Todd Howard wanted Bethesda's original RPGs to be playable before worrying about remasters: "You can play Morrowind, you can play Fallout 3"

Before executive producer Todd Howard was on board with remastering classic Bethesda Game Studios RPGs, he wanted to make sure you could all play games like Morrowind and Fallout 3 as they are already.

In an interview speaking to GamesRadar+ about the future of The Elder Scrolls and Creation Engine, Howard says that he's "warmed up on remasters" in recent years. "For a long time I was a no, no, no," he recalls. "That is a game of its age, let's just make sure it runs."

The Bethesda boss then shouts out Xbox's game preservation program, which allows hundreds of Xbox 360 and OG Xbox games to run on modern consoles, often with framerate boosts and at higher resolutions. "They did an incredible job with backwards compatibility," Howard adds. Right now you can go and play the original Oblivion, you can play Morrowind, you can play Fallout 3. It's backwards compatible, it's 4k, and like, great."

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"So that to me, was like, job number one – can you play them as they were?" Though Howard says the idea of remasters "kept coming up," so the studio started with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. "Feeling like this also serves the Elder Scrolls audience that we hadn't had this, this is good for that audience, and having a single player game and kind of this pocket of time. But there's a million ways that that could have gone wrong," Howard says.

Still, remastering older games hasn't been a totally smooth ride for the famed developer. All the leaks surrounding Oblivion Remastered made players "a little anxious," according to Howard, since hearing about these projects unofficially meant expectations weren't quite in tune with reality.

As The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion turns 20 years old, Bethesda creative lead says the RPG is "what Bethesda games are" in the "rawest form"