Want more Elder Scrolls Remasters? Bethesda just shared some bad news


Did you love the Skyrim remaster? Remasters of older games are great. Whether you missed out on them the first time around, or played through them and need an excuse to re-visit, sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all it takes. We all like to say that gameplay matters infinitely more than graphics, but who wouldn’t rather be playing a game that looks beautiful instead of a game that looks dated?

Aside from unofficial mods that already exist to change and improve the looks of older titles, you’re out of luck if you’re hoping for any more remastered versions of games from the Elder Scrolls series.

image: express.co.uk
image: express.co.uk

Bethesda has recently released two remastered games, Skyrim and Dishonored. In the case of Dishonored, it was a special circumstance because the game came out late in the last generation and was a new IP and they wanted to give it every chance they could to gain a footing, also it didn’t take a lot of extra work to get it ready for current-gen systems.

Bethesda’s vice-President, Pete Hines, goes into more details about why a Skyrim Remaster happened, and why we shouldn’t expect any more of these: 

“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.”

image: gamepressure.com
image: gamepressure.com

In both of these cases, the remastered versions happened becasue it made sense from a practical point of view and the workload wouldn’t have been overwhelming. By the sounds of it, any other overhauls in the future would, at the very least, need to fit that same criteria. It takes a perfect storm, this isn’t something that’s going to become a part of their regular release strategy.

“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?” said Hines.