Today, Bethesda revealed why The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was chosen to get the ol’ remaster treatment instead of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion  — calling the work needed to remaster Oblivion “mountainous.”

Ever since the announcement of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition at E3 2016, fans have wondered why Bethesda chose Skyrim instead of older entries in the series, such as: Oblivion. Well today Bethesda’s Pete Hines revealed why to GameSpot: saying that the work needed to remaster Oblivion would be too much of an undertaking, and would be better spent towards a brand 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,” Hines explained. “It’s not impossible, but it was mountainous. It was either like, go make an entire new game or do Skyrim.”

Hines also mentioned that some of the work had already been done for the remaster when the development team ported Skyrim to the Xbox One as a technical exercise.

“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.”

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is set to release for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 28th. It will include all DLC content, mod support on both PC and consoles, and will be priced at $59.99.

My Opinion:

This could all be summed up in much easier and shorter way: it comes down to money. Skyrim has a bigger audience and requires less resources, aka more money to be made.

Tyler Fischer is a Senior Writer for MONG who plays video games when he’s not busy researching alien conspiracy theories at 2AM. You can find him on Twitter