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Following the release and subsequent success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition on PlayStation 4, we've seen a lot of people ponder whether Bethesda would be interested in bringing its other last-gen titles forward to Sony's console - namely Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. However, in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine, via GamesRadar, vice president Pete Hines says that Skyrim's re-release was something of a one-off for the developer.

"[Skyrim - Special Edition] 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," Hines explains. In other words, Skyrim was ported because the studio was already using it to test its engine on current-gen consoles - transforming it into a full remaster must have seemed like a logical step, and a clever one at that.

"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?" Hines continues. Indeed, the Special Edition is an oddity for Bethesda in that historically, the developer has never really adopted the habits of other studios and publishers. It doesn't pump out a new project every year, and generally speaking, it always seems to have its gaze fixed firmly on what's coming next - such is the reality of managing such large creations, we suppose.

In any case, Hines' explanation is interesting. Now that Bethesda Softworks has evolved into one of the industry's biggest publishers, its priorities may have to shift a little, but we can see the company's core philosophies staying intact for a good few years yet - especially while it's still got The Elder Scrolls and Fallout under its umbrella.

What do you think of Bethesda's current situation? Would you like to see it branch out over the next few years? Tell it to try a new engine in the comments section below.

[source gamesradar.com]