So it's come to this: "Fallout 3" and "Oblivion" are being remastered
Will I play them? The short answer: Probably not. The long answer: Keep reading to find out!
Yeah, yeah, this one’s about video games. Feel free to ignore until there’s another schizopost about the Beast of Revelation or whatever. Anyways, like the title says: according to recent leaks of Microsoft insider docs, one time-industry darling Bethesda has several projects in the works, not including the forthcoming Elder Scrolls VI. Of those, two caught my eye: remasters of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Informally, these two games suck. They’re not very good at all. I have always thought that Fallout 3 had a story almost as weak as Fallout 4’s, with none of the engaging gameplay or semi-modern graphics to back it up. Sure, it’s a game from 2008, but c’mon - ‘08 gave us shooter classics like World at War, Left 4 Dead, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Battlefield: Bad Company, and, uh… Turok, I guess? In any case, Fallout 3’s gunplay is notoriously awful, and its paper-thin narrative gave us this gem:
For context: at the end of the game’s main quest, your character must enter a highly-irradiated room to press a button, which I guess would give you crazy mega-cancer that immediately turns you to goop. This guy, a possible teammate, is so immune to radiation that I’m pretty sure it heals him. However, if you bring him along and ask him to press the button for you real quick, he says this. I sometimes struggle to criticize this line only because it is such a masterwork of unintentional comedy.
Oblivion’s story, from what I understand, is a bit better. However, I never made it that far in the game, because I have never encountered such an uninspired fantasy world in all of my time reading fiction, watching films, and playing roleplaying games (virtual and tabletop). Each city blends into the next, with no individual identity to speak of; every non-player character is just some variation of a boring British person; and even the plane of Oblivion, filled as it is in the lore with wild landscapes and fantastic creatures, is imagined in the base game as basically Hell. It’s just the same lava pit over and over again.1 After playing Morrowind, the previous entry in the series and one of the most visually unique video games ever made, fifteen hours in Oblivion’s Cyrodiil felt like enough. For all the shit that Skyrim gets, it’s gameplay is better and its world is far more interesting. The game’s titular province is rich with color, and the Nordic-inspired architecture of its cities and ruins does not fail to captivate ten-plus years (and nearly as many re-releases) later.
Game quality aside, here is my real question: what the hell are these remasters going to look like, anyways?
When Dark Souls got a remaster five years ago, we were only a generation of consoles removed from its release. While many fans would have prefered a remake a la what we would later get with Demon’s Souls (2020), a 1080p, 60 FPS, stable version of a then-six-year-old game was good enough. It rarely crashed, looked good, and retained the original’s art style.
However, Fallout 3 and Oblivion will be more than fifteen years old when their respective remasters hit (digital) store shelves. They might even be twenty. The latter was barely new enough in 2006 to be an Xbox 360 game, and both were so infamously buggy that they established a precendent Bethesda has not yet shaken all these years later. Remasters so far in the industry have implied touch-ups, done by porting older engines to newer hardware, allowing for higher visual fidelity but not fundamentally changing parts of the game beyond maybe texture upscaling or added postprocessing effects.2
The issue that faces Bethesda, and is unique to their studio, is this: modders did that to all of their games already, and almost certainly better-implemented than the studio itself will be capable of.
Furthermore, I will eat my fucking hat if they think the average consumer is going to accept the re-release of two games in this console generation on the mid-aughts Gamebryo engine, one of the most unstable SDKs ever conceived, without a full port to something better. But that, my friend, is what we call a “remake” - not a remaster. I would be absolutely astounded if Bethesda is planning on not just developing and releasing Starfield and ESVI on the Creation Engine 2, but also these other two shitty old games on a new engine in the 2020s. Bull-fucking-shit.
But hey, if they do, maybe that means they’ll be so busy that Todd Howard will call up Obsidian, also owned by fucking Microsoft, to develop Fallout 5 - especially considering the amount of outsourcing BGS used for Starfield. That’d make it alllll worth it. Anyways, I’m gonna go replay Fallout: New Vegas for the ten millionth time, if anyone cares.
Granted, from what I hear, it’s expansion, Shivering Isles, takes the player to a much cooler and weirder demiplane of Oblivion featuring Sheogorath, god of Redditors. Whatever.
I wonder if they’ll keep that yucky puke-green filter that permeated every inch of Fallout 3’s Washington DC.