Today Bethesda dropped a pleasant surprise and released the BFG edition of Doom 3 on Switch, X1 and PS4. It has no drastic enhancements but its true to the original and runs at around ~1440p on the PS4 Pro and at 60 fps. It will probably run at 4K on the X1X.
It also came at a price of $9.99.
To my eyes, it looks and plays absolutely fabulous. It's definitely the way to play Doom 3 if you haven't before. This port didn't have a lot of money behind it, but it's more than adequate to do the job.
This leads me to ask why Bethesda can't do the same for Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Granted, it will probably take more effort than Doom 3 BFG, but it doesn't have to be a crazy expensive project, either. I'd love for Fallout 3/New Vegas to get the full blown remaster treatment, with full blown mod support, but I'd happily settle for a straight port like the one Doom 3 just got.
Before you scream, "get it on PC!", the PC version of Fallout 3 is garbage and constantly crashes.
Awesome, been thinking about playing FO3 again - should be great on the OneX. I was blown away by how much better Oblivion with almost zero loading times and that was on my OG One.
Same here. I own the Steam version of the game and it's been iffy since going to Windows 10 I believe but I can't recall the last time it worked without having to screw around with it. On the other hand, the GOG version I bought, installed, and it works perfectly.
Today Bethesda dropped a pleasant surprise and released the BFG edition of Doom 3 on Switch, X1 and PS4. It has no drastic enhancements but its true to the original and runs at around ~1440p on the PS4 Pro and at 60 fps. It will probably run at 4K on the X1X.
It also came at a price of $9.99.
To my eyes, it looks and plays absolutely fabulous. It's definitely the way to play Doom 3 if you haven't before. This port didn't have a lot of money behind it, but it's more than adequate to do the job.
This leads me to ask why Bethesda can't do the same for Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Granted, it will probably take more effort than Doom 3 BFG, but it doesn't have to be a crazy expensive project, either. I'd love for Fallout 3/New Vegas to get the full blown remaster treatment, with full blown mod support, but I'd happily settle for a straight port like the one Doom 3 just got.
Before you scream, "get it on PC!", the PC version of Fallout 3 is garbage and constantly crashes.
I completely agree with you. I, too, wish Bethesda would port Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4. That being said, I think we both know the reason they haven't been ported. The port would require a lot of work to perform adequately. Short of Microsoft/Nintendo co-publishing, I don't think it's ever going to happen. Bethesda isn't going to port a 10+ year old game if it can't be done on the cheap. There's no possibility of continuing monetization in old games to offset the porting costs, and it would just take away from the emphasis Bethesda wants to keep on Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online.
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis would be for a Switch-exclusive Fallout? I wonder if a smaller team at Bethesda could pump out a decent Fallout New Vegas-esque game? I can't see Bethesda doing anything with their older games at this point, but maybe some spin-off would be feasible?
I completely agree with you. I, too, wish Bethesda would port Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4. That being said, I think we both know the reason they haven't been ported. The port would require a lot of work to perform adequately. Short of Microsoft/Nintendo co-publishing, I don't think it's ever going to happen. Bethesda isn't going to port a 10+ year old game if it can't be done on the cheap. There's no possibility of continuing monetization in old games to offset the porting costs, and it would just take away from the emphasis Bethesda wants to keep on Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online.
I don't why people continue to spew this nonsense that somehow remastering or porting is some sort of massive resource drain. Porting Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the Switch/PS4/X1 would not be some major resource hog. It's something that would more than pay for itself. Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 mostly have a different audience.
I don't why people continue to spew this nonsense that somehow remastering or porting is some sort of massive resource drain. Porting Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the Switch/PS4/X1 would not be some major resource hog. It's something that would more than pay for itself. Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 mostly have a different audience.
I agree with you, but it seems like Bethesda doesn't want to do anything to take the focus off of Fallout 76. I mean we went through the 10th anniversary of Fallout 3 and they didn't do anything. They could have earned some major goodwill by porting/remastering Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Bethesda could have announced only a Switch port and they would've garnered praise. It's clear that Bethesda is going to do everything they can to make Fallout 76 the only current Fallout people have available to them. It is essentially a Fallout platform, and porting the old games does nothing but remind people that Fallout once had good games in the franchise.
OP I would love Switch versions of those games too man.
