Bethesda has fumbled a bit when it comes to having a perfect Fallout release. In the last 17 years, Bethesda has made three of its own Fallout games in-house and outsourced another game, Fallout: New Vegas, to Obsidian Entertainment. It has been seven years since the last game, Fallout 76, and a decade since the last single-player entry. People are pretty hungry for something new, but unfortunately, it will likely be a good while before Fallout 5 happens. Bethesda has its hands currently tied with The Elder Scrolls 6 and doesn’t typically have two games in full production simultaneously.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Still, Fallout is arguably the most popular it has ever been right now. Not only do these games have a lasting legacy that keeps players constantly talking about them, but there’s also a highly successful TV series as well. Prime Video’s Fallout has been a huge hit and when the first season was released, that success rippled into the games. Players new and old flocked to the previous Fallout games, causing player counts to spike. Fallout 4 went from 25k concurrent players on Steam to nearly 200k around the time Season 1 dropped and Fallout 76 shot up from the low 10k range to 73k concurrents. It was huge, but also represent a problem: there wasn’t a new Fallout release for players to buy.
Bethesda Missed a Perfect Opportunity for a Fallout: New Vegas Remaster
These video game adaptations do wonders for the source material. The Last of Us Part 1, a PS5 remaster of the original PS3 game, was released about 5 months before the premiere of the HBO show. When the show premiered, sales of that remaster skyrocketed by 238%. The PS4 remaster also benefited as well and The Last of Us Part II saw high sales after the second season as well, especially since Season 2 of the show only adapts half of the game.
Having a new release around the time of an adaptation has been key for Sony in particular, as evidenced by other things like Until Dawn. While it’s understandable that Bethesda may not have had something ready for the first season of its show, Fallout Season 2 should have been a different story. The first season ended with a tease that they’d be headed to New Vegas, meaning this would’ve been known for some time. The first season began shooting in summer 2022 before releasing in April 2024. Even then, that New Vegas set-up likely would’ve been cemented earlier than that in the scripts.
That should’ve been enough time for Bethesda to realize it should get a Fallout: New Vegas remaster cooking, prioritizing that instead of a remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It does seem like something may be happening now, but we’re not sure what. Longtime series director Todd Howard recently stated that Bethesda is working on Fallout more than any of its other franchises right now and suggested there are more Fallout games in the works.
It’s rumored that Fallout 3 may get the remaster treatment, potentially ahead of its 20th anniversary in 2028. Nothing has been outright confirmed, so we can only speculate. However, it’s frustrating we don’t have something new to play. A lot of these Fallout games are available on Xbox and Steam, but Fallout: New Vegas is a technical nightmare on PC. PlayStation players are limited to cloud versions that must be streamed, which leads to an inadequate experience. It’s not even a matter of having glossier versions of these games, but having them be accessible in general.
Of course, there was the recent Fallout 4 update which gave the game a little bit of a boost and Fallout 76 added The Ghoul via a new update, but players definitely crave something more substantial. These are games that are already very accessible and well-supported, a lot of them want to see the older games made more easily available. Maybe that will come in time for Fallout Season 3, which begins shooting next summer and will likely premiere in 2027, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
Most Viewed
-
Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
