Anyone else noticed that, including the DLC's, Fallout New Vegas seems to be a remake of Van Buren? Not saying it was intentional or anything like that, just noting that a lot of the material in New Vegas, or that will be in New Vegas, seems to have been inspired by Van Buren, not to mention the setting being a similar location. Anyone else noticed these similarities?

It's not a coincidence, many of the developers at Obsidian Entertainment worked on Van Buren.

A lot of the stuff is borrowed, yes, but it is too different to be considered a remake. For one, the central location of New Vegas (Vegas, obviously) wasn't even supposed to be in Van Buren. I'm glad that the ideas are being put to use, though I kind of wish Bethesda told them "Hey, wanna finish Van Buren?" so the full extent of it could have been realized.

It just goes to show that Van Buren was and still is a very well founded game, it was 90% done before Interplay shot itself in the foot, canceled it, and made the Burned Game. Van Buren had a huge map, many locations, detailed lore and back-stories, established world, and great ideas; it now serves as a source of high-grade material to be used in Fallout games, like a resource for future usage.

At least in this way the content can be made in a higher quality.

NV is barely 5% of what Van Buren was suppose to be.
Still a nice Fallout game though, but hardly up to Van Buren quality.

I still want VB itself.

What I meant by quality was the quality of graphics, sounds, runtime, et cetera.

I wish they would release the Van Buren materials like GSC did with their 2004 Stalker build. The community could probably get it up and running in no time. But Bethesda is too corporate for that.

Don't really care about graphics and with sounds I'm guessing voices for every character/dialogue? Which I could also do well without.
But my previous post wasn't directed towards you specifically, was meant at the OP.

Its pretty much the only sequel to fallout 2 that will be released so it's pretty much the van buren that was never released plust lots of the people at obsidian worked on van buren so that's some good reasons.

Is it possible to "remake" a game that was never actually finished? I think any similarities between the F:NV retail game and the Van Buren never-marketed-unfinished-alpha-version are completely intentional. It's called reducing costs by recycling something that's already done, and in this case it's not a bad thing at all.

Reincarnation is the work you guys are looking for.

Not a remake, New Vegas is a combination of ideas from Fallouts 1, 2, 3, and VB.

Arkane Studios just released the Arx Fatalis source code so it would appear that Bethesda Softworks and Zenimax aren't opposed to such moves in general. However Bethesda has said that they wouldn't release content that wasn't their own.

I somehow doubt that anybody on the development team would be upset if they did, but oh well. I wish they would just give it to Obsidian so they could release it. It's practically theirs anyway.

Yes, i was thinking about the statement that "releasing someone else's unfinished product is not something we would do"

But they do actually own it. What i think they mean is that it's not their own work and doesn't represent their current product quality.
The "old" part is an important one aswell, a handful of craving fans isn't enough incentive to release such an outdated and potentially unplayable... thing. In short my best guess is that it's not in a shape that they're comfortable releasing. I understand that and i'm cool with it, it just would be nice if it happened

BTW Arx Fatalis was freaking great! First RPG i ever played, and one of the few i enjoyed.

It's probably not financially feasible to finish up at this point. While a lot of it is finished there's still plenty left to do. Also, anything that was used in FONV would likely need to be replaced which only increases the resources need to finish this.


I don't think it has anything to do with their own product quality, but otherwise I agree with you.

Van Buren wasn't developed by Bethesda, or any studio in the Zenimax family, and I don't believe Bethesda is comfortable releasing someone else's product like that.

They recycle a lot of stuff from Van Buren, but the main story in NV has almost nothing to do with it.

The plot of Van Buren is different

it was about NCR vs BOS

The Legion was a little faction

Van Grafs

Hanged Man

Some new virus