by Josh Cotts
Fallout: New Vegas has never really left the conversation, and that alone says something. Even after over 25 years, people keep coming back to the Mojave, showing how well the game holds up to this day. However, there's no denying that time has consistently worked against it, and a potential remaster of the beloved classic opens the door for it to clean up the areas that have aged the most. Now, after a Fallout: New Vegas remaster was recently casually confirmed by an industry insider, that reality looks like it could be more possible than ever.
Better visuals in a potential Fallout: New Vegas remaster are already a given, but there are plenty of quality-of-life features not present in the original game (without mods anyway) that would make great additions as well. Things like cleaner menus, smarter inventory tools, smoother traversal, and improved gunplay could help the game feel far more natural to play on modern hardware. Even small updates, like better radio variety or improved navigation, would go a long way toward making the Mojave feel new again without changing the heart of what made the game special in the first place.
Things That Should Be Included in a Fallout: New Vegas Remaster
- Sprinting
- Fewer Invisible Walls
- Inventory, Menu, and UI Overhauls
- Improved Gunplay
- More Variety on Radio Stations
Sprinting
This one might be a tad controversial, after Oblivion Remastered's sprinting animation looks a bit too much on the goofy, awkward side. However, sprinting is arguably a must in almost any game now, and considering the original Fallout: New Vegas doesn't allow players to sprint without using mods, a potential remaster is prime real estate for such a feature. The only hope would be that a Fallout: New Vegas remaster's sprinting animation would be easier to look at in third-person mode than Oblivion Remastered's ended up being.
Fewer Invisible Walls
One of the biggest problems with exploration in the original Fallout: New Vegas was its invisible walls. It's natural for an open-world game to have invisible walls to some extent, but Fallout: New Vegas went to another level with them. Mountains that looked climbable weren't, paths that appeared open were blocked off, even treading up some high hills was out of the question on account of invisible walls. Over time, this became one of the loudest complaints players had about Fallout: New Vegas, with online threads like this one on Reddit featuring fans expressing a strong desire to have the invisible walls removed in a potential remaster.
Even Fallout: New Vegas lead designer Joshua Sawyer mentioned over 10 years ago in an old Formspring post that he would "insist that the world builders use as few invisible walls as possible," were the team given another shot at developing the game. With invisible walls increasingly being labeled as "lazy game design" by players with a desire to explore beyond the confines of a game's main path, there is little doubt that a Fallout: New Vegas remaster would receive the same criticism if it left the majority of the original game's barriers intact.
Inventory, Menu, and UI Overhauls
One of Fallout: New Vegas' most dated features is, without a doubt, the way it handles its inventory, menus, and general UI. The biggest pain point with inventory is how it lumps everything together, forcing players to scroll endlessly through healing items, food, notes, crafting junk, and books in one long list. With proper categories, filters, or sorting options in a Fallout: New Vegas remaster, however, players could find what they need more easily. Faster navigation overall would be a welcome improvement as well, with fewer menu layers and quicker access to things like quests, maps, and stats.
Support for 4K and ultrawide displays could also be considered a must for a potential Fallout: New Vegas remaster, and that alone could solve problems where the original game's UI feels cramped or poorly scaled. Alongside support for larger screens, a remaster of the beloved Fallout classic could include improved readability with cleaner fonts, high-resolution icons, and layouts that don't break when players adjust their resolution. Finally, tighter menu performance would be the cherry on top, with UI transitions that feel faster compared to the original game's sluggish navigation.
Read the full article on GameRant
This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.
