.
“The problem there is that this remake of Oblivion takes place in a completely different engine,” Skyblivion lead developer Rebelzize told Joshua in a recent interview. “Most of these bugs or funny features are very engine-specific. So for instance, lot of those funny clips from Oblivion stem from the game freezing when you’re in a dialog with someone.
“With the assassination of Uriel Septim in the tutorial dungeon, Uriel will sometimes talk to you while the assassin has already appeared behind him, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I hope nothing bad will happen to me!’ Like the guy is just staring [at him], breathing down his neck. It is hilarious.”
A lot of those amusing moments are entirely unintentional, the result of bugs or jankiness in the Gamebryo engine that are unfortunately no longer present in Skyrim’s Creation engine. That means the Skyblivion team would have to intentionally recreate those moments, and Rebelzize said doing so just isn’t feasible.
“Just the way Skyrim’s engine is a lot more streamlined, those bugs often don’t survive the transition,” Rebelzize said. “If it’s purely interesting dialog or delivery of lives, that stuff will still be goofy. I think in a lot of cases, the quests themselves are just really well written, or written in a way that it’s maybe not supposed to be funny, but the way it plays out is funny. Stuff like that, to an extent, will still happen, but I think it’s a much more mature experience.”
Skyblivion’s humorous high-step may also be flattened by other efforts to make the game “more mature.” Rebelzize cited the example of a castle in Kvatch which appears essentially untouched when players enter it in the original Oblivion; in Skyblivion, however, it will look more like a battleground, reflecting the death and damage wrought by the invading Daedra.
“I’m looking right now at a corpse that I’ve placed very specifically in an area where the player can miss it of a burned person and their child, they’re cradled together,” Rebelzize said, describing a bit of the game they were working on. “There’s a lot more fleshed out and more mature designs in the game that I hope really sell [the idea] that the world that these people live in is literally aflame, and it’s death everywhere you look. There’s a lot more urgency because this is what’s going to happen all over the place.”
Yeah, that’s not very funny. This is, though.
For a closer look at exactly why Oblivion’s NPC interactions are so amusingly weird, check out our recent interview with Bacon_, the creator of the videos above. (Yes, there are more videos in the interview, too.)
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