Oblivion Remastered modder delivering Fallout 4-style settlement building reckons the game can still “usher in a modding renaissance”

“It felt like a blank slate, just waiting to be experimented with,” MadAborModding tells me.

The modder, who’s currently working on expanding an impressive proof of concept for Fallout 4-style house building into a full-blown Cyrodiilic settlement system, says that Oblivion Remastered’s behind-the-scenes differences to other Bethesda games are what drew him to it. “With so much of the game now running on Unreal Engine,” he explains, “I saw an opportunity to approach modding from an entirely new angle.”

MadAborModding’s hardly been alone in pushing the limits of what’s possible when it comes to messing with Virtuos’ nostalgia-inducing facelift of a potato-faced protector’s quest to shut some spooky doors. However, over the past month, he’s garnered a lot of attention with his work on the aforementioned building mod and a still-expanding spell pack that lets players do everything from transforming into a lich to conjuring their own Oblivion gates.

The foundation of both works is the “big news” MadAborModding wrote about in a Reddit post at the start of June, which caught the attention of me and a lot of other folks keeping an eye on Oblivion Remastered modding. Community members, it revealed, had worked out how to “make Oblivion’s scripting engine call any function we want from a UE4SS Lua script.”

MadAborModding explained that this meant scripts would now be able to be set up to “react to things like [the player] casting a certain spell, finishing a quest, or picking a specific dialogue option” and predicted that “the complexity of mods we can make just shot up big time.” He even suggested that a mod which lets you order a real life pizza via talking to a character in the game (this is a real thing for classic Oblivion) would be “well within the realm of possibilities.”

Sounds cool, if a bit tough to wrap your head around if you’re either a) someone like me, whose mod-making hasn’t advanced beyond the absolute basics, or b) someone who hasn’t given it a go at all. A month on, has it opened up those new possibilities and caught on in the community the way MadAborModding thought it would? Well, yes and no.

“It’s opened doors most people didn’t realise were there,” the modder tells me, “With UE4SS Lua scripting, things that used to take years to figure out in traditional modding can now be done in hours.”

However, he says the response he’s had from fellow community members about it has been “a bit of a mixed bag” so far. “Some modders have reached out, curious about modding on the Unreal side, but overall the community has been slow to shift away from traditional modding approaches. There’s still a lot of untapped potential here, and I think once more people see what’s possible, we’ll hit a real turning point.”

MadAborModding’s definitely been busy digging into that Unreal side of things himself, though. He says the idea for his settlement building mod came from fellow tinkerer (and fellow member of the Oblivion Remastered modding community Discord) Dicene, who unearthed “a native Unreal function that allows object placement in the world.”

“No one else jumped on it, so I decided to build a quick proof of concept,” MadAborModding recalls, “The actual coding took less than an hour, it’s really that easy when working with Unreal functions in Lua. The engine already had the functions for spawning and moving objects natively; it was just a matter of exposing those functions to the player.”

The modder says his original goal with it “was to generate hype and show that Unreal-based modding isn’t just viable, it’s often easier than the traditional route.

“Bethesda game modders are some of the best, but they stick to what they know and that’s typically Bethesda’s official modding software,” he adds.

Having used the mod in his own “mad wizard” playthrough to build an Oblivion tower home in the ruins of Kvatch, MadAborModding has since started collaborating with another modder called Uregven on turning this proof of concept into a full-blown settlement system.

“It’s going well so far,” he tells me, “Uregven is way better at UI than I am, and that’s been huge. I had the mod just cycling randomly through 12,000 objects at first, which obviously wasn’t practical, but I mostly wanted to show what was possible. With Uregven on board, we’ve now got menus sorted by categories, which instantly makes it feel more like an actual tool you can use instead of just a tech demo.

“The goal right now is to get it closer to Fallout 4’s system, that’s the obvious next step. The hardest part (figuring out object placement and manipulation) is already done. Now it’s just the tedious stuff: sorting through assets, refining placement options, and making the system intuitive. Once we get that baseline in, expanding it further becomes way easier.”

While the Lua scripting breakthrough is fuelling mods like this, MadAborModding acknowledges that’s far from a Mages Guild-worthy incantation that’ll let Oblivion Remastered modders accomplish everything that’s been off limits to them so far. “Lip sync generation and navmeshing are the big ones; we haven’t figured those out yet,” he says, “Until we have a way to do those, true voiced quest/new land mods just aren’t possible.”

As for the lack of any official modding tools from Bethesda, something other Oblivion Remastered modders I’ve spoken to have said they’re still holding out hope for, MadAborModding remains sanguine.

“The absence of official tools is frustrating, yes, but Unreal itself is incredibly powerful and in many cases the tools for modding Unreal are far more flexible than anything Bethesda has officially released. In fact, I’d argue that what we can do natively in Unreal today exceeds what was possible in Skyrim modding for the first ten years of its modding scene.

“Of course, I’d never turn down official support, but I also think we need to stop waiting around for it. There’s a whole frontier here that’s barely been explored because many modders are still clinging to what they know.”

Going forwards, MadAborModding says he believes Oblivion Remastered “could usher in a modding renaissance.” He brings up some unreleased “custom climbing and attack animations that make the remaster look like an Assassin’s Creed game” by a modder named Kemper. He’d also like to see more modders “tackle complex gameplay mods—new spells, combat systems, new animations and attacks—things that took years to develop in traditional Bethesda engines but are straightforward to make in the Remaster.”

In the eyes of this modder who was so drawn to paint on Oblivion Remastered’s blank canvas, “the future’s wide open.”