Bethesda: Skyrim Remastered is a One-Off for Elder Scrolls

Following the re-release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with upgraded visuals on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, many fans have been hoping Bethesda would give its predecessor, Oblivion, the same treatment. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening, according to Bethesda.

Speaking to the Official Xbox Magazine UK (posted online by GamesRadar), Bethesda vice president Pete Hines said that a smaller amount of work needed on both titles led to both Dishonored’s Definitive Edition and Skyrim’s Special Edition.

He stressed that Skyrim remastered happened because they adapted its engine to build Fallout 4 on modern hardware, and that this was basically a one-off.

“We did [a remaster] for Dishonored but that was a unique case where it was a new IP at the very end of the last generation of consoles,” Hines said to OXM. “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.”

Finally, Hines explained that mods for Skyrim on consoles “seemed like a pretty cool idea,” when talking up Fallout 4’s console mod support. “But these things take time, it takes effort and manpower,” Hines said. “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?”

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