Todd Howard has changed his position. Even though he still describes himself as “anti-remake,” the success of Oblivion Remastered has clearly eased the Bethesda chief’s stance. The studio director now admits that Oblivion Remastered‘s results are making them consider additional entries.

When The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Remastered launched in April 2025, it was treated as an experiment, and it worked so well that the fantasy RPG‘s huge success ended up reshaping Bethesda‘s plans. It drew more than four million players in three days and sold over one million copies on PS5. Back in 2018, Todd Howard said he would rather not remaster Morrowind or Fallout 1, because he believed games should be preserved “as they were.”

He is still anti-remake, just less rigid about it

Now, however, the success of Oblivion Remastered has shaken up Bethesda‘s roadmap, at least based on Todd Howard’s comments in an interview on the Kinda Funny podcast. “I’ve softened on the whole remaster thing. Given the success of Oblivion Remastered, we’re thinking about others, but we’ll see what happens.” In this case, though, it is important to unpack what Howard means by “remaster” and why preserving the original game’s DNA matters so much to him.

With Oblivion Remastered, the objective was to deliver “an absolutely better version than you can imagine” while still keeping the original game running underneath it (via PC Gamer). If you inspect the installation files, the code from 2006 Oblivion is still in there. That tells us Howard belongs to the group of developers who prefer to preserve “a game’s personality” and improve selected elements, such as visuals. In this remaster’s case, they went even further by also refining Oblivion‘s level-scaling system.

Remakes, however, are a completely different issue in his view. “I’m pretty anti-remake,” Howard said, while also showing respect for the rest of the industry’s remakes, “but I really believe that a game’s age is part of what it is and its personality and what it stood for when it came out.” That position is consistent with reports suggesting Fallout 3 could receive “the Oblivion treatment,” something Howard did not deny when asked about it. Windows Central also reported that something similar may be happening with Fallout: New Vegas, though it will be a long wait before we find out whether that is true. In the meantime, a Skyrim veteran believes remastering Morrowind would be a bad idea.

Source: 3djuegos