Even Better: Bethesda Gives Full Throat Endorsement Of ‘Skyblivion’
One of things we’ve talked about repeatedly is how much better it would be for content producers, instead of immediately defaulting to behaving like IP protectionists, to treat their fans in a human and awesome way. There are times when the need for protecting IP makes sense, but there are far more times when creative avenues could be explored to allow fans to express themselves, or to simply leave the whole thing alone if it doesn’t represent any actual danger or negative outcomes. Far too often those considerations are sidelined and mercenary lawyers get involved instead.
It’s one of the reasons we were so pleasantly surprised recently that a fan-led team developing a remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the Skyrim engine appeared to have Bethesda’s and Microsoft’s silent approval to continue moving forward, even after Bethesda released its own remaster of Oblivion. At that time, we had to take the word of the team behind Skyblivion, who stated that they were assured their project wouldn’t be shut down.
But it actually gets way, way better than that. What was once silent approval just became very, very vocal approval, as Bethesda’s latest developer spotlight fully celebrated Skyblivion’s existence.
On May 1, Bethesda published a new developer spotlight video focused on art and development lead Dan Lee. He’s been at Bethesda for a long time now, having worked on Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim, and the original Oblivion as well as the newly released remaster. And in his dev spotlight video he called out Skyblivion, a mod that’s been in development since 2012 and aims to recreate the OG game in the Skyrim engine. Bethesda even included gameplay footage of the ambitious fan mod in the spotlight video.
“Even though I worked on Oblivion Remastered, I’m still excited for Skyblivion,” said Lee at the end of the spotlight. “I think what they’re doing is very special and I’m excited to see their interpretation of what we’ve done in the past. And I think it’s a great year for Oblivion fans.”
Straight from an official channel for Bethesda, here we have not just the approval for the fan-made remake, but a full-throated endorsement of it. And you will notice how the developer focused on how good this is for fans of the original game. He’s right! Because Bethesda and Microsoft are being so awesome about this, fans will eventually have two different iterations of an updated Oblivion to play.
The company rightly understood there was no negative impact from Skyblivion existing. It didn’t stop over four million players of the official remastered version from getting the game. The fan game isn’t going to carry a price tag and requires players to have official versions of both games to play it. It didn’t reuse any Bethesda assets. This is just fans doing things fans love to do and the publisher being awesome about it.
And the Skyblivion team is managing to be human and awesome right back at them.
Dan, we’re just as excited to get Skyblivion into your hands this year as you are to play it,” posted the Skyblivion devs on social media. “Thanks for the shoutout and kind words. You said it best: It is a great year for Oblivion fans.”
Imagine how nice a place this would be if this approach was the norm rather than the exception.