Various studios do many things to test new hardware. Nintendo for example decided touching up The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for the Wii U would be a great way to both bring in fans and early adopters as well as get their team familiar with technical capabilities of their new machine. So it’s not really surprising that Bethesda did something similar by getting their dragonslaying open-world fantasy game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, to run on Microsoft’s Xbox One.
During a studio visit by the folks at Game Informer, the director of Skyrim and Fallout 4, Todd Howard explained it was part of the early development stages of the latter project. He stated, “the first thing we did was port Skyrim to Xbox One,” but was then very quick to quell any enthusiasm for a remastered release saying, “don’t get your hopes up yet.” Disappointment aside, it was a very smart call by Howard to do this, as both the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are notoriously buggy, and every new console generation has its share of growing pains when it comes to developers getting used to the new hardware. However, the “yet” part of the statement and the fact that Bethesda have released older games before on new hardware like the pretty decent Dishonored: Definitive Edition does still hold out hope for a chance for Skyrim to show up again later down the line.