Will Bethesda’s Tradition Of Supporting Fan-Game Mods Continue Under Microsoft’s Ownership?
from the biting-nails-nervously dept
Bethesda, for any other faults you might find with the company, has built a reputation for itself as a gaming publisher that is not just tolerant of its modding community, but one which embraces that community. While not every attempt at this by Bethesda has been a hit, we’ve seen the company’s embrace of its fan-modders in the form of building an economy around mods, allowing mods for past games that do nothing other than obliterate the title screen crawl for the company’s Creation Club, and even went so far as to hire some of the modders who worked on the fan-made Fallout: London mod, a total conversion of Fallout 4 to take place in a UK setting.
But while some of those examples above came in the immediate wake of Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda, we’re now several years on from that deal closing. And we’re about to find out whether the publisher’s embrace of fan-made works will continue, as the team behind a fan-made remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, called Skyblivion, has announced the project will be finished some time in 2025.
In a gaming world where cease-and-desists are the most typical response to fan-made remakes or tribute games, it’s incredibly refreshing that Bethesda tolerates such projects. Following 2024’s free player-made Unity remake of Daggerfall, 2025 looks set to finally see the release of the long-developed total conversion mod of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in follow-up Skyrim’s engine.
In a new video called “The Path To Release (Skyblivion Roadmap 2024),” the team of modders known as TESRenewal explain that they’ve finished eight out of the game’s nine regions, having remade every detail of the 2006 game through bespoke creation. Each of Oblivion’s nine regions of Cyrodiil has unique flora and fauna for the team to recreate, and that’s on top of the enormous landscapes and cities.
A couple of things to note here. First, as Kotaku points out, Bethesda, and tangentially Microsoft, did allow for the remake of Daggerfall in the Unity engine earlier this year. Like Skyblivion, the team behind the remake made their work available for free, likely an important component of keeping Bethesda’s lawyers at bay. Unlike Daggerfall, however, Skyblivion is being made within Bethesda’s game engine rather than using a third-party engine. That makes this somewhat different, though perhaps in a way that actually makes the work more attractive for tolerance by Bethesda/Microsoft rather than less. More on that in a bit.
The other piece to note about this is that the team behind Skyblivion did not reuse any Bethesda assets, based on what I’m reading. Every stitch of this remake was created from scratch by this team of dedicated fans and volunteers. And, damn it, it’s impressive.
This project has been going on for a decade now, long before Microsoft acquired Bethesda. It certainly wouldn’t be novel to see a publisher swoop in just before fan-made content was due to be released and shut it all down with legal threats. We’ve seen that time and time again. The Skyblivion team sure seems to think it’s on solid ground, but I won’t consider any of the danger of a late shutdown to have passed until the game is released.
But there are very, very good reasons Bethesda and Microsoft should maintain a hands-off approach to all of this.
Kudos to Bethesda for letting extraordinary projects like these thrive, rather than sending takedown notifications and legal threats. To be able to play Skyblivion, you will be required to own legitimate versions of both Oblivion GOTY Deluxe and Skyrim: Special Edition, although given you can currently pick up the former for $5 and the latter for $10 on Steam, that’s not a big outlay.
Oblivion will be two decades old by the time this gets released. Skyrim itself is well over a decade old. What this mod does, if nothing else, is build continued interest and reasons to buy for these older games (albeit in more recent remastered versions). If a dedicated group of fans want to make Bethesda’s products more attractive through this labor of love, in what world would it make sense for the company to shut it down?
But we’ve made that argument in the past, where companies that value IP over their own bottom lines have done the shut down thing anyway. Hopefully Microsoft in this case will continue Bethesda’s tradition instead. After all, it can only mean more sales of a couple of older titles.
Filed Under: fallout, mods, skyblivion, video games
Companies: bethesda, microsoft
Comments on “Will Bethesda’s Tradition Of Supporting Fan-Game Mods Continue Under Microsoft’s Ownership?”
In the same vein of locking games to Xbox only upon acquiring the franchise; short answer : no.
When Microsoft bought Minecraft, it has be clear that no official mods will be supported, even if the game had already had thousand mods.
If I remember it well, security and piracy were the main reasons, because why not.
It seems like Microsoft doesn’t buy the companies that players like, but just to make more money without much effort…
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Well, that’s what they all do, but “no official mod support” isn’t the same as wanting to crack down on mods themselves. And in the case of Minecraft, the EULA for the Java edition specifically says that mods are allowed.
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This is one of the reasons I’m weirdly optimistic about MS here. Especially when it comes to something like Creation Engine, all outward appearances are that it’s a damn mess. Best case, MS throws a little world-tier talent at a few of the bigger issues with it. At a minimum, I believe they understand how fragile a thing Beth is, including relying on fans to fix things early in release cycles.
Thought I guess it’s possible they just end up gutting it down to IP and skinning over the FPS du jour.
No. 🙂
One can only hope that Microsoft’s lack of going after the modding community since they bought Bethesda means that they don’t plan to.
AFAIK, they didn’t go after mods when they bought Minecraft, either.
Modding support is the reason I’ve bought Elder Scrolls and Fallout games in the first place. If Microsoft decides to change that policy, I guess I won’t be buying their games anymore.
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I don’t even remember what Skyrim looks like unmodded.
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Hell, with all the bugs Bethesda kept introducing to patch out the bugs, playing Skyrim without some form of mod is impossible.
I would be very surprised if they continued the practice of shipping the dev tools with the game vis-a-vis Elder Scrolls Construction Kit.
Elated, and very very very surprised
I have super fond memories of deleting that rake I kept clipping into playing Morrowind.
Bethesda have a decade long history of trying to monetise its modding community. I fully anticipate that this would continue unabated with or without the Microsoft acquisition. It is what higher ups at Bethesda have wanted since the explosion of the Morrowind modding community way back.
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Maybe Liberty Prime was the real friend we made along the way.
While quoting Kotaku makes sense, I think it’s rather important to note a bit of context with the pricing it lists.
Kotaku published a little under 3 hours before the end of the Steam winter sale. This article was published the day after the sale ended, thus making that part of the quote no longer relevant.
Oh, cool. No dragons rising vertically into the sky without flying faster than you can defeat them.
Even more relevant than Microsoft’s approach to Minecraft is their approach to Starfield. Supposedly Bethesda still plans to release the Starfield creation kit this year.
The one potential monkey wrench in this whole business is the rumored Oblivion remake that Bethesda themselves are supposedly working on. It’s one thing to encourage mods of things you have no intention to market yourselves, but Skyblivion might not meet that standard.
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From the article:
So Bethesda face a hard and potentially expensive fight if they try to take Skyblivion down via a copyright lawsuit. Also, going by their history, they’re unlikely to bother with a trademark lawsuit as long as no money continues to be made from this working version of their games.