Older games in the Fallout series won’t be seeing remakes or console ports, Bethesda’s director Todd Howard has said this week, despite the franchise enjoying a huge revitalization with the release of Amazon’s TV adaptation.
The company’s priority is to keep the games playable, but “anything is possible,” he explained in a June 16 interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, before adding his main idea is to keep Fallout 1 and 2 in their original states. Those games should be played with a mouse and keyboard, he went on to argue, with the setup of the games right now accurately capturing “the way it was” and their symbols from among the PC RPG craze of the ’90s.
Bethesda is looking only at keeping the games available and playable on modern systems, but Howard says the company isn’t planning on doing “dev work.”
The director also said he never wanted to change the original Fallouts to make them more “modern” and expressed his desire for them to remain their own selves so players can experience them in their true form—including them staying on PC.
The Fallout games revolutionized the RPG genre in the 1990s. They were made by Interplay and development was headed by none other than Obsidian’s Tim Cain. Both went on to be very successful, but Interplay eventually struggled financially and had to close down. Obsidian and Bioware are the most notable studios to have emerged from the former Interplay brand, which produced like Baldur’s Gate and its sequel.
Bethesda aims to work on Fallout 5 once it finishes development on The Elder Scrolls 6, which had its teaser trailer released all the way back in 2018. Ever since then, it has been more or less radio silence, and we mostly only know that Bethesda is working on it. That places the next Fallout game perhaps a decade away.
