In 2008, Bethesda released Fallout 3, a groundbreaking adaptation of the isometric Fallout franchise to a gameplay style close to its beloved Elder Scrolls series. In seven years, we’ve not only received a new spin-off from Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas, but also a brand new mainline game from Bethesda, Fallout 4. It’s now been over a decade since Fallout 4, and while fans of the series can enjoy things like the online RPG Fallout 76, which originally launched in 2018, and the hit Prime Video series, which debuted in 2024, there’s the wait for a new single-player entry main proved difficult.
In 2018, Bethesda revealed The Elder Scrolls VI through a short teaser. It’s been over seven years since that reveal, and based on recent updates provided by the studio Game Informer As part of the conversations surrounding our Fallout retrospective, it seems like the game still has a way to go. For years, Bethesda alternated between The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, releasing Oblivion in 2006, Fallout 3 in 2008, Skyrim in 2011, and Fallout 4 in 2015. This trend broke with Fallout 76 in 2018 and veered further in 2023, when Bethesda released Starfield, an ambitious new IP set in space.
“We’re better developers for having made a multiplayer game, we’re better developers for having developed our own intellectual property now, because it’s new muscle,” said studio head Angela Browder. Game Informer. “It challenged us in a different way. It taught us a lot of things that we never could have known otherwise. And I think even as we approach IP titles that we’ve made before that we understand classically, we’re still better developers for having done it, because your brain thinks differently once you’ve done that kind of thing. And I think that’s only going to make every title we make better.”
In 2022, Howard said IGN that Fallout 5 will be the next game that Bethesda will set its sights on after completing The Elder Scrolls VI. “We’re going to do Fallout 5 after that, so our roster is going to be pretty full for a while,” he said. IGN. “In 2021, he also told IGN that the studio has a basic idea of what Fallout 5 will be, saying the developers “have a page on Fallout 5, which is what we want to do.”
Bethesda is currently focused on The Elder Scrolls VI, but according to director and executive producer Todd Howard, Bethesda has other projects in the works. “The majority of studios are on VI, but I will say this: We still overlap,” Howard says. Game Informer. “So we are very accustomed to overlapping developments.”
During my in-depth conversations with Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, Emil Pagliarulo, and Angela Browder, I asked them what they would most like to accomplish with the Fallout franchise in the future. Here’s what they had to say:
Todd Howard
Director and executive producer
“I will say, first of all, looking at 76, we never stopped developing Fallout. We’ve had a full team on Fallout for a long time. So Fallout, as a franchise, is the one we’re still working on the most. Now the majority of our internal studio is on Elder Scrolls VI. We’re doing other things with Fallout that we haven’t announced, and you know, there will come a time for that. I feel the kind of anxiety from the fans, like, “Well, what else? What else? Feed me!’ But listen, we’re working on things and we like to wait. And so, I think there will be a time to talk about it, and we want to make those moments special for our fans.”
Emile Pagliarulo
Director of Studio Design
“I would be happy to have a game as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love, you know, and give them a story that they can immerse themselves in and systems that they love and really just an experience that they play not for 20 hours or not for 100 hours, but an experience that they can play for 200, 300, you know, 600 hours, because that’s the kind of games that we let’s create. That would be my hope for the future: to continue doing what we do.
Angela Broder
Workshop director
“I think that each of [our past games] is a learning experience, isn’t it? Take Fallout 76 – Yes, we learned how to create multiplayer; we also learned what it means when you ship a product that doesn’t necessarily work very well right away. And we learned to invest and listen to our players and strengthen who we are and what we are, our own ability to deal with adversity and adversity, all that kind of stuff, right? When you talk about Starfield, we did the greatest thing we’ve ever done in our entire lives: we created space. I’m afraid of space, I think space is really scary, but we made space! It’s all, although it might not be, like “Oh, I’m going to put space in Elder Scrolls VI” – don’t write that I’m putting space in Elder Scrolls VI; [laughs] we’re not going to put a place in Elder Scrolls VI! – everything we learned from putting space in Starfield is incorporated into Elder Scrolls VI. All this can be learned.
We are also fortunate to have a very long-standing team. And so, all of this learning from everyone continues with us, and I think one of the things that you can see the natural progression as we’ve created our titles is that we listen to our players. When we start our big, big list, some of what we write is everything our players want. We listen to our players and we take that into account, so that it all comes down to this moment of what this is all going to look like. It’s one of those interesting things. You never know if people see the correlation between “Six years ago, you said this thing. I listened to you, I swear. Because, look, it’s right here!” People don’t always follow these very long threads, but there are a lot of them. Someday I just wish I could draw a mind map of, like, “This guy said this thing on Reddit 12 years ago that has never left our brains, and there you go!” It took us a little while, but it’s here!
Sometimes there is this preconceived idea that we don’t read, watch or listen to anything. We have read everything. I mean, all of it. And, in particular Fallout, it’s interesting because as its scope has expanded, the amount of feedback we get about it now goes beyond just the game, right? And so, it can be a little overwhelming, but we read everything.”
