Does your friend work for Lumon or something?

Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done. If they C&D it later this year, there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on. Basically I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not Microsoft/Zenimax would want to kill the project to boost their own profits, but rather if they even could at this point, and I think the answer is no. A few years ago may have been a different story, but that ship has sailed.

It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.

It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.

The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.

But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).

My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.

My only thing is that Oblivion does not play well on newer hardware. It was a bit of an ordeal to try to get it running well on my PC where I have two monitors, since it only runs on whichever monitor is primary and only if in Fullscreen mode. And don’t even think about alt-tabbing to check Discord, or it just crashes.

If it got the OpenMW treatment, I’d be thrilled with even that.

Agreed, though one would think they’d have taken steps to C&D Skyblivion the very moment they decided to move forward with their own project if that was their intent. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise to let Skyblivion keep going this whole time if they saw it as a threat to their profits, since the mod is pretty close to completion at this point.

I’m guessing not likely, if only because we’ve already seen mod compatibility take a hit for less drastic engine updates (Skyrim vs Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 vs Fallout 4 next-gen). The work they’re doing seems more extensive than those examples, so I wouldn’t expect old mods to work, but maybe they could be recreated or converted through community effort.

As another user already said, this remaster is being done by an outside studio, so it shouldn’t be significantly affecting any ongoing work at Bethesda.

While Todd Howard is full of shit half the time, I do believe him when he talks about their development roadmap. When Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, it was under the disclaimer that it was not an active project for the team at the time, and would not enter full production until Starfield was done. Starfield released in fall of 2023, so Elder Scrolls 6 should have been in full development for about a year and a half now.

That is still the big question for me. I am all for modernizing the engine and don’t care if that means Unreal Engine 5, but if it doesn’t have comparable mod support to other Bethesda games, I feel that will end up hurting it pretty badly.

But as long as they don’t pull a Blizzard and replace the original game with the remaster, the original game and all of its mods will still be there to be enjoyed, at least. And maybe that means we might someday see an OpenOblivion similar to OpenMW if all else fails.

Don’t think we know yet. Based on earlier leaks, the thought is that Unreal Engine 5 is involved somehow, but there is uncertainty about whether or not it is full-on in UE5 or if UE5 is just being used as a rendering layer. If Bethesda’s own engine is still used as the core of the game, we don’t know if that means simply reworking the original Oblivion code, or if they updated everything to the latest version used for Starfield.

What we can assume is that, even if the original engine is used, there will need to be a good deal of work done to update it regardless, since it is still a 32-bit application that would need to be rewritten for proper 64-bit support. And a lot of the game mechanics, physics, movement, etc. would need to be updated to work with the UE5 rendering layer if that is indeed how it’s working.

I don’t expect they would, since Skyblivion already has their blessing and the team has been working with representatives from Bethesda to make sure that everything they’re doing continues to be kosher with them.

The Skyblivion devs also released a statement recently that they are also looking forward to the release of this remaster, and believe that there is enough love to go around for both projects.

Basically, Oblivion fans are going to be eating well this year. If the official Oblivion remaster is underwhelming, there will still be Skyblivion to look forward to.

I feel like there’s probably about 50 different directions that one could take that idea, and the story very clearly paints that act as a Bad Thing™ to have done.

But to play devil’s advocate (just because I have also been missing this type of discussion), one could argue that experiencing love would compromise Miquella’s plans for his planned age of compassion. An age of compassion would be one which treats everyone equally, to try to universally end worldly suffering.

Love, on the other hand, is what allows one to play favorites, and is also something that cannot really be controlled. Having a stronger attachment towards some people over others because of love would result in discontent, and sabotage the type of egalitarian compassion Miquella wanted to create.

Marika’s reign became rocky because there were conflicts between those she favored and those she shunned. She absolutely played favorites, and did not love everyone equally. Her solution to break the cycle of suffering was to simply remove death from the world entirely, but as we saw, that just ended up making its own whole host of problems.

So I think Miquella was trying to avoid making that same mistake of favoritism we saw under Marika, but ended up making another mistake which could have been just as potentially consequential as his mother’s decision to shatter the rune of death. A dispassionate “compassion” wouldn’t really be compassion at all.

I would rather argue the motivations of a souls boss

Miquella did nothing wrong.

Boston City Hall is truly a legendarily gaudy building.

Part of it is also the constant push to try to weave the principles of confederacy into the fabric of American history via monuments and memorials, to build up this idea that the confederacy is part of the modern American identity rather than antithetical to it.

See for example the recent controversy surrounding the military installation called Fort Bragg. Braxton Bragg was a slave-owning confederate general who, by all accounts, was not even a good leader. But given the fort’s location in North Carolina, one of the former confederate states, it got its name presumably due to local military officials sympathetic to the “Lost Cause” narrative, and stuck until just recently.

In 2023, the Biden administration pushed to change the name of the fort to “Fort Liberty” so as to continue removing these Lost Cause memorials and end this myth, but this year the Trump administration just recently renamed it back to Fort Bragg, ostensibly now named after a different Bragg who was just a paratrooper during World War II. But no one is fooled by what they’re trying to do.

It’s almost sad, really, just how badly they’re clinging to this myth even today. But I guess more scary than sad, given that half of the government is essentially run by traitors. And it’s really been that way for a long time now I suppose, but shocking how strongly they still choose to hold their ground on these ridiculous narratives when pushed.

Acht and neun.

Neun sounds like English nine, and acht is like October, which used to be the 8th month.

English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, Classical Greek.

That makes 11, I guess.

Being gay or bi has nothing to do with this, so why bother mentioning the fact?

I wouldn’t go that far, I think it’s a very relevant detail for OP’s situation.

Internalized homophobia is a real and unfortunate phenomenon for people who grew up in restrictive environments, and it can result in a lot of self-hatred and mental distress, including diagnosable disorders.

And the worst part about it is the shame some people feel about the whole thing might have them feeling that talking to a doctor or therapist is simply not an option, as they are not prepared to be “out” to others, even under the protection of medical confidentiality. The very idea of being out can be internalized as a failure, especially if it would burn bridges with bigoted family members (which is easy to say from the outside looking in that bigots aren’t worth your time anyways, but not so easy when that is your entire support network and every happy memory you had since childhood).

It’s definitely not simple, at any rate.

Luckily digital signboards will always be an option to replace TVs with if the situation becomes truly dire. The sorts of no-frills displays corporations buy to display whatever media they want in store.

Might not come with sound, but you can pick up a cheap sound bar and it will still be better than whatever cheap speakers commercial TVs try to cram in there.

Why is that? It’s being done by a different studio entirely that specializes in ports and remasters.