Should we eventually get re-releases of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it appears they're far more likely to be remasters than remakes. Bethesda head Todd Howard isn't keen on top-down do-overs of a game, instead preferring to keep as much of the original vision intact as possible through remastering.
He explained his position on Kinda Funny. "I've softened on the whole remaster thing," he says. "I'm sort of anti-remake. I respect the other ones out there, but I really think the age of a game is part of what it is and its personality and what it represented when it came out."
Preceding last year's Oblivion Remastered, conversations emerged about digging through Bethesda's releases for remastering on modern hardware. Gradually, the fourth mainline Elder Scrolls emerged as "the right one," and it was approached as if the team had kept supporting it over the years.
"It was, 'I definitely want it to be a remaster, but the absolute best version of that you can imagine,'" he adds. "So it was important to us that the original game was running, so imagine you had patched that game many, many, many times for many years, what would you have done?"
Visually, the idea was, "let's just make it look modern but still in the style it was," keeping that mid-2000s Bethesda feel. "We're not going to redesign the armor to be something new in The Elder Scrolls. It's like that version of it looking the way you remember it, but up-resed," Howard states.
To be sure, Oblivion Remastered really does feel like a time capsule, warts and all. It bodes well for whatever Bethesda's doing for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, because it suggests they'll have much the same vibes as they did when we first enjoyed them.
On the subject of Fallout releases, Howard once again says there are "multiple" projects in the works. Someday we'll get more out of him, I'm sure, but today is not that day. Something Fallout-related seems nearer than The Elder Scrolls 6, at least.
