Oblivion Remastered is just the latest in a long line of redesigns and polished-up versions of some of the best old games, and the Fallout series seems equally primed for such treatment. The natural speculation following Bethesda's return to The Elder Scrolls is that Fallout 3, the studio's first entry in the series, would be the immediate choice. But what about Interplay's beloved original? Series co-creator Tim Cain has been thinking about exactly that, and concludes that there are some pretty key challenges in the way.
In his latest video, Cain takes a "fun Friday" to discuss the struggles that would be faced by a developer looking to remaster the original best RPGs on PC, but the late-'90s classic can be tough to return to.
A fresh coat of paint might be the perfect solution. Cain its that it's something he thinks about a lot, especially when he considers parts of the game that he didn't like and would love to see changed. "But there are issues once you open up that Pandora's box," he cautions. He stresses that he's not necessarily looking to take on the project himself, and that he's not sure he'd even want to attempt it: "By the time you finish this video, you may be like, 'Yes, let's never remaster Fallout.'"
The three categories Cain highlights are "legal issues, technical issues, and subjective issues," although he notes that they interweave somewhat. First is the source code. "When I left Interplay, they said, 'You'd better not have any copies of this,' so I destroyed every copy of the source code I had." He says he even cleared out early prototypes and libraries, losing "personal toy projects" along the way.
There is good news there, however, as Interplay co-founder Rebecca Heineman recently revealed that she found copies of Fallout 1 and 2's 'lost' code. But even "if you somehow magically had the code fall into your lap," Cain remarks, you'd immediately run into issues because it was written using the Watcom compiler. "It is old, it is no longer ed, it's buggy – I found bugs in this compiler. Some of them I had to report to get fixed because it was required for something we were doing on Fallout, and I'm sure there's more."
Cain explains that when he archived Fallout's code, it did not include sound or movies. "The programmer who wrote that code would not give me the source code. I didn't know what was happening then, I still don't know what the situation was – he would just give me a library, compiled, for the game." While they could be extracted from the finished game directly, they would be difficult to convert to a quality that would be satisfying for a remaster.
Next is music licensing; while Cain says there was no time frame on the license used for The Ink Spots' 'Maybe,' such a deal it would not cover a potential remaster, mandating a fresh deal being struck. He also contemplates bugs, and which ones you'd want to fix. Those causing crashes, memory leaks, lost inventory, or incorrect dialogue calls are all reasonable targets. Beyond that, however, you run into questions of subjective changes that might pull the remaster away from its original, beloved form.
"What about AI bugs? Can the AI be improved? Certainly. But is that a fix, or is that a subjective thing you'd be tampering with?" Cain points to the way NPCs shoot each other, or how companions can hit you in the back, or flee without leaving combat. "All of those are things you may want to tinker with and take out. Are these valid things to do in a remaster? Because it will change the feel of the game."
Companions in particular are an area Cain believes could be dramatically improved, because they were a late addition. "But better is subjective here: this would remove some of the jank – some of the fun jank – that people like. Ian won't shoot his Uzi in burst mode at you accidentally." Oblivion Remastered has been a shining reminder that a little silliness can be fun, and particularly when dealing with old games there's often a long-time affinity for some of the more notable bugs and glitches that might occur.
Cain also points to the ability to finish the game without ever collecting the water chip you're initially sent out to find, a trick employed by speedrunners. "Should I fix that? What about something as small and seemingly insignificant as beating ZAX the supercomputer at chess by getting an Intelligence critical success – there's a bug in the check, it never returns a critical, so that will never fire. Should I fix that?"
Even if you do choose to correct some of these issues, that only presents further problems. Mandating the gathering of the water chip might require extra dialogue, but Kenneth Mars, the voice of the Overseer, ed away in 2011. "Here are our options. Don't add any new lines, it'll be weird. We could add them but they're unvoiced. We could carefully write those lines so it uses words that are voiced for other lines – possible, but very restrictive."
Cain also contemplates the possibility of having another actor mimic Mars's performance, saying, "I don't know about the legal aspects of this. I don't want to talk about the ethical aspects, because the fifth solution is to run an AI voice mimic software on all of the Overseer's lines – I bet you a ton of you hate this idea. I'm throwing it out there because these are the kinds of things someone remastering Fallout would have to think about."
Cain considers aspects such as which platforms a potential remaster might land on, and the necessity of adjusting the menus and controls to fit. He asks whether the UI, controls, inventory system, or difficulty settings should be tweaked to suit modern tastes. "How much are we now changing the original Fallout? Is this a quality of life thing, or are we making a new game. Should we turn off critical failures altogether – I know a lot of people hate it – or should there be a setting for it?"
Finally, but also important, are the visuals. Running at a much higher resolution means either scaling assets in real time, or doing it beforehand for a more comprehensive overhaul. "Or do you just leave it and if you go higher res, the sprites and the interface stay small?" In conclusion, Cain says he'd consider tackling the technical issues to be "something I'm good at and would have fun doing," but is aware that the subjective side will never be an easy discussion. "Whoever has to remake this game is going to understand that some of those discussions are going to turn to arguments."
For now, we've rounded up the best Fallout 5 release date might land.
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