Another Skyblivion dev diary shows off the new dungeons and expanded cities Oblivion Remastered never bothered with
August 2025 now has as many Skyblivion developer diaries as there are modern The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion reimaginings: two, which in both cases remains a weirdly high number. But while last week’s Finishing Skyblivion focused on one volunteer’s attempts at getting the ambitious Cyrodiil-in-Skyrim mod over the line, this other vid makes a very specific pitch to those whose interest may have been diverted by Bethesda’s official Oblivion Remastered, showcasing how Skyblivion looks to more aggressively expand and rework the original RPG.
Perhaps most emblematic of this approach is the (re?)addition of Sutch, a city near Cyrodiil’s western coast that Bethesda planned for OG Oblivion before cutting it – save for the tiny ruin of Fort Sutch, which you can visit in both the original and the remaster – late in development. Skyblivion recreates it as a far bigger, if still largely wrecked, castle town that’s been occupied by bandit bastards, and which you’ll be able to explore in full.
A short walk south, the more familiar city of Anvil looks to have grown considerably, its central harbour now sitting in a much wider basin with added docks and market areas. Daedric hellscape The Deadlands, meanwhile, is getting split into two biomes: one that matches the original’s lava lakes and another, stormier region inspired by the Deadlands of The Elder Scrolls Online.
Skyblivion obviously isn’t averse to making cosmetic upgrades as well. The diary also reveals new designs for several of Oblivion’s unique weapons, many of which will throw in some special animations for your trouble. I desperately hope these keep the charmingly stiff bone-janking of Skyrim, as the default animations appear to. But the video is generally eager to emphasise the more practical differences between the mod and the original, which by extension, are also differences between the mod and the remaster.
Personally, my interest in Skyblivion has remained intact, even with Oblivion Remastered having been announced and released in the time since this dev diary’s last entry. This is partly because performance headaches, and that one quest where you get talked into watching someone do farm chores for six hours, made my time with the remaster unexpectedly shortlived. That said, I do like the idea of exploding houses by pointing at them. I’d ask the Skyblivion team to implement something similar, but given the entire point of this diary, they probably wouldn’t be very happy about it.
