Fallout Remake. Personally, I think this might be the most potent combination of words in videogaming. The influence of the Interplay RPG game from 1997 is hard to overstate. From its superb sequel, to Fallout 3, New Vegas, Fallout 4, and all the connective tissue of Skyrim and Starfield, Fallout represents an evolutionary leap forward in the PC role-playing game. Now, with rumors swirling about Fallout 3 Remastered, the creator of the original apocalyptic adventure outlines a personal vision for a hypothetical Fallout remake. Between Starfield DLC and The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda is pretty busy right now, but this sounds so good, maybe, just maybe, it could become a reality.
Imaginative, funny, spooky, and visionary, the first Fallout is one of the greatest games of the ‘90s. Nevertheless, to play it nowadays, especially if you’re coming to it for the first time, might be a little overwhelming. Like a lot of the best old games, it’s from an era before some of the quality-of-life and ease-of-us features that we’ve become accustomed to in the modern gaming world. Timothy Cain, who co-created the original Fallout, outlines extensive ideas for a dream Fallout remake. Top of the list is making it a little more accessible.
“I don’t want to make a completely new game,” Cain says. “If it’s a Fallout remake I think it should be the same game, just better and more modern. Get rid of the bugs or add the stuff we didn’t have time to finish. Get rid of a lot of the frictional parts that are not considered fun challenges in today’s modern world. I would improve the UI and the AI. There are tons of ways to make that UI better. Clean it up. Make it easier to do things with a mouse and keyboard.”
Cain also outlines some of the more detailed changes and improvements that he’d want in a Fallout remake. Between the skills and perk system, the artwork, and even the world design, Cain explains some of the opportunities to make the original classic even better.
“An explorable map would be great,” Cain says. “I would add something like procedural generation… so you could drop in anywhere on the map. I would add procedurally generated ruins, caves, stuff along freeways and roads, kind of like some of the random encounters are already.
“I’d bring in a lot of the original artists and redo the art. I don’t want it to be different. I want it to be much higher detail. I’d also want to add creature respawning. I really wanted that to be a universal thing. I’d definitely add more reactivity to the game. I wish people reacted more to the armor you were wearing… things you’ve said, or all your past actions.
“I’d also like to make changes to maps during play. If you take the water chip from Necropolis there’s a bunch of angry ghouls… but if they had their own water purification, you could fix that. It means dialogue would change, which would be a lot of work but I’d love to put that in.”
Cain shares his vision for a Fallout remake as we also hear rumblings from within leaked Microsoft documents about a possible Fallout 3 Remastered. Who knows? Maybe if that game is indeed real, and proves a big hit (which, surely, it would) we could get a remake of Fallout 1.
“That is an awful lot to change,” Cain says. “I think it’s enough to change. Of course, rolled into this would be fixing all the bugs. Fix things like that so that people could see there was a lot of content that either got cut or never could trigger because of bugs. I’d want to fix all of that. I don’t want to change Fallout too drastically in a remake, but I think this could be done and it would open up the game to being a lot more user friendly to modern gamers.”
If you miss the RPG classic and want to spend even more time out in the Wasteland, try some of the other best games like Fallout. Alternatively, find out everything there is to know on the future of the series and the Fallout 5 release date, which we all want to arrive sooner rather than later.