The Fallout franchise has always been popular among many games, and ever since Bethesda Game Studios took over the franchise with Fallout 3, it has been a long wait between entries in the series. Now, thanks to the new Prime Video series, there are a lot more Fallout fans in the world who have never played a Fallout game, much like star Walton Goggins. Those people might be more interested in playing an new game now, but the influx of interest in the franchise doesn’t appear to be having a significant impact on development for those eagerly awaiting Fallout 5.
The next mainline entry in the Fallout franchise will be Fallout 5 and fans have been waiting nearly a decade for it, as Fallout 4 released in 2015. There does seem to have been something of a resurgence of interest in the Fallout video games alongside the new series but studio design director Emil Pagliarulo certainly isn’t giving all these new fans any reason to expect the game anytime soon. In response to a fan on X (formerly known as Twitter) who suggests the game could be as many as eight years away, Pagliarulo doesn’t contradict it and says that any game can only come so fast with the team they have. He explained…
At the end of the day, though, it always comes down to that most important resource of all – people. As with any dev team, we have talented folks who need time to make great stuff. So we can’t do everything at once. Institute scientists are hard at work on cloning initiatives!
Bethesda’s most recent game, Starfield (think Fallout, but in space) just came out this past September, and the next game from the studio is expected to be The Elder Scrolls VI (think Fallout, but with dragons). Fallout 5 is probably going to be the next game from Bethesda after that, but considering that the previous Elder Scrolls game came out in 2011, the studio is unlikely to have a new Fallout before the end of this decade at the earliest.
In another era, we might have seen a Fallout game rushed to completion to accompany the new Fallout series. In the end, the fact that we’re going to have to wait some time for the next game isn’t a bad thing. As Emil Pagliarulo says, great games take time, and Bethesda games are never without their buggy issues when they are released, so rushing the next game to cash in on the series would only make things worse.
The excellent news is that thanks to a renewal, Fallout Season 2 is coming for Prime Video subscribers. However long it takes, we may be more likely to see Fallout Season 5 before we ever get to play Fallout 5 the video game.