Oblivion Remastered Multiplayer Mod Could Be the Start of Something Bigger
Over the last three months, numerous modding projects have emerged that aim to reimagine popular worlds that were originally designed as single-player experiences. One of the most-recent multiplayer modding projects is working to let players experience The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered seamlessly with friends.
While it’s not the first of its kind—other recent modding endeavors include a Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 multiplayer mod and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt multiplayer mod—it is perhaps the most ambitious. OblivionMP is being developed by ReadyM, a Polish company creating a professional-grade infrastructure designed to work across multiple games rather than a single title or IP.
Oblivion Remastered is Getting Multiplayer, But Not in the Way You Would Expect
Oblivion Remastered is getting multiplayer in a way that will come as a suprise to many gamers.
Bring Your Friends to Tamriel
ReadyM successfully utilized its multiplayer framework with the WukongMP project, which enables Black Myth: Wukong players to experience the game with up to 10 friends. Players can either fight together or engage in player-versus-player modes. For its next IP, the ReadyM team has set their sights on The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered.
ReadyM was drawn to The Elder Scrolls universe because of its high-fantasy setting and how naturally it lends itself to the project goals of having people build guilds and role-play communities within the game. The Elder Scrolls series publisher Bethesda has historically been very supportive of modding content. Julius Kopczewski, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of ReadyM, said they have been in contact with the company.
For its OblivionMP project, the team has set a high bar for itself. According Kopczewski, the OblivionMP servers should eventually be able to host up to 1,000 players at a time. Thanks to their prior experience working on FiveM, a community-led multiplayer experience for Grand Theft Auto Five, the team knows it’ll be able to support those player numbers in the future.
In Tamriel, ReadyM is trying to achieve perfect synchronization for players between game states. So, if one player kills an NPC or steals an item or heals someone in their game, it’ll be reflected for other players in real time. “Our dream is to let people create in Oblivion as if it was single player, but with the added benefit of being synchronized automatically across all the people playing,” Kopczewski told GameRant. That’s different from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt multiplayer mod, where players more or less exist as ghosts in each other’s games, unable to interact with one another.
At launch, ReadyM expects the experience to be more of a sandbox rather than a co-op campaign. The project will use The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered as a backdrop, with modders filling in the content. “We want to first see what people can create, and what kind of stories they want to tell on their own within the larger world of Oblivion,” Kopczewski said. But, the team didn’t rule out adding in a more narrative-driven experience from the single-player game in the future.
However, that doesn’t mean the world will be empty when the project launches. “We’ve already started gathering server owners to start giving them an early preview, so that hopefully, when [OblivionMP] gets publicly released, they’ll already have some things built so it will feel like a vibrant place,” Kopczewski said. ReadyM will provide software development kits (SDK) for modders to use to build everything from community events, guilds, factions, economies, and practically anything else they can think of.
After that, the team hopes creators run wild with the SDK tools and anything beyond the provided tools as well. Kopczewski said that the team will do its best to support the many different ways people want to build on The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered in a multiplayer environment.
While Kopczewski and ReadyM co-founder Michael Szklarski weren’t quite ready to commit to a solid release date just yet, they did say it’ll be here sooner rather than later. “There’ll be more games coming as well, but first we have to do Oblivion really well and start slowly thinking about the next step,” Kopczewski said. In order to try OblivionMP when it releases, players first need to own an official copy of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. Once the project becomes public, Players will be able to download the ReadyM platform from its site to begin launching multiplayer servers.
What is the ReadyM Platform?
“From the very start, we knew that this is going to be something larger that’s going to touch more games as time goes by,” Kopczewski said. ReadyM is striving to grow into the go-to platform for the multiplayer modding and role-playing community. The team is working to create a framework for multiplayer projects that can be used from one IP to the next.
Currently, ReadyM is a team of 12 engineers, testers, and other development professionals hard at work on OblivionMP. Down the line, ReadyM hopes to become a hub for modders that can work together and learn from each other to build community-driven experiences across popular IPs from The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered to CyberPunk 2077.
“Our goal for the ReadyM platform is to be a way for players to access a variety of games that they already own, detected on their PC, to access the multiplayer modes of those games,” Szklarski said.
Kopczewski described the ReadyM framework as being split into two layers. The first layer handles the game’s Application Programming Interface, or API. This layer programmatically handles manipulating the game state, controlling things like enemy spawns, player rewards, items, and more.
The second layer contains ReadyM’s netcode, which handles synchronizing game states between players in a multiplayer setting. That layer is built on top of the first and can be moved between IPs. Because the team always planned to support multiple games, it designed the API layer and infrastructure to be as flexible and reliable as possible.
“Our focus has always been on developing reusable components that we can keep on investing in. If you know you’re going to use something for a very long time, across many different games and engines, you’re more incentivized to spend time figuring out the engineering,” Kopczewski said.
The platform eventually hopes to be a launcher for multiple IPs all with their own multiplayer communities and servers for players to seamlessly swap between. ReadyM seeks to handle many of the challenges that can arise when implementing large mods like multiplayer frameworks, troubleshooting the technical problems and smoothing out the player experience. That ideally frees creators and server hosts to focus on what they do best–creating new experiences for communities to grow around.
“The more we can do to free people from having to deal with networking engineering issues, the happier we will be,” Kopczewski said.
The whole project puts community first. Servers are hosted by volunteers, similar to how Minecraft servers work, and players can join whichever server suits them. Each could have different themes or events. According to Szklarski, OblivionMP already has over 500 sign-ups for server owners.
“In general, anyone who has attempted this kind of experience knows that there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together for people to be able to enjoy it. One thing is to make the technology work. But then there is another aspect of actually making it easy for people to enjoy,” Kopczewski said.
ReadyM envisions a hub where modders collaborate to craft experiences they couldn’t create alone. The team aims to build a thriving community where role players and gamers discover fresh ways to engage with the worlds they know and love.
- Released
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April 22, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Violence