Fallout: New Vegas Remaster might be impossible

Chris Avellone, who is one of the main writers and leads of the game Fallout: New Vegas, said that we should not expect a remaster of that game.
And not because they don’t want to make a remaster, but because they maybe can’t!

The reason and main problem is that there’s a chance that Bethesda doesn’t have the complete source code of the game... When Obsidian Entertainment was making the game, there was a milestone to deliver all the source code and build tools. But according to Avellone, that was never fully delivered, because it’s impossible.

And without the source code, it’s not possible to easily modify the game, so a clean remaster can’t be made. They would basically have to reverse engineer the whole game from scratch. Which is a massive job, basically like making a new game.

Besides that, another problem is engineering know-how.
Avellone also said that he doesn’t think Bethesda currently has the technical capability to do it properly. Which means that even if they had parts of the code, they wouldn’t know how to assemble and use it.

The craziest part about all of this is that Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment are now under Microsoft. But that doesn’t mean they automatically work together, corporate politics still exist.

There is still a theoretical workaround... They could do something like port the game into a new engine like Unreal and give it new graphics. However, that would be more of a remake than a remaster. And it’s still a huge amount of work.

This basically means that a Fallout: New Vegas remaster is not impossible, but it’s definitely not an easy cash grab like other remasters.
That’s why Bethesda would rather do something easier, like a Fallout 3 remaster, than deal with all of this chaos.

With this statement, Avellone basically destroyed the fans’ copium forever. The Fallout: New Vegas remaster isn’t blocked because they don’t want it, but because it’s a technical nightmare to make a remaster of that game.