Back in January, we got a pretty extensive look at the remastered environments and quests being made for Skyblivion - a mod project seeking to remake Oblivion in the Skyrim engine. The team behind this ambitious project has continued making progress, and the latest mod development video focuses on some of the stunning landscapes that are now nearing completion.

According to the new video, the majority of Skyblivion's map is now in the final stages of development, and the work shown so far is seriously impressive. The video discusses how areas such as the forest surrounding the Orange Road have been adapted and improved for the remake. The team decided to make the forest "more lush and detailed than its original counterpart" and make it larger to give it a more prominent role in the game, citing the area's ambience and popularity with players as the reason for giving it more attention.

Blackwood, meanwhile, has been given more fortifications and border gates to add points of interest. The new boggy marsh at the centre of Blackwood, called Blackmarch, looks suitably horrifying and spooky - promising players a subregion full of ruins and decay. The city of Leyawiin has been redesigned from the ground up "referencing concept art from Oblivion that was likely discarded owing to technical and time limitations", with the city divided into three distinct sections. Boats are now able to sail right through the city, allowing them to go further inland.

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We're still a long way from the release of Elder Scrolls 6 - a game that remains as mysterious as ever - so if you're looking for another Elder Scrolls project with no release date to get excited about, I have just the thing.

Skyblivion, a mod project that's been in development since 2012, aims to remake The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion using Skyrim's engine - and while there's still no release date for the mod, the latest update video shows significant progress. Focused on the mod's remastered environments and quests, it's a lovely version of Cyrodiil reimagined with a mixture of Skyrim and custom-made assets.

According to mod team TESRenewal, most of the mod's exterior environments are already on their "first pass", with the team now looking to add polish and additional details to the outside world. The team is working on a whopping 2663 interiors, and is currently in the process of reworking all the caves, mines and dungeons from Oblivion. While Oblivion often reused its dungeon designs, the Skyblivion mod team is making them more unique: designing them based on NPC and book descriptions found in the original game. Plenty of Oblivion assets have been given a redesign, but the mod team seems to be looking for even more 3D artists to help with all this fancy furniture.

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The Elder Scrolls is one of the most illustrious sagas in video game history, which is perhaps why Skyrim has been ported to everything short of a calculator over the last eight years. However, although Skyrim and its predecessor Oblivion are vast oceans containing a wealth of wonderfully intricate curios, their oft-overlooked older sibling Morrowind is a bottomless lake, its boundless depths plummeting into the territories of magic, secrecy, and the unknown.

Since Morrowind launched in 2002, players have been exploring its every nook and cranny, desperately seeking to unravel its most intimately hidden secrets. Perhaps the most accomplished of these Morrowind mystery hunters is Redditor OccupyTamriel, who has discovered countless hidden treasures buried in Morrowind's deepest recesses.

"I started playing Elder Scrolls when a very dear friend of mine told me about the series," OccupyTamriel tells me. "I needed a lot of time to get used to Morrowind - the sheer complexity of the world and the mechanics, the invisible per-attack dice roll, and just being lost and making no progress were extremely off-putting."

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The volunteer-based group TESRenewel has released a new teaser trailer showing the incredible progress it's made on the mod to remake Oblivion in the Skyrim engine.

Skyblivion started life back in 2012 with the aim to bring The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion to a new generation of gamers, and seven years on it's clearly made some great progress, though no news of when we'll see a playable version just yet.

"We have been hard at work these past few years and recently a lot of that work has fallen into place, finally shaping up to what we can call a proper video game," writes project lead Rebelize. "It's been a long ride but we are finally at a point where the end is almost in sight.

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Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

In his Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the late Sir Terry Pratchett writes, "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."

Most people know Pratchett as the author of Discworld, the famous fantasy series about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants. However, what many people don't know is that the knighted author was also a massive fan of video games - so much so that he actually worked on mods for Oblivion, most of which were spearheaded by a Morrowind modder named Emma.

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When does a console generation arrive?

Most people would agree that the seventh gen started when the Xbox 360 launched but that answers a different and thoroughly less interesting question.

It isn't unreasonable to say that the 360 era arrived on the carrier wave of Patrick Stewart's Royal Shakespeare Company tones announcing the final hours of the life of Uriel Septim 7, god-emperor of Tamriel, whose death serves as the starting gun for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and quite arguably the golden age of western RPGs that followed. A golden age that includes The Witcher 3, as if anyone needs to be reminded.

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The environments of massive open-world games, particularly in recent years, have been rightly praised for their representation, scale and design accuracy. However, there are some gems at the other end of the spectrum - environments that make you feel cramped, tense and desperate for a break. This is an approach to environment design utilised in our real-world, from gardens to architecture, and is mirrored excellently in some game environments, creating areas that trap us in cramped, claustrophobic conditions.

The underground tunnel network of the Metro series, adapted for human life but traversed with trepidation and tension, nailed its own post-apocalyptic look and feel, and had claustrophobia, discomfort and fear oozing from its design. These spaces successfully evoke real-world design principles of landscape mazes and labyrinths, such as dead ends, twists and turns to cause doubling back and elevate desperation, fluctuating size and scale of spaces, and a continuous and monotonal finish (a symphony of grey in Metro's case) that makes every surface and area look the same, but also makes for an unrelenting and repressive aesthetic.

Often, the spaces are not only characteristic of uncomfortable mazes and tunnels, but their disrepair and crumbling structure means they have a constant feeling of pressure and weight about them: the feeling that, at any moment, the space could collapse on top of Artyom's head. The tunnels are also powerful spaces as they are a believable and familiar environment to us; adapting a real-world, recognisably claustrophobic environment makes for a powerfully uncomfortable virtual space.

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Bethesda has confirmed the Oblivion 5th Anniversary for Europe. It will be released on 23rd September for £20 on PS3 and Xbox 360, £18 on PC.

European PR manager Alistair Hatch confirmed the date on Twitter.

Inside the Oblivion 5th Anniversary Edition is the Game of the Year Edition of Oblivion, which contains DLC add-ons Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine.

Also in the box are a Making of Oblivion DVD and a colour map of game world Cyrodiil and the Shivering Isles.

A Skryim video is thrown in as well.

The Oblivion 5th Anniversary Edition doesn't come in Steelbook casing in Europe, but it does in the US.

Oblivion was the fourth Elder Scrolls game and is the predecessor to new game Skyrim. Eurogamer's Oblivion review awarded a modest 10/10.

Video: Shivering Isles.

A new BBFC rating for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition has popped up online, suggesting UK gamers may soon see the launch of the 5th anniversary edition of the sprawling fantasy RPG.

The 5th anniversary edition launched in the US earlier this month.

The new BBFC rating, classified today, details the Game of the Year Edition of Oblivion, which includes the Shivering Isles expansion.

In the US the 5th anniversary edition includes a map, a making of DVD with a Skyrim trailer and a $10 Off Coupon for Skyrim.

This comes in a steelbook with slip cover.

Eurogamer has contacted Bethesda for comment.