A Steam glitch convinced some Fallout fans a New Vegas remaster was imminent, only to have the rug yanked out from under them: 'Slowly turning into r/HalfLife'

Two things I believe to be true are: One—given the success of last year's Oblivion remaster, remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are all-but assured. Two—they probably won't drop any time soon. Oblivion is not even a year behind us (though given its last patch was in July and Bethesda seems to have forgotten it exists, you'd be forgiven for feeling like it's been longer) and the studio is notionally working on new "space gameplay" for Starfield. Oh, and The Elder Scrolls 6 is bubbling away in there somewhere.

It doesn't feel like a lot of space to launch a humdinger of a Fallout remaster, is my point. But fans of those games are quite keen on the notion of prettied-up versions, and a recent Steam glitch had a few of them ready to declare that the prophecy would soon be fulfilled (by which I mean: a remaster or two were imminent).

Fans over on Reddit have noticed something hinky going on with Fallout 3 and New Vegas over on Steam. Namely, the fact that if you try to leave a user review for either of those games at the moment, you'll be blocked from doing so, and get a big block of red text that says "You must wait until this product has been released before writing a review for it."

As a veteran journalist and videogames expert, I can confirm that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both released games. They've been released for yonks, even! And yet Steam seems to have gotten mixed up on that front. Quite recently, too: there are reviews for New Vegas from as recently as yesterday. And oh-ho, what's this? Search for Fallout on Steam and the platform will tell you there are 12 games in the series, yet only 10 are listed when you click through.

"With recent rumors of both games getting remastered, the Fallout page Count Down, the Fallout TV show happening AND only those two games being affected rn, it's too much of a coincidence to not be," wrote a fan going by the name DaughterOfBhaal on Reddit. "This is definitely promising," concurred mellow_kitten_23. "Do y’all think they’ll get shadowdropped like Oblivion remake or announced at the xbox developer direct next week?"

"Slowly turning into r/HalfLife," joked Soviet-_-Neko. That is to say, Fallout fans are increasingly coming to resemble a community famed for constantly reading tea leaves looking for signs of a sequel or update (that also used to be the Silksong community, until those guys got freed by their game actually releasing).

In fairness, it's not as if the entire community went feral. For everyone huffing the copium, there was someone else saying it was probably nothing.

Alas, Soviet-_-Neko's gag rather hit the bullseye. As suspicious as all these Fallout coincidences seem, they have other explanations. The review thing? It's also affecting other games, like Kerbal Space Program, and it seems unlikely anyone's on the cusp of dropping a beautiful UE5 remaster of that (more's the pity).

As for a Fallout search showing 12 games, it's harder to say what's causing that, but I'd bet it has something to do with the region-specific packages available for New Vegas. For me—and probably you—the listing Steam shows us when checking out the New Vegas page is for that game's global version, but if you're in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), you'll get a region-specific PCR version. There are two of those: one for base NV and one for the Ultimate Edition.

So smoke, but no fire. Which is a pity because, I confess, when I first saw people getting excited about the review glitch earlier today, I had to admit it seemed odd. Did I get my hopes up? A little. But the yawning maw between Bethesda game releases never changes.