When Bethesda announced a current-gen remaster of Skyrim during E3 2016, the majority of fans were pleasantly surprised.
Still, the question on most lips was obvious: Why not remake an older Elder Scrolls like Morrowind or Oblivion? Both games are far more dated visually and would benefit from a face-lift way more than Skyrim, after all.
The answer is actually pretty simple: an Oblivion remake would take way more work – work Bethesda wants to put into giving us a brand new Elder Scrolls game.
Bethesda marketing boss Pete Hines told GameSpot:
Oblivion is 10 years old, so the amount of work for that engine and that tech to bring it and remaster it and do all the things we wanted to do was significant. It’s not impossible, but it was mountainous. It was either like, go make an entire new game or do Skyrim.
You might also remember that Bethesda already ported Skyrim to Xbox One as an experiment for Fallout 4, so much of the work was already completed.
And of course, there’s more money in Skyrim – as Hines said:
It just seemed to be a much closer path. It was the most successful game that we had ever done before Fallout 4, so it already had a huge audience.
Hines also revealed to GameSpot that the Skyrim mod support on consoles will work exactly as it does with Fallout 4 .
Although the team is still having issues getting mods working on the PS4 version of Fallout 4, so let’s hope that gets sorted before the Skyrim remaster drops.
Skyrim: Special Edition lands October 28 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC – PC users who already own the game (and all DLC) can upgrade for free.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.