During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he’s responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.
With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. “I’m personally looking forward to that,” he said, “because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights.”
The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn’t really what they’d hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. “It’s not like it’s exactly how we intended,” he said. “I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it’s 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained.”
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Fallout 3’s concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland’s scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.
“I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too,” he said. “Like 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 like threw 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.”
