Both of the big TESRenewal projects have put out substantive updates in the past six months, which makes this a good moment to line them up and ask the question we've all been quietly asking: which one actually ships first? (Spoiler: not TES6. It was never going to be TES6.)
Skyblivion: cutting features, which is how you know it's real
Skyblivion slipped out of 2025 and into 2026, announced by project lead Rebelzize on 3 December, and the same announcement carried news that stings a bit: spellcrafting and underwater combat are cut from launch, pushed into a post-launch "living project" plan. The healthier numbers from that update: world map 100% done, cities and quest dungeons finished.
Then in March the team turned up at the C3 Make-A-Wish charity stream, where they were reportedly "in a great place" and fully into bug-fixing and polish, showing revamped Mages Guild quests and expanded Ayleid ruins. Still targeting 2026. Still no date.
My honest read: cut features plus a bug-fix phase is the most credible "we're actually shipping" signal a volunteer project can send. Teams cut scope when the deadline is real. Projects that never plan to finish don't bother cutting anything.
Skywind: gorgeous numbers, glacial trajectory
Skywind's May update, "2026: The Road Continued" (its first major one since May 2024), is 32 minutes of genuinely impressive percentages: writing about 96% done, voice acting about 92% with roughly 185,000 lines across some 3,000 NPCs and 300 actors, animation around 75%, ten of thirteen exterior regions at 90–100%, and all core Morrowind mechanics implemented. And then, explicitly and deliberately: no release date. They said so themselves.
That VO figure is staggering; 185k lines is more dialogue than most studios ever record. But look at the spread. Writing and voice are nearly done while animation sits at 75%, three regions aren't finished, and two years passed between major updates. The last quarter of an asset pipeline is always the slowest quarter. If I had to bet, Skywind is 2027 at the absolute earliest, and the team is right not to pretend otherwise.
So, odds. Skyblivion first, and it isn't close. One project is squashing bugs; the other is still building content. The wry part is that both have decent odds of beating The Elder Scrolls VI itself. There's no official TES6 date at all, insider reporting points to 2028 or 2029 (unconfirmed, to be clear), and the game skipped last week's Xbox Showcase entirely. Two volunteer remakes of games from 2002 and 2006 may lap the actual sequel. I've stopped finding that funny and started finding it quietly impressive.
The wildcard for Skyblivion specifically is reception. Oblivion Remastered exists now and pulled in millions of players. They're different beasts, one a faithful coat of paint and the other a ground-up rebuild with redesigned quests, but "do I replay Cyrodiil twice in two years?" is a real question. Plenty of chewing-over in the older remaster threads here.
Meanwhile, the one you can play tonight
If the waiting grates, Lordbound is the already-shipped option a lot of people slept on. It launched in March 2025 after roughly a decade in development, dropping the Druadach Valley between Skyrim and High Rock: a landmass bigger than Solstheim, 60+ hours, 40+ quests, 50+ dungeons, three faction lines, fully voiced, with an original soundtrack. It's also quiet proof that decade-long fan projects do, in fact, land. The skyrim-mods threads have more if you want company for it.
I keep going back and forth on whether the spellcrafting cut matters, so here's where I'd genuinely like input. If you're planning a day-one Skyblivion run, does losing spellcrafting at launch change your build, or were you never going to out-spell the redesigned quest content anyway? And is anyone holding out for Skywind as their proper return to Morrowind rather than firing up OpenMW now?