Todd Howard has 'softened' on remasters, but he's still 'anti-remake'

Todd Howard has received your emails, seen your comments, possibly even read my articles (sorry, Todd), but no: it sounds like he's not going to remake Morrowind, or Daggerfall, or Fallout 1 any time soon.

A remaster, though? Well, perhaps. In a recent chat with Kinda Funny, Howard says he's "softened on the whole remaster thing" in the wake of last year's Oblivion Remastered. No wonder: that game made Bethesda approximately a squillion dollars; I'd soften on the concept too.

Back in 2018, Howard was much more opposed even to remasters: "For something like Morrowind, my personal preference is not to remaster it. We [also] get asked a lot to remaster [1997’s] Fallout 1, and I usually say, if you have a PC, you can play Fallout the way it was. I think that’s how it should be," he said at the time. Now? "Given the success of [Oblivion's] remaster, we think about others, but we'll see what happens."

Which sounds to me like, well, what we all kind of know anyway: yeah, obviously Bethesda is going to put out more Oblivion-style remasters of its classics somewhere down the line, likely starting with Fallout 3. But a full-blown remake? Howard still says no.

"I'm sort of anti-remake," said Howard. "I respect the other ones out there, but I really think the age of a game is part of who and what it is, like its personality and what it represented when it came out." Ironing out those kinks? It just doesn't appeal to Howard and co.

Howard explains that this is how Bethesda settled on its approach for the Oblivion remaster: "I definitely wanted it to be a remaster, but kind of the absolute best version of that you can imagine. So it was important to us that the original game was running." Indeed, it was—if you check an install of Oblivion Remastered, you'll find the original game's files ensconced in there like a mosquito in amber.

I agree entirely with Howard, frankly. If Bethesda came out and announced a Morrowind remake tomorrow? I'd be sceptical. I just don't think Bethesda's modern sensibilities would do that game any favours. In fact, I think it would erase a lot of what made it special.

A remaster, though? Well, my ideal scenario is still for Bethesda to just canonise OpenMW as a modern version of the game, but I won't pretend for a second that I wouldn't be there on day one to see a properly gussied-up version of my favourite game.

I do have to pull him up on a couple of things, though. First of all, let's not pretend you left every part of Oblivion untouched, Todd. That abysmal scaled-levelling system from the original game is nowhere to be seen, so there are clearly some refurbishments Bethesda is okay with making. Second? Oblivion Remastered's last patch, its second, came out in July, and the game is still riddled with bugs and performance issues. I don't think you can call it the "absolute best version" of Oblivion just yet.