Fallout: New Vegas dev says don't expect a remaster, argues Bethesda doesn't have the source code or 'the engineering knowhow'

Fallout: New Vegas writer and former Obsidian creative officer, Chris Avellone, says don't get your hopes up for an Oblivion-style remaster of the game, and his reasoning is a bit of a doozy.

"I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow to make a remaster of New Vegas at all," says Avellone in an interview with TKs-Mantis (spotted by GR+). That's a pretty eyebrow-raising assertion, given that what the studio and Virtuous managed with Oblivion, but Avellone argues there's a unique roadblock with New Vegas: "the very last milestone" Bethesda gave Obsidian Entertainment was to "deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build" for $10,000.

"For reasons unknown to me, but I have suspicions, [Obsidian studio head] Feargus [Urquhart] decided not to cash out that milestone, and did not deliver it," says Avellone. "It's not a strange decision if you feel, which would not be out of the realms of possibility, that the New Vegas experience cheated him out of X amount of money.

"In which case cutting off the revenue stream for that product for a time would be a possibility. I could certainly see that. And I'm not saying Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas, they may have aspects of the code… but everyone that I talked to after that period of time said they had no idea how to reassemble it."

The idea that Bethesda doesn't have the source code for New Vegas seems absurd: I've reached out to Bethesda reps to ask whether there's anything to it.

"What that milestone really meant was if all those assets are given to Bethesda, that means they can recreate the game at any time," says Avellone. Things get a little thornier when you get to how Bethesda would actually approach such a project: the Oblivion remaster uses a fork of Unreal Engine 5 that somehow incorporates the original Gamebryo engine.

"One of the only ways they could do [a New Vegas remaster]" would involve a similar approach, with Avellone adding that the mooted Fallout 3 remake will be a good opportunity to "try out that process… just to see what all the all the problems and issues are as a result."

These days, both Bethesda and Obsidian are owned by Microsoft, though Avellone argues that just because the two companies have the same owner doesn't mean they're necessarily going to play nice.

Avellone himself left Obsidian in 2015, citing creative and business disputes with company management. He has since done contract writing on a number of notable RPGs, including Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Most recently, he has collaborated with Red Info, the studio founded by Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz, on an unannounced game.

The rumours around a Fallout 3 remaster have been swirling for years, and things like the success of Oblivion Remastered and the wildly popular Fallout TV series make it seem almost like an inevitability. Similar levels of hopium waft around a mooted New Vegas remaster, with the most recent only last month.