Fallout 3 was a massive RPG that felt like it was pushing the Xbox 360 hard when it launched back in 2008. Many players, myself included, still had a great time with it and liked its take on what a post-apocalyptic wasteland would look like. But Fallout 3 artist and former Bethesda developer Nathan Purkeypile says he’s excited about the recently confirmed Fallout 3 remaster because the game doesn’t look the way the team intended.
In a new interview with The Examined Game, Purkeypile talked about his career at Bethesda, working as an artist on titles like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even the early days of Starfield. During the conversation about his time at Fallout 3, he admitted he was excited to check out the previously rumored and now confirmed upcoming remaster of the popular open-world RPG because the original game was held back by the tech of the time.
“Apparently it’s confirmed now that they’re doing like a Fallout 3 remaster, but I’m personally looking forward to that ‘cuz we were super tech-constrained making Fallout 3,” said Purkeypile. “And you could only place so many lights, and again textures are pretty small. And constantly worrying about the memory, budgets, or how much stuff you’re putting on screen. So, it’s not like it’s exactly how we intended.”
According to Purkeypile, while he understands why some people are upset over movie remakes, in the case of games he thinks tech can sometimes hold artists back and what you get isn’t quite what they were hoping to pull off, adding that with Fallout 3 “it’s 100-percent not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained.”
“Even before I was doing games professionally, I started making games before we had color,” said Purkeypile. “So I’ve seen it change dramatically over time. I think a lot of these remakes have been done, frankly, better lately, too. The Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while, I think a lot of those updates were just like, oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger and [ran it] through a sharpen filter in Photoshop, and it doesn’t really look that much better or actually as good as other games that are coming out.”
Purkeypile’s comments touch on an ongoing debate around video game remasters and remakes.
Take, for example, Halo: Campaign Evolved. While I do believe that the tech of the era likely limited Bungie’s ability to create large, detailed worlds with realistic visuals in the game’s original 2001 release, I think that due to those constraints, the end result is a more alien-looking and memorable video game. In the remake, which uses new tech like Unreal Engine 5, the game often looks “better” technically, but fails to capture the same feeling as that original shooter. It’s an interesting scenario where devs might want to go back and remaster or “improve’ a game’s look, but in the process they could lose part of what so many players connected with in the first place. I’ll be curious to see how the Fallout 3 remaster walks this tightrope, how devs like Purkeypile react to it, and if fans still feel that it captures the vibes of Fallout 3, something I’m not sure the Oblivion remaster pulled off last year.
