Bethesda Lacks "Engineering Knowhow" to Make New Vegas Remaster - Inside Games Daily

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Prolific game designer and Fallout New Vegas senior designer Chris Avalon cast heavy doubt on the possibility of a remaster of Fallout New Vegas in an extended interview with the YouTube channel TK's Mantis, saying that Bethesda likely lacks the quote engineering knowhow to pull it off.

[00:00:15]Welcome to Inside Games Daily, the only gaming news show brave enough to agree.

[00:00:19]>> Yeah, I mean, we keep we keep dogging on Bethesda. It's starting to get a little exhausting at this point. Hey, we love you. We love your games. Just it's complicated. It's complicated sometimes.

[00:00:29]Complicated Lawrence is a very good word for this to describe the prospects of a New Vegas remaster. Games Radar caught the news in which Avalon isn't exactly calling Bethesda inept, though he's certainly more blunt than most game devs.

[00:00:44]>> Yeah, and you could, hey, you could read between the lines here if you want. Uh, and he does spill some tea about that working relationship. We'll get to that later. Uh, regardless, Avalon said, quote, "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering know-how to make a remaster of New Vegas at all.

[00:00:58]That's quite a statement, I think.

[00:01:00]>> Pretty blunt, huh?

[00:01:01]>> Yeah. The reason it would be an engineering challenge for Bethesda is that according to Avalon, Obsidian never delivered Fallout New Vegas source code at the end of the project.

[00:01:10]>> Yeah. Yeah. As Avalon reveals, New Vegas's final milestone was to quote deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build in exchange for a $10,000 check.

[00:01:21]>> That's it.

[00:01:22]>> Yeah. Just 10K. You'd think it'd be way more on that, right?

[00:01:24]>> Yeah. Uh, apparently Obsidian CEO Fergus Urkheart elected to skip the $10,000 paycheck.

[00:01:32]>> Makes you wonder why. Maybe it's feeling kind of protective at that point. Uh, who knows? Avalon acknowledges that a remaster could be made similarly to the recent Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Remastered where Unreal Engine visuals are wrapped around the game's creation engine core.

[00:01:47]>> Yeah, it worked out really well for that game. But then Avalon very correctly points out that it would make sense to quote try out that process with Fallout 3 before biting off a New Vegas remaster. And that's what's rumored.

[00:01:59]Fallout 3.

[00:02:00]>> Yeah, that was revealed in some of the uh I guess improperly redacted documents and the anti well in the lawsuit to prevent the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. That whole thing that was a long time ago. Yeah, that was uh apparently was in the works at some point. We have to assume it still is now, but we haven't heard anything about it. And now that Obsidian and Bethesda share a common parent company in Xbox and Microsoft, it's tempting to think that collaborative lines could be reestablished.

[00:02:25]>> Tempting, yes, but further anecdotes from Avalon don't depict the rosiest collaboration.

[00:02:31]>> That's too bad. Uh, there's that tea we did mention in the intro, so we'll get into it in just a sec. First, we got to class up your gaming space a little.

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[00:04:16]I looked it up and Display does have a lot of cool Fallout designs. Just saying. Uh yeah, getting back to the story here. Avalon shared some stories that imply Obsidian and Bethesda didn't really have the best working relationship.

[00:04:26]>> That's what we've heard. Uh elsewhere in the interview with TK's Mantis, Avalon recalled telling press back in the day that New Vegas would run at 30 FPS. Uh he said quote in my mind it's inexcusable that a game would not run 30 frames per second. So I said yes it will. And to my surprise I'm in this Bethesda meeting. This tech director starts lecturing me about you shouldn't have said that. He continued and I'm sitting there taking it and all I'm thinking back of my head is like why do you have a [ __ ] engine that can't run 30 frames per second and then call that your claim to fame and you're the director of technology. It was so offensive to me. I sat there and I smiled and I took it. But overall, that in itself is one fundamental flaw of the technology there.

[00:05:04]>> Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking it. Uh, it's it's interesting that, you know, I don't know, they uh, well, whatever. I'll just leave it there. All right. Avalon also said that Bethesda programmers quote say the engine is all sorts of messes under the hood. I think we've kind of heard this over the years, but yeah, >> everybody knows it, too. You play New Vegas, it crashes every 45 minutes or whatever.

[00:05:24]>> Oh gosh. Yeah. The best you can hope for is to kind of make it crash less, and that's the best anyone's ever been able to do.

