It would seem that Bethesda has no plans to revisit the Elder Scrolls’ classics in an official capacity moving forward. Bethesda vice president Pete Hines spoke to the Official Xbox Magazine UK (posted online by GamesRadar) and explained that lesser work loads were the driving force behind both Dishonored’s Definitive Edition and Skyrim’s Special Edition— the latter of which was made easier again by Bethesda’s efforts in bringing the Skyrim engine to modern hardware for Fallout 4.
“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 tells 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.”
Hines notes that mods for Skyrim on consoles “seemed like a pretty cool idea” in light of Fallout 4’s console mod support. He continues, “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?”
