The fact that an unofficial, community-driven Fallout New Vegas remake is in the works and Bethesda continues to look the other way is “like an 18-carat run of bad luck.”
Released within 2 years of Bethesda’s Fallout 3, New Vegas was Obsidian’s love letter to the older Fallout titles, albeit made within the hitherto famed Bethesda’s 3D framework. Fallout New Vegas is still touted by many as the best role-playing game in the series and one of the best the genre has to offer.
But if it’s already as good as us fans claim it to be, one might ask, ‘Why bother remaking it?’
Fallout New Vegas Was Rigged From The Beginning
After Fallout 3’s release in 2008, Bethesda moved on to Skyrim’s development; yet there was strong demand for a new Fallout title. Fans wanted more of 3D Fallout.
Bethesda heard and loaned the project to Obsidian. This decision is easily understandable, because 2008’s Obsidian housed several Black Isle veterans who worked on the original 2D Fallout games. If any studio in the world understood the intricacies of the Fallout universe as well as Bethesda, it was Obsidian.
However, Obsidian was strapped for time.
New Vegas debuted in 2010 with a lukewarm reception, thanks to the game-breaking bugs and crashes it was riddled with. A game of this much scope was born in just two years, which seems like a miracle when we visit it through the lens of our present time.
As intimated later by Bethesda head Todd Howard, they deemed Obsidian to be the only studio capable of doing justice to the Fallout universe. And then they gave them an unrealistic deadline.
Was the game rigged from the start? We may never find out.
Talking about justice, Obsidian didn’t receive any royalty as the game missed Bethesda’s stipulated 85+ Metacritic rating by one point.
Now, Obsidian and Bethesda are both under the Xbox umbrella. With Fallout 5 being almost a decade away, I can’t see a reason why Microsoft would not want to tuck a Fallout New Vegas Remake somewhere in the middle.
F4NV Is Doing What Bethesda Didn’t
New Vegas’ proverbial redemption arc undoubtedly owes a whole lot to its modding scene. Since the title’s launch, its passionate modding community has been hard at work, patching the game with countless bugfixes.
But this came at a cost—players on PS3 and Xbox 360 were left behind. Even with backward compatibility, the later generation of consoles never got mod support for Fallout New Vegas.
Enter Fallout 4 New Vegas, the modding community’s I-will-do-it-myself answer to Xbox-Bethesda’s apathy. For the uninitiated, F4NV is an unofficial project aimed at recreating New Vegas inside Fallout 4’s engine.
It is an enormous undertaking with every asset of the game having to be created from scratch, including 65,000 lines of dialogue to be voice acted. While the project is coming along slowly (the last video was posted five months ago), the finish line is understandably years away.
The modders around Bethesda RPGs are no strangers to ambitious mods getting shelved mid-way. After all, these are volunteer-run passion projects, and I can’t fault them for it.
Will F4NV meet the same fate? Only time will tell.
Either the F4NV team will soon reach their goal of creating a definitive Fallout New Vegas remake, or Xbox-Bethesda suits will decide that the Mojave Wasteland and Strip are in dire need of reconstruction.
If anyone at all could provide justice to New Vegas’ potential—to emerge as one of the best RPGs ever created sans the jank—I want either to manifest.
