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The Elder Scrolls VI is next rather than Oblivion HD or Morrowind HD

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There was no Elder Scrolls VI announcement at QuakeCon, but the show hasn’t passed by without some news on the highly anticipated sequel.

Over here in Dallas, Texas for QuakeCon 2016, there was some slight hope amongst attendees that Bethesda Softworks might use the event to announce a sixth instalment of the Elder Scrolls series. It was highly unlikely, given that a HD remaster of Skyrim and a collectable card game spin-off in Elder Scrolls Legends are the primary focus for the IP in 2016, but you can’t blame a fan for holding out hope.

During a lengthy interview with Pete Hines, vice-president of Bethesda Softworks, I probed into The Elder Scrolls future and got an interesting response. We’ll publish the full interview shortly, but here is that snippet:

If Skyrim HD proves to be success, how much more likely will that make it for you guys to greenlight HD remakes of Oblivion and maybe Morrowind, or are they just too old now?

The question becomes, "should we work on a Morrowind or Oblivion remaster, or should we work on Elder Scrolls VI?"

Pete Hines: I think a lot of my answer has to do with their age. 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 it 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.

Our Take? We’re more than excited to just hear Elder Scrolls VI even get mentioned and it’s great to see that Bethesda is set to concentrate on a true sequel rather than digging into remakes of old Elder Scrolls or Fallout games. However, if Skyrim HD sells five million copies, will that philosophy change? Surely such a project could be outsourced, right?


The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is available to preorder on PS4 and Xbox One from $85.99


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