Oblivion Remastered is Getting Multiplayer, But Not in the Way You Would Expect

Oblivion Remastered is getting multiplayer thanks to an in-development mod from a talented team of modders. There’s no indication of when players will be able to get their hands on this Oblivion Remastered multiplayer mod, but the footage released so far looks incredibly polished.

Oblivion Remastered was shadow-dropped by Bethesda and Virtuos almost a year ago. The remaster was quickly hailed by fans and critics as an impressive overhaul of 2006’s Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, remaining largely faithful while introducing small changes that modernize the gameplay. The quirks of the original game were still present, which only added to its charm. Choosing to shadow-drop such a major title was a risk from Bethesda, but Oblivion Remastered quickly hit big sales milestones that justified the company’s decision. Like the original, the Oblivion remaster was a single-player-only game, and some modders have spent their time fixing that.

A recent Reddit post from user ready_mod announced the Oblivion Remastered multiplayer mod (simply named Oblivion Multiplayer) with some awesome gameplay footage that shows multiple players in the world at once. Having consistent combat is usually a major issue with these types of mods, but from this trailer, this Oblivion Remastered mod appears to have solved that problem already. The trailer boasts “actual captured gameplay footage,” and even at this stage, it looks incredibly impressive. It’s not clear exactly how many players the mod will support, but the trailer shows up to five players on a single server, which would be a massive technical feat.

Oblivion Multiplayer is shaping up to be incredibly ambitious, going above and beyond simply making Oblivion Remastered a co-op experience. The modding team is implementing its own technology, named ReadyM, which was previously used to create WukongMP, a Black Myth: Wukong multiplayer mod. According to the modders, the ReadyM Creator SDK “will allow server owners and modders to create entirely custom experiences on top of Oblivion Remastered – deep RP, custom rules, quest lines, and game mechanics.” If it fulfills its potential, it could fundamentally change Oblivion Remastered on PC forever. Gamers can sign up for early access to Oblivion Multiplayer on the mod’s website, although no release date has been given.

Implementing multiplayer in games designed exclusively for single-player is no small feat. Adding a network framework is extremely difficult, and getting it to be reasonably stable is another matter entirely. That said, there have been plenty of attempts in other games, such as Skyrim‘s Skyrim Together, which is arguably the most high-profile multiplayer mod out there. After years in development, Skyrim Together is a major success story for this type of mod, and it’s proof that they’re not all doomed to failure. Given this team’s history with WukongMP, there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful about Oblivion Multiplayer.

In the wake of its release almost a year ago, Bethesda confirmed that Oblivion Remastered won’t officially support modding. It’s a funny statement in hindsight, given that players immediately got to work on creating tons of mods for the game. On Nexus Mods, Oblivion Remastered mods have been downloaded over 28 million times, and there is no sign of it slowing down. The lack of official support may hinder Oblivion Remastered from having a modding community the size of other Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, but projects like Oblivion Multiplayer show that talented creators will persevere regardless.