Bethesda chief Todd Howard says he gets the "anxiety from fans" regarding the studio's dead silence on Fallout 5, which has continued even amid peak Fallout TV show hype, but maintains that work is happening and news will come.
In Game Informer's excellent oral history of Fallout, Howard joins other Bethesda veterans in evaluating the future of the series. For years, the only concrete information we've had for Fallout 5 is that it will come out after The Elder Scrolls 6 – another game with next to no details available, and no release date in sight. Not terribly comforting, you could say, but Howard is optimistic.
"Looking at {Fallout 76], we’ve never stopped developing Fallout," he says. "We’ve had a full team on it for a long time, so Fallout, as a franchise, is the one that we’re still doing the most work in, above anything. Now, the majority of our internal team is on Elder Scrolls 6. We are doing other things with Fallout that we haven’t announced. And, you know, there’ll come a time for that.
"I get the sort of anxiety from fans, like, 'What else? Feed me!'" he adds. "But, look, we’re working on stuff. And, you know, we do like to wait. And so, I think there will be a moment to talk about [the future of Fallout], and we want to make those special moments for our fans."
Longtime quest designer Emil Pagliarulo, who most recently led design work on Starfield, offers some broad goals for future Fallout games. "I would be happy with a game that is as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love," he says, later specifying the type of game you don't just play for 20 or even 100 hours, but "200, 300, you know, 600 hours, because that's the kind of games we make."
He also seems to tip his hat to the long, still-growing gap in Fallout releases and how games have moved on in that time. He uses Oblivion Remastered as an example of Bethesda acknowledging the times. "People forget, in the original Oblivion, you couldn't sprint," he says. "So, of course we're going to add that in the Oblivion remaster. Things like that. The industry moved on, and so, we want to move on with it."
In his conclusion, Howard reiterates the importance of "role-playing games where you can put yourself into it and spend a lot of time," and how fans "want to revisit it in new ways." They're crumbs, folks, but with enough milk and eggs and patience, you could almost cobble them into something vaguely resembling bread, and frankly we've got to eat something while we continue the wait for Fallout 5.
