Despite the existence of Skywind, Skyblivion, or the fact Morrowind's Vvardenfell popped up in The Elder Scrolls Online recently, it would seem Bethesda has no plans to revisit the medieval RPG series' classics in an official capacity moving forward.
Speaking to the Official Xbox Magazine UK (posted online by GamesRadar), Bethesda vice president Pete Hines 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 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?"
Admittedly with Prey, TES 6, Quake Champions and The Elder Scrolls: Legends, among other projects in the works, it is hard to imagine where Bethesda would find the time to overhaul the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion.
But that'd have been pretty cool, don't you think?
