Prep work on Fallout 4 helped ease the transition of Skyrim to current-gen consoles.
That’s according to Bethesda’s Vice President Pete Hines, who spoke to GamesRadar about both the PS4 version of Skyrim and the company’s overall approach to remasters. Generally speaking, Hines believes Bethesda should be firmly focused in future titles, but there are exceptions to the rule (see: Dishonored) where a current-gen port can be seen as a smart business move.
First up, Hines reflected on the impact of developing Fallout 4 for PlayStation 4 and how this ultimately helped the team bring about Skyrim: Special Edition.
“Skyrim was … 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.”
Dishonored notwithstanding, Bethesda generally puts new ideas above all else, according to Hines, who spoke about the effort and manpower needed to engineer a current-gen remaster.
“We did one for Dishonored but that was a unique case where it was a new IP at the very end of the last generation of consoles. 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.
“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.”
Bethesda Games Studios currently has at least three major titles simmering in various stages of development, one of which is surely the sixth Elder Scrolls game.
[Source: GamesRadar]
