There are, apparently, multiple Fallout games on the way, including one being made by Obsidian Entertainment. This is an appealing prospect, since that's the same studio that gave us Fallout: New Vegas, and rumor has it Josh Sawyer is back in the director's chair as well. One of the studio's co-founders believes this much is good for both the company and for publisher Bethesda.
Chris Avellone, a co-founder and former senior designer at Obsidian who worked on New Vegas, Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic 2 and more, told the Human Can Opener that he immediately got excited at the prospect of New Vegas's writer returning. "If they got John Gonzalez to be the lead writer again, that's going to be awesome," he says.
"I have yet to play a game that John wrote for that I didn't really enjoy the story," Avellone explains. "Overall, I love his writing. I want to know the answers to these questions that he's presenting to me in the narrative. Having him back at Obsidian is going to make that Fallout game shine."
Gonzalez did come back to Obsidian in January 2025 after a spell at Guerilla Games working on the Horizon series, where he's now creative director. "Back to Obsidian for exciting times! (No, it's not [Fallout: New Vegas 2])," he says on LinkedIn, putting a dampener on Avellone's hopes.
However, it's unclear if he's updated his page since Xbox's massive restructuring of its games studios, where there were hundreds of layoffs, and many teams had their slates changed. Obsidian is one such team, where Fallout became a more central priority according to reports. Gonzalez's focus may have shifted as a result.
Naturally, Avellone gives a hat tip to Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, developers who worked on the original Fallout and its sequel and are now at Obsidian, where he "can't imagine" they wouldn't be incorporated into a new Fallout game in some capacity. "I think it's going to be both good for Obsidian, because I don't know how well their original IP was gaining traction," he adds.
"And I think it's going to be good for Bethesda, in many ways," he says. "Bethesda has chronically long lead times for all its titles coming out, it's just how the studio's always worked." Obsidian could be a "satellite studio" to help share the publisher's workload and increase the cadence of releases.
Considering we're now 11 years removed from Fallout 4 without any concrete evidence of Fallout 5, he has a point. We'll see what the future has in store.
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