Damn, I was playing Fallout 3 on my brother's Win11 PC just the other night for like, literally 7 hours.

I didn't get a single crash. But then I did remember getting the thing for him that makes it stable, so maybe it's just the one mod that takes all of 5-10 minutes to find it and install it.

even then it will still crash 4 times in the span of one day.

I feel stupid. This was always my experience even on Day 1 release date. That's been my Bethesda experience since forever! FO4, New Vegas, Skyrim.

You're telling me people play these games without it crashing every 1-3 hours?

Ive just accepted it as a fact of life.

Ironically the easiest way to play Fallout 3 these days is on Linux via Proton where it works perfectly.

For me, Fallout 3 ran perfectly but New Vegas is incredibly unstable and crashes often before I can even finish character creation. I have tried playing the game multiple times and never make it out of the starting area before the game crashes, and as a result I have never played New Vegas. And thats with the community mods and patches to help stability.

Meanwhile Fallout 3 boots and runs perfectly fine completely vanilla. It still crashes occasionally, but I can at least play it for an hour or two with it crashing.

As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,

I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I'm sure that that's doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn't need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn't handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.

I mean, sure, I'd also like to have Fallout 5, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they're kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release Fallout 5 in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be Fallout 4, 2015, and before that, Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 and Fallout 3 from 2008. That'll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series. If you rewind a comparable 15 years from Fallout 3, you're at 1993. That's the original Doom release. That's a pretty enormous gap.

Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.

On a Windows machine, the GOG version of Fallout 3 works right out of the box in Windows 10. Not sure about 11, but no reason to believe it would be different.

The issue was, Fallout 3 had DRM that was shut down ages ago. Games for Windows Live. Xbox Live for Windows. Bethesda refused to remove the DRM and it was actually illegal to do so in the US. GOG had it without DRM first. Like a decade later Bethesda officially removed it from the Steam version.

There's like one other thing you have to do and it has to do with memory and I'm not sure how necessary it is, but again, the GOG version does it automatically.

But screw Windows and its bullshit. I can run the GOG version of Fallout 4 on my Mac, albeit with a few hacks. I have to disable gore because something about the gore animation fucks up the translation layer. There are a couple others but the biggest change is, no gore. I mean the exploding heads. I think it still has blood. It's not censored. Anyway, the flying eyeballs were a bit much, it got old quick. So no issues there. I've also run Deus Ex, but that's Unreal Engine 1 and not really relevant. Haven't tried running Fallout 3 yet.