Bethesda has just confirmed rumors that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are being remastered. And while I understand the temptation to get caught up in the hype after over a decade without a traditional Fallout game, I just won't get it. ~ degrees I'm still excited. Let us not forget the sorry state in which Virtuos left the Oblivion remaster.
It's been over a year since the last Oblivion Remastered update, released on July 9, 2025. This patch fixes an extensive list of quest, audio, performance, UI, gameplay, and system bugs, while also resolving some of the known crashes. It was promising considering the common Unreal Engine 5 issues that plague PC ports, but the update was completely broken.
Performance is still noticeably sluggish to this day, and the community isn't keeping quiet about it either. Steam forums are actively warning people against buying the game, and social media is flooded with posts asking if performance has improved yet, only to receive a disappointing 'no'. On the other hand, many reviews on Steam, which recently brought the score down to 'mixed', call on Virtuos directly to fix the game.
Of course, we don't know who is developing the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters, but it's likely that Virtuos will continue to work with Bethesda even after Oblivion becomes a huge success. First off, it's already laid the groundwork for remastering Gamebryo games, but more importantly, BGS is juggling The Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5, and post-launch Starfield support, while Obsidian Entertainment is busy developing a new Fallout game.
This puts Virtuos in the lead, but if so, the Fallout remaster risks running into the same problems as Oblivion.
A remaster will be much more difficult to mod
Apart from performance, there is another important issue to consider. This is modding. Bethesda games have thrived thanks to a community that boasts one of the largest modding scenes of any game, but Oblivion Remastered's dual-engine approach made modding much more difficult than the original 2006 title. While Oblivion Remastered's peak concurrent player count of 24 hours a day is only 1,622 in one year, Skyrim Special Edition's peak player count is over 30,000 and continues to soar.
Returning to Fallout 3 and New Vegas a few years later with a last-gen facelift and some quality-of-life improvements to finally bring parity to the PlayStation port and fix some of the issues on PC looks incredibly promising on paper. However, considering Virtuos' track record so far and the likelihood that they will take the same Unreal Engine 5 approach, it's worth being a bit skeptical when it comes to future projects.
No official mod support, no performance issues, just giving up on the game when it needs a little more TLC. This is what the current Fallout remaster really means.
- released
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October 28, 2008
- ESRB
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M (Mature): Blood and gore, intense violence, sexual themes, strong language, drug use.
- developer
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bethesda game studio
- publisher
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Bethesda Softworks
- engine
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gamebrio
