I doubt it. We take expenses into account before we compute profit. A game that makes 20 million dollars will lose Bethesda money if they spend 20 million and one dollar developing and marketing it.

The cost of combining all five games into one enormous super-ultra-mega-game would be astronomical. I seriously doubt that they could make a profit from such an endeavor.

That makes me sad.

Oh well, there is always imagination.

Another factor to consider is Bethesda's rule that it never does sequels, instead preferring to reinvent itself from scratch for every game. They have followed that rule religiously since Todd Howard has been in charge. I doubt they would break it to put all of their games on the same engine. They purposely make each game different.

I didn't know that. That explains a lot. I still say they went too far with Skyrim and the chargen needs to more closely follow the model Gary Gygax gave us. The d&d character sheet was virtually copied into Daggerfall. All of the other games used a skill point system modeled after d&d. Skyrim uses an overly simple and barely customizable skills tree. If I wanted to blindly build a skill tree, I would just play Infinity with my kids.

Honestly for me the problem is that these games are very different and each one of them "play" differently, Morrowind for example without it's unique gameplay experience wouldn't be Morrowind, So to me, porting it to The Skyrim engine (like the on going project that we don't talk about here) is not an obvious net upgrade.
Sorcerer Dave has an excellent video in which he explains this quite well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0jiOpD-AQ

I would tend to agree with everything you just said. It's one of the reasons I got into mods, since I have more faith in modders than Bethesda to deliver the type of gameplay experience I am looking for in a game.

Edit: I appreciate Bethesda's games mostly for their modability and their amazing mod community.

I think the fact that we enjoy their products goes without saying, we play them and discuss them on forums owned by Bethesda.

But I do also believe that part of their strength and cult following is due to the modding community. Just look at Doom.

It would be a huge project and it would take way too long.

I'd especially love to have remastered versions of Daggerfall and Morrowind with better game engines. At least there is a fan version of Morrowind coming out called Skywind.

But I'd rather have Bethesda focus all their energy on the next TES game. Remastering older games would only increase the (already long) wait on TES VI.

That is a great philosophy, it makes me wish that ZeniMax was publicly traded.

Ah, Hell, who am I kidding. I'd buy your stock any way, and get a single certificate to get autographed by Patrick Stewart, Lynda Carter, Sean Bean, Michael Hogan and whomever you got lined up for VI.

Shhhhhhhh!

The first rule of Fight Club is we do not talk about Fight Cub.

Due to potential legal issues, Bethesda has asked us not to mention those projects ~ by name.

You're going to get us kicked out of the club.