Skyrim is the only reason I have a switch. I’m away from home so often that I’d love having portable versions of my favorite games.
Well, this thread made me start playing Fallout 3 again. It's still a fun game. It really does make me realize that the old Bethesda is gone. We're not going to get another Fallout 3 or Skyrim type of game from them.
most of the bethesda switch stuff is coming from Id. Fallout 3/NV is probably too "old" for them to bother with though if they ever get a special edition treatment they'll probably wind up on switch
Awesome, been thinking about playing FO3 again - should be great on the OneX. I was blown away by how much better Oblivion with almost zero loading times and that was on my OG One.
There have been a bunch of ports. Darksiders, LA Noire, Skyrim, Wolfenstein, Doom, Assassin’s Creed 3, and a lot of indie games. The Switch has gotten more ports than the Wii U ever did.
I get your point though. It’d be nice if there were more third-party support.
DOOM on mobile was a downgrade. I don't think everyone knows this.
I have noticed a handful of differences between the two ports. The current version, which you can buy on the app store for $4.99 is a huge downgrade. It bugged me so much I wanted to point out the differences.
Menus
DOOM 2009 has a far superiod start screen and menu.Way more options to choose and customize.
I apologize for the resolution on this one.
You have the option to change the layout of the controls. You also had a mission select screen.
Now take a look at the recently re-released DOOM.
The new version makes you sign in with your Bethesda account. It also looks like the programmer didn't care what it looked like as long as it had a couple options to choose from.
Control Layout
DOOM 2009 (pictured above) had multiple ways to customize your layout
The current version (pictured above) has a single button layout and you have to tap the screen to open doors and levers. In the 2009 version you could run up to the door and it would open. The current version only as the option to have auto-run turned on.
I feel like the only thing the current version added that could be considered positive is the map icon in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Otherwise the 32-bit 2009 version of DOOM is far superior in many different ways. Maybe Bethesda couldn't publish it because John Carmack's name was all over it. Its a shame we got such downgrade with DRM included.
I don't why people continue to spew this nonsense that somehow remastering or porting is some sort of massive resource drain. Porting Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the Switch/PS4/X1 would not be some major resource hog. It's something that would more than pay for itself. Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 mostly have a different audience.
It may not be as simple as the resource issue. I think a major problem may be licensing for the game's voice actors and the various music used. You have screen actors like Ron Perlman, Malcolm McDowell, Liam Neeson, Matthew Perry, Wayne Newton, Kris Kristofferson, etc. Their contracts may not have allowed for their voices to be used beyond the initial release. Both the Capital Wasteland and F4NV fan remasters have received warnings from Bethesda that they would be running into legal issues with the game's voice acting and music, not from Bethesda but from the SAG and RIAA which stalled both projects. It's entirely possible that even Zenimax is having issues with the SAG and RIAA and it's not worth the extra money to pay these actors who are now even more valuable than they were back then. This wouldn't affect Skyrim as much as all the music was composed for the game and most of the voice acting was done with Bethesda staff or using professional voice actors like Charles Martinet who would have had a contract more open to re-releases/remasters.
Remastered versions of the games on consoles would make Bethesda a mint just like Skyrim:SE did, and they have all the resources they need to do it. All the textures are already available to them, they downsized the original textures for the games to run on the hardware of the era, but likely have larger files in-house that they could pull out like they did for Skyrim:SE and Fallout 4's 4K pack. Add some improved lighting and voila, Fallout 3 and NW remastered. The problem is that Both Skyrim:SE and Fallout 4:HD were not worth the performance hit. simply plunking 4K textures into a game does not make sense. 4K texture on a pencil, a little dagger, a small lighter, a pebble, fuck you very much VRAM. Both games run smoother and faster with optimization mods and higher quality 4-8K textures in appropriate places (including matchg 4-8K specular and normal maps, and shit like pencils and chalk getting downgraded to 256x256 textures since nobody is taking a close look at chalk.
The console versions of Fallout 3 and NV were just as buggy as the PC version. I had so many issues at launch with NV on my X360 I abandoned the game for months before finally giving in and restarting. I had to keep a pile of save files going on rotation just in case it was a Bethesda game. Turns out it was and I often had to revert to earlier saves losing hours of play time. When I got to the end of New Vegas and was crossing the dam, every time the Boomers plane came for the bombing run the game would crash. It took me a dozen attempts to finally watch it happen at about 5 fps. I did the same on PC recently and with all the mods running it was as exciting as it was meant to with massive explosions and improved reverb for the sound.
