Are we ever going to see a remake of any Bethesda game? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by Buttflapper@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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Fallout 3, New Vegas, Elder scrolls Oblivion are my three favorite games of all time If I had to put my finger on them. But it's not enjoyable anymore to simply download them and try to play through them again. There's just something about trying to replay them and it just doesn't work. Maybe I spent too much time playing games with high graphical fidelity lately, or I spent too much time in them back in the day. But if there was a remake, 2028, they released a brand new version of any of these games, it would be immediate purchase for me. I would spend another thousand hours in them with modern graphics and updates. Like a modern game engine... The thing I wonder though is why? Why don't they remake any of their games? Not even Skyrim! They just keep re-releasing it.

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[-] lemmy_user_838586@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh boy, I get to excite you with the news of SkyBlivion, a community project to recreate the Oblivion game in the skyrim engine. Its been in development since 2013, and they say they have a 2025 release date scheduled but as I've been following this project and SkyWind (Morrowind remade in Skyrim's engine) for years, I wouldn't hold your breath on a 2025 release.

[-] Marafon@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 week ago

Go play Fallout London. It's a bitch to install and has more bugs than an ant colony but it's the best Fallout since New Vegas imo. Even in it's rough around the edges state you can tell it is a love letter to Fallout and is so good its canon for me regardless of what the will of Todd may ultimately decide.

If you have any issues installing the game and getting it stable please reach out to me. There was also a nearly gamebreaking issue with semi auto rifle damage being grossly under calculated that I can help with as well. If Fallout 3 and NV are your favorite games you really should play it and that goes for anyone else who stumbles on this comment. It's just so good.

[-] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

OpenMW counts as a remake of Morrowind, kinda. It only changes the game engine though.

But like, officially? Pretty unlikely. Which is fine, the old games are still good, easily available, and very playable. I'd rather that than Bethesda's new games get delayed in favor of remaking old ones, and then the remakes completely change what the old games were into something they were not.

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev -1 points 1 week ago

The real irony is that OpenMW is a better engine than anything bethesda managed to come up with in the past 20 years.

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Not really, because it is in it's core the same engine with the same limitations. It has the same worldspace and cell system as the original engine from Morrowind. Yes it has shader (a modern feature that is in the creation engine at least since Fallout 76, most likely even Fallout 4) and a LUA script engine besides the official creation script engine. This could be added to the engine very easily and that the Creation Engine doesn't has this is a design decision not a engine limitation.

[-] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

Yup.

OpenMW is awesome, no arguments there. But it is really "just" an incredibly patched and modernized version of the Morrowind era gamebryo. One could argue it is comparable to if Bethesda ported Morrowind to Skyrim (they would be very much exaggerating but...).

But issues regarding level geometry, animations, world/cell space? All of that is still there.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 13 points 1 week ago

https://tesrskywind.com/

https://skyblivion.com/

Project Arroyo seems dead, though, so no Fallout that I know of.

But why no official ones? They don't think it would be profitable. Microsoft and Bethesda are businesses first.

[-] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Don't forget https://capitalwasteland.com/

[+] Buttflapper@lemmy.world -6 points 1 week ago

[deleted]

[-] simple@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago

Countless games have had successful remakes, and crazy profits.

The vast majority of remakes, even the bigger budget ones tend to be of smaller games. Games that are easier to recreate or port. Bethesda games are huge, and it'd need to be ported to another engine and redo everything from voice acting to the open world visuals. Even if they'll bother with all that, I don't think there's a demand to remake Bethesda's older, clunkier games.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

Voice acting has been good enough in the past few decades that it's usually usable without re-recording. Maybe remastering at most.

There's also plenty of tooling to upscale textures too, even without AI. The biggest hurdle (for assets, at least) is 3D models. You can slap a subdivision modifier on them to make them higher-poly, but you'd still have to make sure the UVs didn't get messed up (or whatever it is that they're using these days). And also verify that nothing weird happened like new geometry hiding or showing something in-game. (Collision probably doesn't need to change if you're just increasing polycount.)

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago

I'd like to see that data. I'd be surprised if it exists, companies rarely release that level of detail on their finances.

