| gtotheunit91 said: Hmm, Matty brings out some good points as far as concerns when it comes to the rumored Oblivion remake. Firstly, the hybrid of UE5/Gamebryo engine. Results of hybrid engines within UE have been....mixed. He gives a couple of examples like GTA Trilogy and Halo MCC. Both games were in terrible, terrible states when they released. It brings up the concern about the level of mod support that can be expected as well. There's also another notable example that I thought of with Quake Champions where it was a hybrid of Saber's proprietary engine and id Tech. The game just had a lot of technical issues that were never fully resolved to this day. So the concept of hybrid game engines being used has had very mixed results. MCC eventually became great, but it took years. Then there's also the concern of just Virtuos being the developer. Their most recent work was The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition. The other more recent notable project of theirs was the PC port of Horizon: Zero Dawn which was bad at launch and Nixxes had to come in and fix the game. So Virtuos's reputation is.....more on the negative side. So them being tasked with a remake of Oblivion on a hybrid engine isn't exactly instilling confidence. |
I personally doubt the engine is actually a hybrid of Unreal 5 and Gamebryo, that just sounds like it would be a total disaster, trying to hybridize Gamebryo, an engine released in 1997 that was last used for a new game in 2015, with Unreal Engine 5, a modern engine. I think that what they are doing is designing the art assets such as character models, foliage, and textures in Unreal Engine 5, and then porting those new assets back into Gamebryo to replace the old assets, that way they can keep the original combat, physics, etc, but have them with graphics that look more modern. Since it's not a true hybrid engine project, I doubt that it will suffer from issues like GTA Trilogy remake. GTA Trilogy Remake was a completely different scenario, they took the original game and then ported the whole game into Unreal Engine 4, and then either AI upscaled original art assets or in some cases replaced original art assets with (often worse) art assets within Unreal Engine 4. What I think they're doing with Oblivion remaster is the opposite, they are designing the modern art assets in UE5 and then porting them backwards into Gamebryo, instead of porting the entire original game forward into a newer engine.
As for Virtuos themselves, they do have a bit of a rough development history, but it reads like as of now at least, the plan is for a straight graphical remastering, gameplay, systems, etc. will remain untouched from the original, so they can only do but so much damage when they are pretty much only remastering the graphics and bug busting. Bethesda just needs to make sure the game is in development long enough that the bugs are squashed and that it's optimized well, don't let them rush it out before it's ready for release like Private Division allowed them to do with Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition. It's also worth noting that Virtuos is assisting Konami with Metal Gear Solid 3 remake, which so far looks fantastic:
I think that Bethesda should do the same honestly, once Starfield is shipped they should get a small team at Bethesda to assist Virtuos with development on the Oblivion remake, don't let them do it all by themselves, work on it with them so that you can keep a close eye on it and make sure it is a product worthy of the Elder Scrolls name.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 02 August 2023
