Skyblivion announces 2025 release date

The team of modders behind Skyblivion, the project aiming to recreate Oblivion in Skyrim's engine (as distinct from Morroblivion, porting Morrowind into Oblivion's engine, and Skywind, which is porting Morrowind into Skyrim's engine), must have got sick of people asking them when their decade-plus work would finally be finished. The latest trailer offers an "official release year announcement," declaring that Skyblivion will be done by 2025. Which is probably sooner than we'll see The Elder Scrolls 6, at least.

That's 2025 "at the latest" as is made plain by the YouTube video's description. "Making games takes time," it says, "this goes double for a volunteer project the size of a AAA game that took a team of fulltime DEVS years to make. Regardless we would like to share today that Skyblivion is in a state where we can promise a 2025 release at the latest."

Like every trailer for Skyblivion, the hope is that this one will bring more volunteers to the project. With enough of them, it might actually come out before 2025. "We hope with your support to finish the final steps in completing our dream," the description continues, "maybe even beating our own estimation."

Watching the trailer is a harsh reminder that Skyrim is over a decade old, and looks it. That said, there's a definite frisson to seeing familiar places and faces from Oblivion brought back in a slightly shinier form. The trailer shows off the white stone of the Imperial City and the view across the river from the tutorial dungeon beneath it, a meeting with the Dark Brotherhood, and various giants, goblins, undead, and dremora you might vaguely remember killing in Oblivion as you tried not to level up too fast and break its scaling system.

One of the modders named Rebelzize comments beneath the trailer to say, "Personally I think we can beat our estimates but as per usual it depends on how much free time we can spend on our hobby project and how many people sign up to help out after this video". If you'd like to sign up, Skyblivion has a volunteer page with all the info you'll need.

When Skyblivion comes out, you'll need to own both Skyrim Special Edition and Oblivion, with all its DLC, to run it. For something you can try today, here are the best Skyrim Special Edition mods.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.