By now it should be no secret that Bethesda will be releasing a remastered version of Skyrim later this year. In fact, it's been confirmed, and will be coming with graphical enhancements, mod support and all sorts of other goodies.
However, with that announcement came two questions: "Why bother with Skyrim instead of making a new game?" and more importantly, "What about Oblivion?"
For what it's worth, both are sound concerns. Skyrim, having come out in 2011, is 5 years old now, thus suggesting that Bethesda should be focusing on making a new Elder Scrolls game instead of reviving an old one. Meanwhile, Oblivion is just as popular as Skyrim, and since it's older than Skyrim, it should have gotten the remaster treatment first.
Now, with testimony from Bethesda, we now know why Oblivion isn't getting a remaster: because the time spent on that would be better spent developing an entirely new game.
"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," explained Bethesda marketing boss Pete Hines. "It's not impossible, but it was mountainous. It was either like, go make an entire new game or do Skyrim."
With that said, Skyrim is fairly old itself, so why is that getting a remaster? As it turns out, the reasoning for why Skyrim is getting a remaster is just as practical as the reason for why Oblivion isn't: Skyrim had already been ported by the development team to the Xbox One, so part of the remaster work had already been finished. The porting was done as a technical exercise while the team was in the research phase for Fallout 4.
"It just seemed to be a much closer path," Hines said. "It was the most successful game that we had ever done before Fallout 4, so it already had a huge audience."
Staying on the subject of Skyrim, Hines touched upon the most appealing feature that will be coming to Skyrim: Special Edition: mods.
Mods in Skyrim will work exactly like how they did in Fallout 4's creation kit. PC owners will get the best deal, getting the Special Edition for free if they already own Skyrim and all its DLC, as well as the obligatory new creation kit alongside it. And, as with Fallout 4, mods will need to be run through the new Skyrim creation kit and published to Bethesda.net to make it available to everyone, including console players.
There are some caveats though: since the remastered PC version is 64-bit, any mods running at 32-bit will need to be modified to be compatible.
Skyrim: Special Edition is just a small bit of what Bethesda has in store for fans. The beloved gamemaker is finishing up its last planned expansion pack for Fallout 4, titled Nuka World. The company also has two untitled large-scale projects in the works.
