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Don't hold your breath for a Fallout: New Vegas remaster akin to the treatment Oblivion got, according to Chris Avellone, because Bethesda apparently doesn't have the engineering chops to pull it off.
"I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow to make a remaster of New Vegas at all," the prolific RPG veteran and New Vegas senior designer says in an interview with TKs-Mantis.
The main reason for Avellone's doubt is that "the very last milestone" Bethesda apparently gave to New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment was to "deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build" for a $10,000 cheque. Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart allegedly decided to skip that pay check.
"What that milestone really meant was if all those assets are given to Bethesda, that means they can recreate the game at any time," Avellone explains. A source code-less Bethesda might mean a remaster-less Bethesda, then.
But there may still be ways around the conundrum. Avellone agrees "one of the only ways they could do it" would be to wrap the Creation Engine original in Unreal Engine's visuals, not unlike how The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered went about it. The veteran game developer also said it would be pragmatic to "try out that process with Fallout 3" before jumping over to New Vegas "just to see what all the all the problems and issues are as a result."
Now that Obsidian Entertainment and Bethesda Game Studios fall under the same corporate umbrella of Microsoft, it's also possible the two could collaborate to unearth the game's source code. Although Avellone doesn't think sharing a parent company necessarily makes the two parties more willing to work together.
Improperly redacted court documents from Microsoft first made mention of the Oblivion remaster, which did eventually come to pass, and a Fallout 3 remaster, which remains to be seen, years ago Fresh off hints from Todd Howard, a more recent report also claimed Bethesda was, in fact, reviving its post-apocalyptic wasteland.
