Bethesda recently confirmed rumors of Fallout 3 and a new Vegas remaster, and while I understand the temptation to bask in the hype after more than a decade without a traditional Fallout game, I don't get it. too still excited. Lest we forget the sorry state that Virtuos left in the Oblivion remaster.
It's been over a year since the last Oblivion Remastered update—which was pushed live on July 9, 2025. The patch fixes an extensive list of quest, audio, performance, UI, gameplay and system bugs while ironing out some known crashes. This was promising given the usual Unreal Engine 5 hiccups that plagued the PC port, but then updates stopped altogether.
Performance is still noticeably slow to this day, and it's not like the community is keeping quiet about it. The Steam forums actively warn people to stay away from buying the game, social media is full of posts asking if the performance has been improved yet – to which they have been met with a disappointing 'no' – while many reviews on Steam, which has pulled its current score to 'mixed', call on Virtuos directly to fix the game.
Yes, we don't know who is developing Fallout 3 and the new Vegas remasters, but it is possible that Virtuos will continue to collaborate with Bethesda after the great success of Oblivion. For one, it's already laid the groundwork for Gamebryo to remaster the games, but more importantly, BGS is shaking up Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5, and post-launch Starfield support, while Obsidian Entertainment is busy working on a brand new Fallout game.
That leaves Virtuos to take the lead, but if that's the case, Fallout remasters risk running into the same problems as Oblivion.
Remasters will be very difficult to mod
Aside from performance, there is another important issue to consider – modding. Bethesda games thrive because of their communities, boasting some of the biggest mod scenes in all of gaming, but Oblivion Remastered was significantly harder to mod than the original 2006 title due to the dual engine approach. It's no surprise that Oblivion Remastered's 24-hour concurrent peak player count dipped to just 1,622 in a year, while Skyrim Special Edition continues to soar to a peak of over 30,000 players.
Going back to Fallout 3 and New Vegas all these years later with a current-gen face-lift and some quality-of-life improvements, finally bringing parity to the PlayStation ports and addressing some issues on PC, sounds incredibly promising on paper. But considering Virtuos' track record so far, and the likelihood that it will take the same Unrealistic Engine 5 approach, it's worth being a little skeptical when it comes to future projects.
No official mod support, performance issues, and games being abandoned when they still need a little more TLC — that's what Fallout Remaster really means right now.
- issued
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October 28, 2008
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and gore, intense violence, sexual themes, strong language, drug use
- developer(s)
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Bethesda Game Studio
- Publisher(s)
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Bethesda Softworks
- Engine
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Gamebrio
