Modders have torn apart Oblivion Remastered and found ‘potential’ for proper modding, but without tools from Bethesda we’ll need ‘a lot of reverse engineering work… before modding can be fully realised’

As we speak, countless modders are currently buzzing away in the file system for the Oblivion Remaster, trying to figure out how to make the original game’s library of 30,000+ mods make the leap to the new version and its thick Unreal Engine 5 wrapper. Or, at the very least, how to create brand new mods for it.

Now, the good folk over at Nexus Mods have put out their community’s early findings after a few days of investigation, and the news is… mixed, I’d say, though Nexus emphasises that—since these are early findings—you should “Take everything you read with the biggest pinch of salt.”

As you might have read in a little outlet called PC Gamer dot com, modders have found that, yup, a whole bunch of Oblivion Remastered’s “core data” still comes from .esp and .esm plugin files. What’s changed, though, is that the records in those files are kind of in two places at once to work with UE5. They get mapped over to, well, whatever corresponding thing UE5 needs to make it all work using JSON.

That’s my layman’s understanding, and chances are it went over your head much in the way it did mine. In essence, what it means is that if you wanted to mod in new content to the game, you not only need to make the necessary tweaks to Oblivion’s core data, you’d also need to insert a JSON link to make it all play nice with UE5. That’s a whole new layer of modding work that isn’t currently understood that well. In addition to that, some of the JSON guff tied to default Oblivion game data also has “additional values” that no one has figured out yet, and the Level of Detail system is brand new and likely heavily tied to UE5.

So there’s quite a lot of brush to cut through before we can start turning Mehrunes Dagon into Randy Savage. Still, there is some reason to be optimistic. Nexus says “hints within the game code that there may be a Construction Set coming for this game,” meaning official modding tools from Bethesda and Virtuos (although Nexus stresses those hints might just reference the devs’ own tools), and the Game Pass version declares it has “‘In-Game Purchases’, which could imply the eventual integration of the Bethesda.net paid mods store.”

“To heavily summarise,” says Nexus, “there’s some potential here, but unless we get an official Construction Set from Bethesda/Virtuos, there’s a lot of reverse engineering work to be done before modding can be fully realised.” In other words, we have to hope that the introduction of UE5 doesn’t make Bethesda and Virtuos decide against releasing proper mod tools. If they do release them (along with some nice, handy documentation to explain to mod devs what the heck all this UE5 stuff is up to), we’ll be up and running pretty quickly. If they don’t? It’s gonna be a long, hard, reverse-engineering slog to even get close to the glory that was OG Oblivion’s mod scene.

The good news is that, even with the many challenges the modding community currently faces, the mods are rolling in anyway. They’re not quite as wild or ambitious as they could have been in the original game (yet), but people are going to work on this thing whether Bethesda wants them to or not.

And with Bethesda support telling everyone the game doesn’t officially support mods, you might be a bit pessimistic, but I admit I struggle to imagine a world where a Bethesda game doesn’t eventually get some form of official modding support (and a world where Bethesda doesn’t take the opportunity to sell you more Creation Club stuff). I’m hopeful, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens here. As Nexus says, “Please don’t badger the super smart folks working on this; let them cook.”