Exciting news in the world of Skyrim modding today, as the Skyblivion released a new trailer, and have announced a target release date for their work finally: 2025!

The trailer looks quite good!

But now that they have at least a tentative release date, this put me in the mood to finally start poking at Oblivion. I want to do the same thing with this game that I’m doing with Morrowind: get to know the game in its vanilla form before its makeover mod drops, so I’ll be in a position to properly appreciate all the changes they’ve done!

So with that in mind, I finally attempted to start an Oblivion game. I tried this twice, first on my Win11 VM, and then on my Steam Deck.

On the VM, the game loaded, but it was not in a good state. I was able to go through the character creation flow, but as soon as I was out of that, I got stuck in this loop where the game was acting like a key was stuck. It kept making noises and trying to load the same dialog over and over.

I did manage to save my game though so I wouldn’t have to redo it on the Deck.

Loading it on the Deck worked a lot better. I was able to open up the save I’d done on my computer and see my character as I designed her. And Steam on the device already had a good controller layout mapped, so I just had to get familiar with it to try to navigate in the game.

I made one minor change to it, remapping the D-Pad so that I could have access to mouse wheel scrolling events, and also taking screenshots. I want to doublecheck what I set there; it’d be nice to have those actions completely match what I custom-set over in Morrowind.

I only went so far as to finish the character creation process; I am not trying to play yet. But this was enough to let me confirm that yes, I can run Oblivion just fine on the Deck, apparently!

And now I have a character. Check it out, y’all! Ganniwer the Bosmer!