Speaking toOfficial Xbox Magazine, Bethesda Vice President Pete Hines said that the remaster process that broughtSkyrim Special Editionto the current gen is the exception rather than the rule, and that revamped past experiences should not be expected.
According to Hines, much of the reason for the Skyrim remaster lies with the team’s active development ofFallout 4on the current gen platforms. In his words:
Skyrim was more about the work that Bethesda Game Studios had done in the early days of getting ready for Fallout 4 on this generation of consoles—moving the Skyrim engine and doing some work to run it on this generation of consoles just to see how it worked, and so forth, before they started doing all their Fallout stuff. It’s the most recent thing they did.
Moving the Skyrim engine onto the current gen in order to tune it for Fallout 4, made it relatively easy to bring Skryim along to a new platform. With Skyrim being the game the development team most recently worked on, it was not a far leap to update it.
When asked about the challenges of remasters and bringing mod support to consoles, he had this to add about their developmental focus in general:
Generally speaking, our approach has usually been that instead of spending all this time on a thing we’ve already made, why don’t we instead spend that effort on something new, or on the next version of that thing?
Fan favorite experiences like Morrowind and Oblivion are much older games and their adaptation to a current gen experience would be significantly more of an investment than Skyrim required, which means that given Hines' statements, the possibility of them getting the special edition treatment are slim to none, at least in the near to moderate future. The vibrant PC mod community has already begun tackling overhauls of these games and it seems for now, those are going to be the only avenues for players interested in remastered versions of Bethesda’s classic open world games.
Many love reliving classic experiences but there is something to be commended about forging forward with new experiences. What side of the fence are you on? Would you rather an Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 or do you want to see the potential of Morrowind tapped via a remastered edition? Let us know in the comments!
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