The success of the Fallout TV show has led to something of a renaissance for the series, with all of the best Fallout games seeing a substantial spike in players over the past week. You'll need to stick to those games for now, though, as it seems as though Fallout 5 continues to be a long, long way off.
In a recent Twitter exchange, Bethesda veteran (and Fallout lore magnate) Emil Pagliarulo is asked exactly why so much time goes into making a Bethesda game. With The Elder Scrolls 6 not releasing until 2026 at the earliest and Starfield in development for the best part of a decade, the best guess for the next Fallout game suggests it might not be coming out until the 2030s. So if we're going to be waiting six more years, what's taking up all that time at Bethesda?
The short answer, Pagliarulo explains, is that there is no short answer. Development timeframes are "not specific to any of our games," and "can vary for a variety of reasons." When it came to Starfield, a lot of the studio's time was taken up with "updating and developing tech," but the idea is that that tech can be used again in the future, speeding up future timelines. Pagliarulo also points out that the team "paused for a bit to assist with Fallout 76."
Whether anything like 76 gets in the way of Fallout 5's development remains to be seen, but there's no guarantee of a release date either way. As Pagliarulo points out, "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."
The Bethesda veteran closes by joking that "institute scientists are hard at work on cloning initiatives" to help fill out the studio's ranks, but I seem to remember that that didn't go very well for Fallout 4's shadowy organization.
