Earlier this week the team behind Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion put out a call for some “final” and “vital” veteran help to get their work over the line in 2026. Given the mod’s delay late last year and the fairly lengthy list of roles the post on Nexus Mods cited the Skyblivion crew as looking to fill, you’d be forgiven for wondering what this recruiting push might mean in terms of how work on the mod’s going.

However, Skyblivion’s project lead Kyle ‘Rebelzize’ Rebel says it’s not a sign that the project’s “dead in the water”, but instead a team who have been “stretched thin” for a long time trying to take advantage of “good momentum” they currently have as they work to tie up remaining loose ends.

“The update video we shared last year holds true,” Rebel told me in response to my reach out about the recruitment post. “While the team is doing well in terms of progress, we are stretched thin as we have been for the last decade, so the call to action was an idea to try and get a few extra hands on the project to help out, mostly with polish. We listed all departments not because we are dead in the water and have nobody left to help out, but because we currently have good momentum and want to take every opportunity we can to make sure we can keep that up and maybe even find one or two more people to help speed things up further.

“From what I see internally I am pretty optimistic,” he continued. “All quest locations are finished and QA’d, the Imperial City has gotten the breakthrough we needed to push that through and I hope soon™ to have the city completed in terms of level design. Mechanics are in good shape, and we are squashing bugs left and right. We still have work to do and of course as you [know] there’s always the chance shit hits the fan and we suffer another major setback.”

Rebel went on to emphasise that while the team did put a year – 2025 initially – in place in terms of a release goal a few years ago, they’re still volunteers working in their free time and dealing with the various sorts of troubles life throws at all of us from time to time. “My goal has never been to keep this game from people any longer than I have to, but I owe it to everyone who helped out over the years to make sure we have a functional game to deliver,” the modder said, pointing to the team’s recent charity showcase as showing they’re “so damn close to achieving that”.

For now, he added that it’s proving “exciting though equally challenging” to playtest, bug fix and use their “limited resources” to finish up dealing with the effects of a “huge setback from last year” in the case of the Imperial City. “Just as the team and myself are very passionate about our work, so are members of the community,” he concluded. “However you voice that excitement, please take a step back and recognise the work and the people behind it. There are no ill intentions [on] our part and everyone is doing the best they can to get this out ASAP.”

Last year’s drama around how close Skyblivion is to release and what that would ideally look like in terms of delivering on its various creators’ visions has undeniably made it a more complex case to consider in that regard compared to other big modding projects. That said, it makes sense to me that Rebel and co would be keen to try and get as many veteran hands on board for their final push as possible, given how key and vast even pre-release bug fixing on its own is for a mod of this size. Just ask the folks behind the equally ambitious Fallout: London, which got over the hump back in 2024.