Fallout 3 And New Vegas Desperately Need The Oblivion Remastered Treatment

I love Fallout 3, and I love New Vegas, but my god, the shooting in those games is awful. It’s like playing with a Nerf gun in your radioactive backyard.

They were bad FPS games at the time (even designer Bruce Nesmith admitted as much), following on from the legendary Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare a year earlier. But two decades later, they feel even clunkier, like you’re a wacky inflatable man trying to keep hold of an assault rifle with your giant spaghetti fingers.

Thankfully, Bethesda and Virtuos might be teaming up for a Fallout 3 remaster (as per a leaked FTC document and reports from reputable insiders), giving one of the most underrated entries in the series the Oblivion treatment.

Shooting Shouldn’t Be Tied To Skills And Perks

Fallout 3 and New Vegas suffered from two major problems: they were Bethesda’s first attempt at making a shooter, and they tried to juggle gunplay with an RPG character sheet. That means accuracy is directly tied to skills and perks, so at lower levels, you’re less adept at shooting. In a real-time action game, that doesn’t feel natural.

For the first two Fallout games, it worked because the games were turn-based, and increased accuracy simply meant you were rolling better dice, just like in a D&D campaign.

All good FPS games are built around skill level. If your accuracy is bad, you have room to improve, which makes progression feel earned and mastery rewarding. Basing that entire learning curve on a levelling system rips that away and just feels frustrating, since your skill will always be hampered by outside forces.

Fallout 4 struck a much better balance, as the shooting not only felt crisp and reactive, but it could be improved with skills that increased your damage, not your accuracy. The RPG mechanics worked in tandem with the flow of a shooter, rather than putting up artificial roadblocks that dragged down both halves of the game.

I’m not sure how much a Fallout 3 remaster will change — Oblivion Remastered still feels like Oblivion, not Skyrim — but the sequel offers a great foundation that would make the DC Wasteland far less tedious to navigate. I just hope they don’t stop at Washington.

One Of The Best RPGs Of All-Time Is Awful To Play

New Vegas tried to shake things up with weapon mods and ADS, but you can only do so much when the foundations are built around an active nuke. It’s a shame, as the three-pronged war for Hoover Dam is layered with some of the wittiest dialogue in the series, and some of the most intricate branching side quests Fallout has ever seen. But because the first impression is a shooting range in Goodsprings with a rifle that feels as effective as a blowdart, recommending New Vegas always comes with caveats.

You probably don’t realise just how old it is. Obsidian’s magnum opus launched in 2010, so a lot of the kids who are growing up with Fallout 4 (and yes, 76) will have never played it. It’s a generation old, and considering it felt bad at the time, it must feel awful today. We often talk about touching grass and going outside, but it’s important to consider these gamers, who are a much broader audience that don’t usually bother with archaic, outdated releases. Good luck selling them on New Vegas, especially when those caveats tend to include a laundry list of necessary mods they’ll have to spend hours sorting.

That’s not to mention the state of the PC port, or that you can only play it on PlayStation by streaming the also awful PS3 port.

A remaster would make the game far more approachable, just as it has done for Oblivion, and it’s hard to imagine a world where you’d do Fallout 3 but not New Vegas. It’s the focal point of the TV show, and Obsidian was able to develop it with such a fast turnaround because it was built on the back of Fallout 3. A remake could do the same, making all of the Bethesda-era games playable on modern hardware with, hopefully, actual good shooting.

With Bethesda’s reluctance to even talk about New Vegas, I’m not holding my breath. But the Mojave is an impenetrable wasteland not just because of the radioactive sandstorms and quarries full of deathclaws, but also because of the abysmal shooting that makes Roblox shooters look prestige. C’mon, it’ll sell gangbusters, Bethesda.