Months after a last-minute delay, long-awaited conversion mod 'Skyblivion' is back with a new video… that doesn't move

The last time we covered Skyblivion, an arguably over-ambitious merging of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, it was closing in on a scheduled 2025 release date. That didn't happen. On December 3, an eight-minute-long video dropped to explain why it wasn't going to land in our holiday hampers. Now, three months later, and with only a vague 2026 release dream, the Rebelzize team has finally put out a new video. And no, it's not a release.

Potentially set to reward you after a rough week or sour your mood with the whiplash of rapid elation to potential disappointment, the latest Skyblivion video - the first for this quarter-gone year - is the equivalent of a stationary webcam on an early 2000s website. An atmospheric, still, through-the-day look at a log in the Fall Forest of Cyrodiil, in the Skyrim engine, with a sliver of its ambient sounds slapped over the top.

Now, I love a babbling brook and the serene chirping of birds as much as the next guy. I'd sit on a log in the woods right now if it weren't four degrees Celsius outside my house. Still, given the long, long wait for Skyblivion, a "porting and rebuilding" of the "quests, locations, and characters" of Oblivion, it feels a little disheartening to see this after missing a date that's already been pushed back by many (and I mean many) years. "There's no movement and no UI," it's stated. And though I understand why that is, I will admit that it made me think that even that wasn't done yet.

In the team's defence, it did post a handful of screenshots of Wendelbek, "a massive Ayleid ruin" around this time last month. And I genuinely can't wait to dive in there. "More and more of the project is entering its final state," they said at the time. But I've been following this gargantuan project for close to ten years now. This is GTA 6 levels of waiting we're talking here. The lengthy wait for an Elder Scrolls 6 release date actually doesn't seem so bad when you consider just how long one of the (hopefully) best Skyrim mods has been in the oven for.

And while there's a light at the end of the tunnel - a gargantuan reimaginging of my favorite Elder Scrolls game comparable to that massive Fallout: London conversion a little while back - I do worry we might actually see The Elder Scrolls 6 before I get to shoot a wolf off the log I just had on my screen for almost half an hour.  Remember: Skyblivion was conceptualized to "bring the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to a new generation of gamers." This isn't going to look like last year's Oblivion Remastered without some serious modding mayhem behind the scenes. It's sure to run better for it, though.

Still, I do feel pretty relaxed after that. Will I "fall asleep to this every night till Skyblivion is released," like one eager YouTube viewer? No. But I do have to wonder how much the team would make off my YouTube Premium sub by that point. To be honest, given that Skyblivion is set to be entirely free, the least I can do is leave it on repeat.