Remember that these were estimates from more than three years ago and before Microsoft completed its acquisition of ZeniMax in March 2021, so there’s always the chance that some of these plans have changed dramatically or been scrapped entirely. But they may provide an early look at some of the games we can look forward to from Microsoft down the road.
Honestly more commentary on the state of gaming in general with rereleases happening all the time. Bethesda did release Skyrim like five separate times.
But it’s not just Bethesda. Final Fantasy is getting remakes. Persona 3 is being remade. Blizzard is working on rereleases. The Resident Evil games are being remade. Like hasn’t resident evil 4 been released three times now?
This isn’t anything new though. How many different platforms has Super Mario Brothers been playable on? Or Sonic 2?
The best games of every generation get brought to the next. Whether it’s older stuff like Super Mario All Stars or the various Sega Ages and Classic collections. Most great PS1 and PS2 games saw release on the PS3, either digitally or in various physical collections. Tons of PS3 games have been re-released on PS4. Despite no backwards compatibility, there’s only a few PS3 exclusive titles left stuck on that platform. I don’t even know how many WiiU games are left that have not been ported to switch yet: that might be in the single-digits.
I don’t see how Skyrim is much different, but for some reason the Internet loves to hate it Skyrim and Bethesda in particular. Don’t get me wrong: they’re a giant soulless corporation. But there’s so many other corporations that have had way more consumer-unfriendly practices. Re-releasing a game on multiple platforms with new content added, usually at a pretty good price, just seems consumer friendly to me.
For me, I don’t mind that they re-release tesv on whatever potato they can fit it on, it’s that they keep doing this for over 10 years, but where tesvi? Maybe they got grrm writing it.
It’s not as critical for Bethesda’s series, because the stories don’t intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.
Skyrim rerelease doesn’t really change anything, I don’t even think it cost Bethesda much to rerelease it. Your other listed games are remakes made from ground up. It’s like comparing Indie games and AAA games in term of development
There’s a good mixture. Some of the games I listed were literally just ports to he new hardware. Some were complete remakes. I’d say most of Skyrim lies somewhere in-between. It’s the base game, plus the 3 DLC’s, plus however many officially-sanctioned mods or platform-specific changes like for VR, Alexa (lol), or Switch. The re-release and different edition names are trying to set up boundaries and market the amorphous blob that most mod-heavy PC games are to console users.