I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble with Fallout 3 and NV, even without mods I can run them just fine and we have fairly similar hardware. I can't imagine the GOG version would differ from the Steam or physical versions enough to make it run more poorly.
If you have an hour to spare and really would like to play them in better quality than the console release I always keep the links handy in case anyone wants to get into modding:
Download Vortex off Nexus mods, then F3SE for fallout 3, NVSE for New Vegas. Mod Manager is fine too, but Vortex is very friendly to use for people that have never tried modding before or don't want to go super crazy with mods. It takes care of load order and will always point out mod conflicts along with providing the tools to prevent them.
Those are just the stability mods, with then you get vanilla Fallout 3 the way Bethesda should have released it. If you start digging into visual and gameplay mods there is everything from iron sights mods to FWE which overhauls the entire game, making it a lot more involving.
Again, installing those will give you a completely stable, crash-free New Vegas. If you dig into the mods you'll find a ton of mods completely overhauling the entire game.
I have never crashed Fallout 3 or New Vegas with these mods. I've never crashed New Vegas with the main stability mods. In fact I haven't crashed it with pretty much all the major mods active and an ENB running. Explode 100 mines at once, no crash. Back and forth through a door from cell to cell 100 times, no crash. Spawn 100 Secutitrons all shooting missiles at once, no crash.
Spend another hour grabbing the texture and lighting mods, and a good ENB like Wasteland of the Apocalypse or Rudy and you have a much higher quality Fallout than Bethesda will ever make. All you have to do is compare Skyrim:SE to even a mildly modded Skyrim from the same time period to see that Bethesda isn't giving remasters their best effort. Compare it to a heavily modded Skyrim with an ENB and it's really embarrassing for Bethesda. It's pretty telling that the most popular mods for Skyrim:SE (aside from the nude mods) are texture and visual enhancement mods ported from the original release because even year older modded Skyrim looked better.
As much as I like the concept of Switch, its created an even more annoying subculture in gaming. Consoles like ps4 and xb1 are already underpowered to hell and back. But switch is leagues less powerful than that, but then you have this legion of entitled gamers that expect everything on their little platform just because its sold fairly well.
That mobile chipset isn't ideal to port all games, and I hate the argument "buts its powerful actually, for its size!" Okay, it was 2 years ago, but even then how does that help developers? It doesn't.
It may not be as simple as the resource issue. I think a major problem may be licensing for the game's voice actors and the various music used. You have screen actors like Ron Perlman, Malcolm McDowell, Liam Neeson, Matthew Perry, Wayne Newton, Kris Kristofferson, etc. Their contracts may not have allowed for their voices to be used beyond the initial release. Both the Capital Wasteland and F4NV fan remasters have received warnings from Bethesda that they would be running into legal issues with the game's voice acting and music, not from Bethesda but from the SAG and RIAA which stalled both projects. It's entirely possible that even Zenimax is having issues with the SAG and RIAA and it's not worth the extra money to pay these actors who are now even more valuable than they were back then. This wouldn't affect Skyrim as much as all the music was composed for the game and most of the voice acting was done with Bethesda staff or using professional voice actors like Charles Martinet who would have had a contract more open to re-releases/remasters.
Remastered versions of the games on consoles would make Bethesda a mint just like Skyrim:SE did, and they have all the resources they need to do it. All the textures are already available to them, they downsized the original textures for the games to run on the hardware of the era, but likely have larger files in-house that they could pull out like they did for Skyrim:SE and Fallout 4's 4K pack. Add some improved lighting and voila, Fallout 3 and NW remastered. The problem is that Both Skyrim:SE and Fallout 4:HD were not worth the performance hit. simply plunking 4K textures into a game does not make sense. 4K texture on a pencil, a little dagger, a small lighter, a pebble, fuck you very much VRAM. Both games run smoother and faster with optimization mods and higher quality 4-8K textures in appropriate places (including matchg 4-8K specular and normal maps, and shit like pencils and chalk getting downgraded to 256x256 textures since nobody is taking a close look at chalk.
