After years of rumours, Bethesda has finally announced remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas – and given hints about Fallout 5.
After the launch of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, Bethesda fans have been waiting for at least one of the older Fallout games to get the same treatment.
A Fallout 3 remaster has been something of an open secret since 2023 and there’s also been chatter of fan favourite Fallout: New Vegas seeing a remaster or sequel.
Now, with as little fanfare as you’d expect from the games industry nowadays, Bethesda has just casually admitted that both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are getting remasters, alongside a slate of new updates for the studio.
The announcements were made via a blog post on Bethesda’s website, though it pointedly refrained from sharing any release dates or any info whatsoever. Not even a bit of concept art.
It mentions that it’s planning something special for Fallout’s 30th anniversary, but that’s not until October 2027, and you’d think Bethesda wouldn’t wait that long to properly show off the remasters.
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Bethesda also touches upon both The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, saying that the latter is in pre-production, but the former remains the priority and is progressing well: ‘We’re where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day.’
Additionally, it confirms reports that New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment is working on a new Fallout alongside Bethesda, but whether it’s New Vegas 2 or not remains to be seen.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Bethesda is still committed to Starfield, which it describes as ‘an important part of our future.’ It boasts that the game has ‘over 17 million players logging almost a billion hours to date’ and promises further DLC for next year.
All this is quite clearly an attempt at damage control, following the awful Xbox layoffs earlier this month, which saw multiple studios have their teams gutted as 1,600 employees were let go, with another 1,600 still to be impacted before the end of next June.
This has only worsened Xbox’s already dire reputation, so an easy fix is to curry favour with the promise of Fallout remasters people had been demanding for years. Frankly, if Xbox was smart, it wouldn’t have waited till now to get Obsidian on a Fallout project considering New Vegas is the best game in the series and Microsoft has owned them for years.
In an interview with Windows Central, Elder Scrolls and Fallout series director Todd Howard was asked about the layoffs, but all he said was, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, whenever you’ve worked with people for, in some cases, many decades, and they’re no longer here, that’s really personally very difficult, and difficult for our teams.
‘… I think we’re at another change moment for how we support each other, and what we do with these games and for our fans.’
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