Bethesda just confirmed rumors of Fallout 3 and New Vegas being remastered, and while I understand the temptation to get swept up in the hype after more than a decade without a traditional Fallout game, I wouldn't get for excited yet. Lest we forget the sad state Virtuos left the Oblivion remaster in.
It's been over a year since the last Oblivion Remastered update – which went live on July 9, 2025. The patch fixed an extensive list of missions, audio, performance, UI, gameplay, and system bugs, while also fixing some of the known crashes. It was promising given the usual Unreal Engine 5 hiccups that plagued the PC port, but then updates stopped altogether.
Performance is still noticeably sluggish to this day, and it's not like the community has been quiet about it. The Steam forums are actively warning people against buying the game, social media is full of posts asking if the performance has been improved yet – to which they are met with a disappointing 'no' – while many of the reviews on Steam, which has dropped its latest score to 'Mixed', are calling on Virtuos to fix the game outright.
Although we don't know who is developing the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters, it is likely that Virtuos will continue to work with Bethesda after the huge success of Oblivion. First, it's already laid the groundwork for remastering Gamebryo games, but more importantly, BGS is juggling post-launch The Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5, and Starfield support, while Obsidian Entertainment is busy working on a brand new Fallout game.
That leaves Virtuos to take the lead, but if that's the case, the Fallout remaster risks running into the exact same problems as Oblivion.
Remasters will be much harder to modify
Aside from performance, there is another important issue to consider – modding. Bethesda games thrive because of their communities, with some of the biggest mod scenes in all of gaming, but Oblivion Remastered was significantly more difficult to mod than the original 2006 title due to its dual-engine approach. It's hardly surprising that Oblivion Remastered has dropped to a 24-hour concurrent player peak of just 1,622 in a year, while Skyrim Special Edition continues to soar with peaks of over 30,000 players.
Returning to Fallout 3 and New Vegas all these years later with a current-gen facelift and some quality-of-life improvements, finally bringing parity to the PlayStation ports and addressing some of the issues on PC, sounds incredibly promising on paper. But given Virtuo's track record so far, and the likelihood of it taking the same Unreal Engine 5 approach, it's worth being a little skeptical when it comes to future projects.
No official mod support, performance issues and abandoning the games when they still need a little more TLC – that's what a Fallout remaster really means right now.
- Released
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October 28, 2008
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, intense violence, sexual themes, strong language, use of drugs
- Developer
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Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher
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Bethesda Softworks
- Engine
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Gamebryo