The console versions of Fallout 3 and NV were just as buggy as the PC version. I had so many issues at launch with NV on my X360 I abandoned the game for months before finally giving in and restarting. I had to keep a pile of save files going on rotation just in case it was a Bethesda game. Turns out it was and I often had to revert to earlier saves losing hours of play time. When I got to the end of New Vegas and was crossing the dam, every time the Boomers plane came for the bombing run the game would crash. It took me a dozen attempts to finally watch it happen at about 5 fps. I did the same on PC recently and with all the mods running it was as exciting as it was meant to with massive explosions and improved reverb for the sound.
I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble with Fallout 3 and NV, even without mods I can run them just fine and we have fairly similar hardware. I can't imagine the GOG version would differ from the Steam or physical versions enough to make it run more poorly.
If you have an hour to spare and really would like to play them in better quality than the console release I always keep the links handy in case anyone wants to get into modding:
Download Vortex off Nexus mods, then F3SE for fallout 3, NVSE for New Vegas. Mod Manager is fine too, but Vortex is very friendly to use for people that have never tried modding before or don't want to go super crazy with mods. It takes care of load order and will always point out mod conflicts along with providing the tools to prevent them.
Those are just the stability mods, with then you get vanilla Fallout 3 the way Bethesda should have released it. If you start digging into visual and gameplay mods there is everything from iron sights mods to FWE which overhauls the entire game, making it a lot more involving.
Again, installing those will give you a completely stable, crash-free New Vegas. If you dig into the mods you'll find a ton of mods completely overhauling the entire game.
I have never crashed Fallout 3 or New Vegas with these mods. I've never crashed New Vegas with the main stability mods. In fact I haven't crashed it with pretty much all the major mods active and an ENB running. Explode 100 mines at once, no crash. Back and forth through a door from cell to cell 100 times, no crash. Spawn 100 Secutitrons all shooting missiles at once, no crash.
Spend another hour grabbing the texture and lighting mods, and a good ENB like Wasteland of the Apocalypse or Rudy and you have a much higher quality Fallout than Bethesda will ever make. All you have to do is compare Skyrim:SE to even a mildly modded Skyrim from the same time period to see that Bethesda isn't giving remasters their best effort. Compare it to a heavily modded Skyrim with an ENB and it's really embarrassing for Bethesda. It's pretty telling that the most popular mods for Skyrim:SE (aside from the nude mods) are texture and visual enhancement mods ported from the original release because even year older modded Skyrim looked better.
Ill be happy to give some of those mods a try, but every time I try a new mod for PC, it just leads to the same bullshit. Constant crashes and just plain poor performance. I'll try reinstalling and a fresh game.
You want to know what would be an AMAZING move on Bethesda's part?
You want to know what would be an AMAZING move on Bethesda's part?
Pick up the tab for the Fallout 4 Capital Wasteland mod, get an actual development team to finish up/assist/tweak the game and allow that to turn that into a remaster of Fallout 3.
I would imagine that since they just did this, they may want to see if it was a waste of time and effort before committing to bring anything else over.
If you liked Doom 3 and want to play it again, it's easily worth the cheap price. If you didn't like Doom 3, there is no better way to revisit it and see if your mind can be changed.
Whether it's worth it is up to you, but it's hard to argue that the price isn't a steal.
Download Vortex off Nexus mods, then F3SE for fallout 3, NVSE for New Vegas. Mod Manager is fine too, but Vortex is very friendly to use for people that have never tried modding before or don't want to go super crazy with mods. It takes care of load order and will always point out mod conflicts along with providing the tools to prevent them.
Apparently it's now just fucked. I swear it wasn't this way a year ago I just played New Vegas and it ran like a champ, zero crashes the whole time.
It appears there was a Win10 update that just completely broke the whole thing. I can get it running smooth, no ticks, rock solid fps, no bugs, but the game just CTDs randomly now. I can literally be standing still in a room and get a CTD out of the blue. The GOG version seems to suffer the most.
There is another option that think might work for you, Tales of Two Wastelands. It's actually a Fallout NV mod that has inserted Fallout 3 into New Vegas using the updated Vegas version of Gamebryo. It adds the NV companion wheel for Fallout 3 companions. It inserts a train station in both games that lets you travel between them. Basically you play through Fallout 3, then after the game ends you can hop on a train to the west coast, time skips nine years, and you're in New Vegas to play that game. You can go back to the Capital wasteland with new companions like ED-E, and you can take old companions like Fawkes into New Vegas. Companions are all given NV style perks and all have new homes in either world.