[00:05:31]>> Uh, that's not the only time Avalon felt patronized by Bethesda, either. Avalon said that after Obsidian had finished their run of New Vegas DLC's, Bethesda made quote, "A whole PowerPoint about all the things Obsidian did wrong."

[00:05:43]>> My goodness. Yeah. He sarcastically described the event as quote, "Hugely morale boosting."

[00:05:49]Can't even imagine. Sheesh. Uh Avalon said that Bethesda used low review scores for New Vegas DLC as a reason they didn't want to work with Obsidian anymore. Though he added quote they didn't want to keep doing things with us anyway, so whatever.

[00:06:02]>> Yeah. Uh I mean Avalon uh he didn't leave on the best terms with Obsidian either. So he has a reason to be pretty loose-lipped about things or at least that's not hugely surprising. Uh but yeah, it's it's kind of amazing to imagine uh that trying to think of where to begin with this. That story of uh not delivering the source code at the end is so bananas to me. I'm shocked that it's only 10K. I guess if they had a game they could sell, that's all that matters. But yeah, the fact that the source code wasn't delivered at all.

[00:06:32]Feels like a spiteful move. I mean, you don't know why it happened, but uh it doesn't necessarily imply that everything was going great. And that might Yeah, that makes sense. Huh. I thought that uh I think like a lot of people, I thought that once Obsidian and Bethesda were under the same umbrella that maybe Obsidian would have the chance to work on Fallout again, but I think it's even more telling that they kind of made their own version of that with The Outer Worlds. So, uh it's pretty clear statement to me that they're fine doing their own thing. You You're totally right. And like Obsidian, I'm sure they get get asked about Fallout every 3 months or whatever whenever whenever press pops up to talk about Obsidian's new game. But you can look at Obsidian's history and be like, they're making brand new games. Avowed, uh, they're making, what did they just make? Oh, Outer Worlds 1 and 2. Like, they're clearly trying to get away from Fallout. And I'm I'm betting somebody at Microsoft is like desperately trying to get Obsidian and Bethesda in a room to like hash it out. I don't know who is left in terms of executives at Bethesda and executives at Obsidian who have some beef cuz there's probably a couple people still who still have this beef from way back in New Vegas times and it's got to make Bethesda upset that New Vegas is the one that everybody says is the best Fallout, right? Like it that generally speaking most people are like, "Oh, it's the best Fallout." Um I'm sure that that doesn't make people happy at Bethesda either. So, I look, I hope for the sake of all of us gamers that they actually do sit down and talk it out and be like, "Let's make a New Vegas remaster and then possibly get back into the Fallout world with another Obsidian uh not even an expansion, but maybe just like a offshoot or a prequel or a sequel."

[00:08:10]>> Yeah, these days you need every little shred of nostalgia or marketing power that you can possibly scrape together.

[00:08:16]Uh cuz yeah, there's there's good games being made and they just don't get the attention. I I believe remastered had its little pop off. So maybe those numbers have convinced uh the folks at Xbox to mine the Millennial Nostalgia vein a little further and that could motivate some meetings could get some things happening, some checks cut if they're desperate enough to scoop up more Game Pass subscriptions if that's if that's what it did. So there's a Yeah, there's potentially a future there. I have to imagine it would be Fallout 3 first, though. And I also have to imagine that Fallout 3 would probably do better as well. really think Fallout see it's interesting because I know Fallout 3 the remaster of for Fallout 3 I mean like I feel like it's 95% it's going to come out and everyone says it's going to come out this year so I could be wrong but I think generally speaking that that is the rumor. Um and but everybody's like what about New Vegas?

[00:09:01]Why don't why can't New Vegas get a remaster? And so I think that they're going to release Fallout 3 before New Vegas just because they know that that's the one that people want in quotes, you know. Um, and Fallout 3 will be fantastic, just like Oblivion Remastered was. Uh, it'll sell a bunch and then they'll be like, "Okay, now we're going to give you the one that everybody wants, New Vegas." But that's going to be that's like a maybe a year or two away, even after the Fallout 3 remaster, if that gets released at all. Like, this these are all this is all speculation.

[00:09:30]None of these have been confirmed.

[00:09:32]>> Yeah. But at least they have a lot to they have a lot to work with, I guess, if their developers can can start shipping games. Thing is, Obsidian, they've been a factory, man. and they've been making games non-stop. I hope that it I hope that it leads to their success. Um, and I hope that it leads to a bright future where yes, everyone who wants to return to the mid2000s can do so gleefully.

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