Bethesda prefers to work on new IPs than remasters

Bethesda is known for putting out some great original IPs, and the studio is apparently committed to staying on that path.

In a recent interview with Xbox Magazine, Vice-President Pete Hines shed some light on how the publisher/studio feels about remasters and original IPs, saying they prefer to work on new games rather than going back to something that was done before.

“We did one [remaster] 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. Skyrim was more 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.”

“Plus the mod support on consoles that we did for Fallout 4 – being able to bring that to Skyrim seemed like a pretty cool idea. 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?”

While I commend Hines for vocally addressing the desire to create new IPs, the reality is this generation has been rife with remasters and special editions that they’re likely not going to stop anytime soon.

Still, Bethesda has countless unique IPs under its belt, so I don’t mind a few Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or Dishonored sequels.