It's a super long install as it has to convert all the FO3 audio to the same bitrate as NV (1-4 hours, closer to 1 for your PC), you need a clean install of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and you can't re-use old saves as there is so much changed they would be broken anyways.
It's still a Bethesda game, but it runs more stable without mods than Fallout 3, and it looks better than Fallout 3 since it uses the updated engine.
Apparently it's now just fucked. I swear it wasn't this way a year ago I just played New Vegas and it ran like a champ, zero crashes the whole time.
It appears there was a Win10 update that just completely broke the whole thing. I can get it running smooth, no ticks, rock solid fps, no bugs, but the game just CTDs randomly now. I can literally be standing still in a room and get a CTD out of the blue. The GOG version seems to suffer the most.
There is another option that think might work for you, Tales of Two Wastelands. It's actually a Fallout NV mod that has inserted Fallout 3 into New Vegas using the updated Vegas version of Gamebryo. It adds the NV companion wheel for Fallout 3 companions. It inserts a train station in both games that lets you travel between them. Basically you play through Fallout 3, then after the game ends you can hop on a train to the west coast, time skips nine years, and you're in New Vegas to play that game. You can go back to the Capital wasteland with new companions like ED-E, and you can take old companions like Fawkes into New Vegas. Companions are all given NV style perks and all have new homes in either world.
It's a super long install as it has to convert all the FO3 audio to the same bitrate as NV (1-4 hours, closer to 1 for your PC), you need a clean install of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and you can't re-use old saves as there is so much changed they would be broken anyways.
It's still a Bethesda game, but it runs more stable without mods than Fallout 3, and it looks better than Fallout 3 since it uses the updated engine.
The anti-stuttering mod was the main crash culprit.
I see no reason they couldn't just port the New Vegas and Fallout 3 assets to the Fallout 4 version of Gamebryo. I can't speak for everyone, but I had no issues whatsoever with Fallout 4 on either my PS4 or X1 playthrough.
For those of you saying that porting Fallout 3 and/or New Vegas would require too much work I have a real hard time believing that is the case and am inclined to believe that it's just plain false.
The fact that all of these mods have been done by a very small team (sometimes even one person) and do a LOT in terms of stability and gameplay, I am having a hard time believing a team of professionals couldn't get the game running in a reasonable amount of time.
New Vegas would need the original developers approval and they both cut ties. Why Fallout 3 is in limbo I assume because Fallout 4 and the MMO took priority.
New Vegas would need the original developers approval and they both cut ties. Why Fallout 3 is in limbo I assume because Fallout 4 and the MMO took priority.
I seriously doubt that Bethesda would require any approval to re-release a game in which the IP and the game is owned by them. At worst, Obsidian might be owed some royalties, but even that I doubt would be the case.
For those of you saying that porting Fallout 3 and/or New Vegas would require too much work I have a real hard time believing that is the case and am inclined to believe that it's just plain false.
The fact that all of these mods have been done by a very small team (sometimes even one person) and do a LOT in terms of stability and gameplay, I am having a hard time believing a team of professionals couldn't get the game running in a reasonable amount of time.
That's the problem. A lot of these guys sitting at home in their gitch are apparently better programmers and artists than a lot of the people at Bethesda. Bethesda should wave the white flag and pay these people to work from home fixing their games for them, in the long term it would be cheaper than releasing broken games and pissing off the fanbase. In my spare time I've changed every texture in Fallout 4. If there wasn't a mod for it, I just opened it up and fixed it myself. My version of Fallout 4 looks an order of magnitude better than Bethesda's and runs better too. I am not a programmer and I've made huge improvements to how the game runs just farting around with the .ini files.
I seriously doubt that Bethesda would require any approval to re-release a game in which the IP and the game is owned by them. At worst, Obsidian might be owed some royalties, but even that I doubt would be the case.
I think you're right, Bethesda contracted Obsidian to make the game, I can't imagine they would have given them any rights to the franchise outside that. RIAA and SAG are probably the biggest hurdle to a remastered version, other than Bethesda stalling it so they can figure out how to inject the Atom store into the remasters and charge you for purple power armor skins