And "evil" is a very strong word. We're talking about video games, a luxury recreational product.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Remaking them in the same tired-ass engine would only make them worse and it's not likely they will ever give up their Frankenstein's monster of GameBryo in favor of something that isn't a pile of dogshit.

The last few re-releases of Skyrim where they updated some visual features and added new content (most of which they didn't make) is as close to a remaster or remake they will actually do.

[-] swordgeek@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

Have you played Morrowind? Best Elder Scrolls game by far, in my opinion.

And so hard to play, so yeah.

Not gonna happen. It's a lot of work, and they'd rather spend it making new games (for legitimate reasons).

[-] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Best we got is a new Skyrim version. What do you mean you don't want to buy the game you already own again? We made 20 different versions, all just for you to buy!

[-] Banichan@dormi.zone 6 points 1 week ago

No.

Damn, that was easy.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago

For Oblivion, there is Skyblivion coming out next year.

Not sure what you hope would be added in a "remake" though. You're asking for something which would inherently do very little and be exactly the sort of cash grab that we normally condemn. You want these games with better graphics or mechanics? Play with mods.

[-] Buttflapper@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

I wouldn't hold your breath on it. That mod collection has been in development for many years now. They keep pushing the release date forward, and even when it is released, it's still built off of the really old Skyrim game engine. People who want a remake, not a remaster, want a game that has the same capabilities but with a newer game engine. It really does matter, because it affects what is possible to do in the game. You can't just use the old outdated game engine and upscale the graphics. It's simply will not be possible and will be sluggish, slow as hell. Look at Starfield. Utter failure because many people expected it to have a new game engine. The one it has now is just not up to par

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Whenever people criticise Bethesda games for their engine, I pretty much assume right away they know nothing about game development. Bethesda's engine is something they have a lot of control over and can constantly improve and iterate on. It's not as though Starfield and Morrowind are running on the exact same codebase.

Starfield is bad because of bad game design, not bad game development. Skyrim was buggy on release as well, and yet people loved it because the design of the game was good enough that people were willing to forgive the programming flaws. People overvalue the engine in discussions about Bethesda games and it's become this meme among people to seem like they sound like they know what they're talking about, but ultimately the flaws in Bethesda games that determine their success has very little to do with what engine they use.

Also, the Skyblivion team is constantly releasing dev diaries showing the progress, and the mod is nearly finished. It looks very well done, and the whole thing is out in the open. There's no reason to be cynical about whether it will ever release when you can literally go look at the progress with your own eyes.

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Skyrim has not the same engine as Oblivion and Starfield has not the same engine as Skyrim. There always were huge upgrades and changes to the engine, saying that Starfield has the same engine is like saying that Unreal 5 is the same old engine as Unreal 1. It is the same engine in the same way as I am the same as my father or grandfather. We share lots of features and DNA and have the same last name, but we are very different in many ways.

[-] Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

The DNA example might be a bad comparison to make, though, when hereditary illnesses are also a comparison you could make to an engine that has the same flaws as it's predecessors.

Hopefully whatever they do next with their engine moves away from the cells and worldspaces model of their previous engines. After all of Starfield's criticisms, they need to move away from loadscreen triggers as much as possible.

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago

The cells and worldspaces are needed for a engine that allows huge amounts of persistent dynamic objects that can be removed from and added to the world freely., That is the reason why we don't see games with large worlds like this in other engines. Even more so when the game has to run on consoles too. Neither No Man's Sky, nor Outer Worlds or Cyberpunk have worlds or places full of persistent dynamic objects, nearly everything is static and hard baked into the world.

[-] Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

I mean hey they're all a mod of the compiler if you look deep enough

[-] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah and everything IRL is just a wild mix of gluons, mesons and other strange particles. I would say that going so deep down is a bit much 😄

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

I'm still curious to see, if the Microsoft leadership pushes them to do that, especially with the more recent titles being duds, but in general, I don't expect them to do it, because:

As others said, mods and community remakes like OpenMW, Skywind, Skyblivion etc. reduce the value that an official remake would have. They would need to deliver something much better, otherwise they'll get ridiculed.
They don't have an amazing story or anything like that, where there's a strong argument for playing an old title rather than a new title.
Their engine hasn't made that many amazing advances since Oblivion. To make things look better, they'd pretty much need to update all the textures, which is a lot of work.