Bethesda has made sure to port Skyrim to every platform under the sun, but true remasters of its games are far and few between. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is the studio’s first real remaster project, and the leaked-but-not-announced Fallout 3 Remastered is seemingly coming in the near future.
Despite many players asking for remasters of Morrowind or other Bethesda titles in the past, studio lead Todd Howard has been outwardly against the traditional remaster method in the past. As you can probably tell, Howard is no longer completely against the idea of remasters, but only if the original games they’re based off are still playable somewhere.
In an interview with GamesRadar, Howard explained that he used to be against the idea of remastering a game with huge graphical improvements or mechanical changes. “That is a game of its age, let’s just make sure it runs,” he would say, although the iconic game designer has now “warmed up” on the prospect of bringing older games back.
This makes a lot of sense. For decades now, Bethesda has been giving away The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall for free on their website, and the fan project OpenMW has been able to exist without any issue. The studio also hasn’t delisted its games with earlier Fallouts and Elder Scrolls RPGs still available to buy.
Howard explains that Xbox’s work on backward compatibility, which brought back Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas to modern consoles, meant those games were now playable again. “Right now you can go and play the original Oblivion, you can play Morrowind, you can play Fallout 3. It’s backwards compatible, it’s 4k, and like, great,” he said. Obviously, if the games are now playable, the only real purpose of a re-release is to be a substantial remaster.
Howard explains that “job number one” was to make sure that fans can “play them as they were”, an issue that was solved on PC and Xbox. However, as fans still asked for remasters, Bethesda allowed Virtuous Studios to give Oblivion a gigantic facelift in a way that “serves the Elder Scrolls audience” that hadn’t seen a new single-player release since 2011.
The Bethesda lead claimed that “there’s a million ways that could have gone wrong”, but Oblivion Remastered was a huge success. While the game’s technical issues are still lingering, the game was largely well received, and introduced the now 20-year-old fantasy RPG to millions of gamers that may have never played its original incarnation.
While Bethesda isn’t a bastion of game preservation, the studio does do better than most, and that does include its frequent ports of Skyrim to everything except your mobile phone. While companies like Nightdive actively seek out lost or forgotten games to bring back to life, Bethesda has spent decades offering older games for free, or simply allowing fans to do whatever the hell they want with their older titles. Daggerfall Unity, anyone?
Of course, Bethesda still has a lot of preservation work to do. There’s a number of older Elder Scrolls games—such as Shadowkey or Redguard—that should be brought back in some form. While these games may not be particularly good, they should be playable on console in some type of collection. After all, these games definitely aren’t getting Unreal Engine 5 remasters, well, ever.
