Since 2018, Bethesda Game Studios has been quite transparent about its future development plans. At the time, the studio announced both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 in back to back reveals. Starfield just launched last year but it continuing to get updates and DLC. Meanwhile, work on The Elder Scrolls 6 is just ramping up, so where does that leave Fallout 5?
With the Fallout TV series becoming a huge hit this past week, boosting sales and player numbers for all Fallout video games, Bethesda is being asked a lot of questions about Fallout 5. Unfortunately, the game is still years off. In an interview with IGN, Bethesda head, Todd Howard, explained that the team is “avoiding putting dates on anything” but reaffirmed that the studio’s priority “is The Elder Scrolls 6 before we get into Fallout 5”.
Backing up the idea that development timelines have not been influenced by the success of the Fallout series, Bethesda Studio Design Director, Emil Pagliarulo, explained to a fan on Twitter that the “most important resource of all” is the people at the studio and those folks will need time to work on The Elder Scrolls 6, before turning attention to Fallout 5.
While many other major studios at this point house multiple project teams, Bethesda tends to focus on one franchise at a time, in similar fashion to Rockstar Games. Despite being acquired by Microsoft several years ago, this has not changed and from the looks of it, it won’t be changing anytime soon.
Of course, aside from laying the groundwork for The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda is also continuing updates on Fallout 76, and is also working on additional updates for Starfield, which is due to get its first piece of major DLC content later this year, alongside modding tools and other updates. If it typically takes Bethesda five years to develop a game, then we should be expecting The Elder Scrolls 6 somewhere between 2027 and 2028. This would push Fallout 5 into the 2030s.
KitGuru Says: Chances are, the Fallout series is going to begin and end before Fallout 5 comes out. However, Microsoft is in a privelaged position, in that it owns the Fallout IP, as well as the studios set up by original Fallout creators, in addition to Bethesda. With that in mind, there are plenty of other creatives who have had a hand in the Fallout universe working on other teams. We might not get Fallout 5, but we may get another spin-off game, similar to Fallout: New Vegas.
