Bethesda CEO Todd Howard recently granted an interview to YouTuber MrMattyPlays, in which among other things he addresses the controversy over Starfield’s DLC pricing and some of Bethesda’s future projects. But there’s also room for some chatter about the past and, with the TV series putting the post-apocalypse back on everyone’s minds, the original Fallout games, developed by Black Isle Studios but now owned by Bethesda.
The big takeaway is that Bethesda has no plans to return to the first games in the series (Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics) and remake them. “A main priority for us is to make sure they’re available and you can still play them on the PC,” says Howard of the early isometric games. “And making sure that they run OK. As far as beyond that, we’ve talked about it, but our priorities in terms of ‘Hey let’s go do dev work and make certain things work’, they haven’t been in those areas, so again priority is ‘can people load it up and play it?'”
“And I do think we want [the games] to load up and run well,” says Howard. “The rest of it… I could argue that some of the charm of games from that era and the original Fallout is a little bit of that age. I would never want to sort of paste over some of that with, ‘Well we changed how this works so it’s more modern.'”
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Perspectives will differ, but if you ask me this is a good Todd Howard opinion: these games are still fantastic, and I don’t really see how you’d remake them without losing most of what makes them great. Are they of their time? Sure, these are isometric turn-based strategy titles from the late 90s, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
“As long as you can download it,” ends Howard, “as long as it loads up and runs, I think I’d like people to experience it the way it was.”
MrMattyPlays ends this line of questioning by invoking Wasteland, a Fallout spiritual successor, and pointing out that this is available on consoles. Any prospect of that with the original Fallouts?
“Anything is possible,” says Todd, in a manner that makes clear this is not going to happen. “But that’s gonna be a longer dev throw, and you have to ask yourself is that where we wanna put our time right now… or is it best played the way it was on a PC? And if you ask me right now the best way to play it is with a mouse & keyboard on PC.”
Not everything needs remade, and for my money the original Fallouts are fine as they are. These days there are a whole host of mods to smooth out some of the elements that haven’t aged so well, anyway, but after the first few minutes you just get lost in this detail-packed world and can feel the majesty of 1997 in PC gaming wash over you. OK, fine, I’m old. Look: if you really want a first-person Fallout 2? Bethesda isn’t doing one, but a dedicated group of modders is.