With rumors going around of a potential remaster of Fallout: New Vegas, former senior designer on the game, Chris Avellone, has revealed there were even talks of a sequel at one point. In an interview with TKs-Mantis, which you can check out below, Avellone revealed this as part of partially confirming the host’s theory that the events of Fallout: New Vegas take place in a world where the cancelled prototype of Fallout 3 – codenamed Van Buren – also happened.
He said that TKs-Mantis was “partially right,” going on to note that “there are certain things that were gonna take place in Van Buren that do happen during the time of New Vegas.” Despite this, however, “not a ton of” things from Van Buren affected the story of Fallout: New Vegas aside from “a little bit” of a planned plot point involving conflicts between the New California Republic and a “merchant mafia.”
“That’s why all those nukes go off, cause I’m like, ‘well, I need to destabilize some regions,” Avellone explained. “Like, not wipe out factions, but I need to shake up both the Brotherhood, I need to shake up the NCR, I need to have them even more at each other’s throats in California.’ And so that was the reason for some of the precursor decisions for some of the DLC stuff and some of the stuff in core New Vegas … When we still thought we’d be able to do a New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be, but that quickly evaporated.”
As for the evaporated idea of a New Vegas 2, Avellone has said that it “will not happen in the next six years at least, if ever.”
In the same interview, Avellone had also said that a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas in the vein of last year’s The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is unlikely due to Bethesda’s lack of engineering know-how to make it.
“I don’t think Bethesda has the engineering know-how to make a remaster of New Vegas at all,” he said. This lack of know-how was reflected in the fact that, when New Vegas was still in development at Obsidian Entertainment, Bethesda had offered the studio a $10,000 bonus if it could “deliver all the source code and the ability to make the build.” This bonus was skipped by studio lead Feargus Urquhart.“What that milestone really meant was if all those assets are given to Bethesda, that means they can recreate the game at any time,” he explained.
While a collaboration of this scope between Bethesda and Obsidian seemed unlikely in the years following the 2010 release of Fallout: New Vegas, both companies now fall under the Xbox Game Studios banner following a series of acquisitions by Microsoft. This means that there is potential for the two to work together to remaster the critically acclaimed cult classic open-world RPG.
March also saw a report indicating that Iron Galaxy Studios might be involved in the development of a Fallout: New Vegas remaster. However, the studio quickly dispelled the notion by revealing that any hints towards the remaster were merely a “behind-the-scenes” look at its preparations for team meetings, and that it wasn’t involved in any project related to the Fallout franchise.
