While the next game that Bethesda launch will be The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the long awaited remaster of Bethesda’s most successful game till date, Bethesda are making sure that their fans understand that this remaster for Skyrim is a one-off, and that they have new games planned for after its release.
Speaking to Finder, Bethesda’s Pete Hines discussed the possibility of a remaster for either Oblivion or Morrowind versus an all new game. The long and short of it? Don’t expect any more remasters. Instead, it sounds like Bethesda have their sights squarely set on the future.
“I think a lot of my answer has to do with their age,” Bethesda’s Pete Hies said. “An Oblivion remaster is an interesting idea, but it is ten-year-old game. And Morrowind is 14. The leap we had to make and the work we had to do with getting Skyrim remade was much more obtainable and a much clearer path. With Oblivion, you are talking about several engines ago. So it gamers were like, “why didn’t you do Oblivion HD instead of Skyrim HD,” it wasn’t like those two processes were exactly the same. Oblivion HD would be a significantly larger undertaking to get to work and Morrowind… geez… that’s even worse. So the question becomes, “should we work on a Morrowind or Oblivion remaster, or should we work on Elder Scrolls 6.” Because that is the volume of work we are talking about.
“So we try not to spend too much time on remasters: the only other one I think we have done is Dishonored, which was a new IP that came out in the last year of a generation. So it was not a hard path to walk to bring that over to current-gen. For everything else, we have to ask “do we want to take time and resources, and spend money, on something that is already out to bring it to a new platform, or do we want to forge ahead with new stuff?” And in most cases, the answer is that we want to forge ahead with new stuff.”
The Elder Scrolls Skyrim: Special Edition, which is the remaster of Skyrim on the PS4 and Xbox One, is due out later this year. As of right now, we don’t quite know when The Elder Scrolls 6 will release.
