I wonder what would happen if Bethesda gave a few of the best modders full access to the game's code and to the latest version of the engine. I bet they could come up with a current gen remake in under a year without the involvement of a single Bethesda dev.
I think you're severely underestimating how much time, effort, and resources game development takes. Especially when the devs aren't doing it full-time.
Well, in such a scenario I'm also making two assumptions:
That the modders are indeed being paid by Bethesda to work full-time on it since it's meant to be sold when finished (not unlike Skyrim Special Edition, only made by modders)
There's a way to add code and assets from existing mods to their remake. If they have to make it all from scratch then yeah, a year is not enough.
Are we talking about a whole engine re-write or just bringing the game into modern times graphically? Because you could do the latter much easier and with less time (still time consuming yes, but not as much) with just basic modding and not even need the source code.
I wonder what would happen if Bethesda gave a few of the best modders full access to the game's code and to the latest version of the engine. I bet they could come up with a current gen remake in under a year without the involvement of a single Bethesda dev.
I think you're severely underestimating how much time, effort, and resources game development takes. Especially when the devs aren't doing it full-time.
Well, in such a scenario I'm also making two assumptions:
Are we talking about a whole engine re-write or just bringing the game into modern times graphically? Because you could do the latter much easier and with less time (still time consuming yes, but not as much) with just basic modding and not even need the source code.