Fallout 3 developer says a remaster would have to improve the ‘not good’ gunplay

This week’s big news was the reveal and simultaneous release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, a remaster-slash-remake of the 2006 classic that’s immediately shot to the top of the Steam charts.

The remake was a co-production between Bethesda and Virtuos, and prior to the official announcement had been one of the worst-kept secrets of recent years, thanks to its appearance on a list of upcoming titles revealed during Xbox’s FTC negotiations in 2023. It wasn’t the only Bethesda remaster on there: hello Fallout 3.

A Fallout 3 remaster now seems inevitable, even if it might be some ways off. And one of Fallout 3’s original designers has been chewing over the areas of the game that any spruced-up version would look to target.

“What did you see in Fallout 4? That will tell you what they felt was necessary to change from Fallout 3,” designer Bruce Nesmith told VideoGamer. “I know in Fallout 4 there was a lot of work done on the gun combat, because Fallout 3 is the first time they ever tried to do a shooter-style game. And, well, I think the work that was done was amazing.”

Nesmith is undeniably right that Fallout 3’s gunplay never felt good, but necessity was also the mother of invention here. One of the game’s standout features, and a little link to its isometric turn-based predecessors, was the VATS targeting system, which slowed the game to a crawl while you targeted enemy body parts: then unleashed the bullets and had body parts exploding all over the shop.

VATS was a solution to a game where the standard realtime gunplay was, as Nesmith puts it, “not good.” Fallout 4 did vastly improve on this area, though I still don’t think it hit a standard where I’d ever call Fallout 4 a decent shooter.

“[Fallout 3 combat] didn’t hold up to shooters at the time,” continues Nesmith. “Also, it’s an RPG shooter, it’s not a run-and-gun shooter. But a lot of work was done on that for Fallout 4. So I anticipate seeing a lot of that work go into it, assuming they’re doing the same thing.

“Oblivion wasn’t just brought up to the 2011 version of Skyrim. It was brought up to something that, at least on the surface, looks like it exceeds the most recent graphics update in Skyrim.”

It should be said that those 2023 leaks, while clearly having some substance to them, can’t be taken as the gospel truth. The document was originally an internal presentation from 2020 and Oblivion Remastered, for example, was listed with a 2022 release date. Fallout 3 Remastered was down for 2024, so if you wanted to do beermat math we could speculate about a 2027 release.

But the truth is no-one outside of Bethesda and Virtuos knows anything, other than that Fallout 3 Remastered is very likely to be in development and, going by what we’ve seen this week with the Oblivion Remaster, may be a more substantial overhaul than the word “remaster” suggests.