Have you ever thought to yourself, wow, the original Fallout would be the perfect candidate for a remaster? Well, first, you are 100% correct. And second, OG Fallout lead Tim Cain says the process of doing so—if and when someone decides they’re going to do it—is a whole lot more complicated than you might think
Cain, as you may be aware, has made something of a habit of sharing deep-dive retrospectives on his past work, and his videos are generally informative, insightful, and entertaining. For his latest talk, you can add “disappointing” to that list, because while Cain isn’t dead-set against the idea of a Fallout remaster, he does have a rather long list of obstacles that such an endeavor would face.
First and foremost, legal issues are a big potential roadblock: Bethesda, which now owns the Fallout property, would have to green-light the whole thing, and music would presumably have to be re-licensed as well—a Fallout remaster without the Inkspots just would not fly, after all.
Even with a thumbs-up from all involved—and as we’ve learned from from NOLF over the past 25 years, that’s no sure thing—Fallout’s age is another problem: The game’s audio and video libraries are proprietary, and it was compiled using the old Watcom compiler, which is itself aged, buggy, and very limited in capability. (Ironically, Cain said he found his original Watcom CD, but doesn’t currently have an optical drive in his PC.) It’s also not compatible with newer versions of DirectX, and while I’m not a programmer I would guess that would also prove something of a headache.
But lawyer headaches and technical hurdles can be overcome—what’s really interesting is what Cain described as the “subjective” approach to remastering the Fallout experience. Some bugs are obviously problems (and Fallout has its share) but others contribute to the feel of Fallout: Cain said he could easily make companion AI “way better,” for instance, but “better is subjective here. This would remove some of the jank, some of the fun jank, that people like. You know, Ian won’t shoot his Uzi in burst mode at you. Accidentally.”
From there Cain ticks off a list of other things that could be changed, maybe should be changed, but maybe not, too: The ability to finish Fallout without ever finding the water chip that’s at the center of the game, for instance, or a bug in the code that prevents critical successes in chess games against ZAX the supercomputer. Both of those are technically bugs, but they’re also at this point well-established parts of the Fallout mythos. Should they be corrected in a remaster?
Similar questions hover over more granular aspects of the game, like difficulty, display resolutions, and of course the archaic Fallout UI. “People really hated that long strip inventory we had, and the fact that when you added an item it went to the bottom so you had to scroll all the way down,” Cain says.
“A simple fix would be, make [the] latest items added go to the top, be first in the list. How about a whole ‘sort-by’ option—sort by weight, sort by value, sort by recently added? How about a grid—how about we just make it instead of a strip, we make it a grid? That would be a whole bunch easier. But how much are we now changing the original Fallout? Is this a quality of life thing or are you making a new game?”
It’s an interesting topic that goes way beyond just Fallout, and one that Cain has clearly put some thought into—which, to be clear, should not be taken as a suggestion that he’s actively digging into a Fallout remaster: “I’m not even sure I want to do this,” he states emphatically near the start of his chat, “and as you watch this video you’ll figure out why.”
But he’s also not rejecting the idea out of hand: While he has “absolutely no interest” in trying to untangle the legal part of the equation, Cain said he “would love to dive in and work on some of these technical issues.” As for the rest of it, he has some ideas but isn’t looking for arguments—although arguments, he acknowledges, are inevitable.
“The bottom line is working on such a remaster should be enjoyable,” Cain says to wrap things up. “Discussions about these things should be fun. I do not feel like arguing about them but I do feel like discussing them in detail. I like doing that. Whoever has to remake this game is going to understand that some of those discussions are going to turn to arguments, and some of those subjective decisions do not have a correct answer and people are going to argue about what to do.”
Personally, I would love a Fallout remaster, ideally with a light touch—make it run on modern systems, make it look gooFalloutd, and otherwise leave it alone. (Except for the parts that shouldn’t be left along, but that, as Cain said, we can argue about later.) There may not be much hope of that happening, but it does seem almost certain at this point that Fallout 3 Remastered is on the way—and hey, I’ll take that, too.
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