Plans for a Fallout: New Vegas remaster may not happen after all, as one of the original creators questions whether Bethesda has the skill to make it.
Given how beloved Fallout: New Vegas is amongst fans, being widely regarded as the best Fallout game ever made, an updated remaster seems like a no-brainer for Bethesda and Microsoft.
With both Bethesda and New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment under the Microsoft umbrella, fans have been hoping for a New Vegas remaster for years but it’s never happened.
A remaster is rumoured to be in the works, alongside a Fallout 3 remaster, but a former New Vegas developer has poured cold water on the idea, arguing that Bethesda lacks the ‘engineering knowhow’ to make it.
Chris Avellone, who worked as a senior designer on New Vegas during his time at Obsidian, was recently interviewed by YouTuber TKs-Mantis and, naturally, the topic of a Fallout: New Vegas remaster was brought up.
‘I don’t think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow to make a remaster of New Vegas at all,’ asserted Avellone, claiming that Bethesda might not even have the source code for the original game.
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Avellone alleged that Bethesda had offered $10,000 for Obsidian to ‘deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build,’ only for studio head Feargus Urquhart to not ‘cash out that milestone.’
‘I’m not saying Bethesda doesn’t have the source code for New Vegas, they may have aspects of the code,’ Avellone continued, ‘But everyone that I talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it.’
If this is the case, Bethesda would have to recreate the whole game from scratch, which isn’t ideal. Especially given Bethesda’s reputation for launching games in less than stable states.
To its credit, Bethesda has improved recently. For all of Starfield’s faults, it was more technically competent than previous efforts despite still having its fair share of bugs at launch.
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Some will insist that Obsidian, as the original developer, should spearhead a remaster, but unless that’s one of the four games it’s currently working on, it may not have the time or resources to handle it.
Alternatively, Bethesda could simply put an outside studio in charge of a remaster. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was primarily handled by Virtuos and that partnership proved successful given the game was a critical and sales hit (although also suffering from a lot of bugs).
Whatever the case, Microsoft will want something Fallout related out sooner rather than later, to capitalise on the success of the Fallout TV show, which wrapped up its second season in February and just so happened to be set in New Vegas.
The older games saw a boost in interest thanks to the first season, but aside from spin-offs, there’s yet to be a wholly new mainline release since Fallout 4 in 2015. And with Fallout 5 still many, many years away, an updated remaster of an older game makes the most sense.
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