Best get comfortable with Elder Scrolls: Online for a while before expecting another game to come out!
[dropcap size=small]F[/dropcap]or quite some time, Elder Scrolls has been one of the best game franchises of the decade, expecially with last year’s release of Elder Scrolls: Online.
At this year’s E3, Bethesda announced that there will be an HD remaster for Skyrim some time in the future. Remasters for Oblivion and Morrowind are in doubt due to how old the games are. Bethesda also confirmed Elder Scrolls: Special Edition, but will work on Elder Scrolls VI before focusing on remastering the classics. Bethesda VP Pete Hines dropped a few details about the future of Elder Scrolls in an interview on a show.
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 if 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 VI.” 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.
As appealing as the older games would be to see them remastered, Elder Scrolls VI would take less time to make and release than Oblivion or Morrowind. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t ever work on creating those games. But it would be difficult to go through everything that was made on both games and modernize them to the systems that we play on.
Would you prefer Elder Scrolls VI first or Bethesda remaking one of the classic games? Let us know in the comments below!
