Bethesda Has No Plans to Remake Old Games

Bethesda, as you’ve probably heard by now, has released the updated, special edition of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the world to enjoy, which brings Bethesda’s most iconic game (so far) to modern consoles with all the DLC nicely packaged with it… and they even did the cool thing and let people on the PC who already had all the DLC update for free. And people are returning to Skyrim to experience the updated world, perhaps not in droves, but certainly in numbers large enough for some to wonder… why Skyrim? I mean, of all the Elder Scrolls games out there, why would Bethesda give the update to their most recent game, and not other classics, like Oblivion or, I don’t know, Morrowind?

Well, that a subject that cropped up in an interview between Official Xbox Magazine UK (posted by GamesRadar) and Bethesda vice president Pete Hines. When asked about the re-releases of Dishonored and Skyrim, he said:

We did one for Dishonored but that was a unique case where it was a new IP at the very end of the last generation of consoles. So remastering it and bringing it to this gen wasn’t a ton of work and it made a lot of sense given the proximity of those two. 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.

So, basically, since most of the work had been done already to bring Fallout 4 into the world, they figured “what the heck, easy money” and made a re-release for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Fair enough. Now, Bethesda has already gone on record saying they have no plans to remake Morrowind, and what he said next put the final nail in the coffin:

But these things take time, it takes effort and manpower. 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?

Oh well. It may be a long time before we get to explore Tamriel again, but we’ve always got mods. Mods and Doom.