A new Xbox survey is asking players how they would feel about future titles being console-exclusive to Xbox, with Fallout, Hideo Kojima's Physint, and Minecraft name-dropped.

Since its massive spending spree on the likes of Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, Xbox has been a bit all over the place when it comes to exclusives. Aside from honoring exclusive deals with the likes of Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, Microsoft went all-in on being a third-party publisher for a bit there, bringing almost every one of its games to PS5. Then, with the appointment of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, the strategy changed again: Gears of War: E-Day was confirmed to be on Xbox and PC only, despite reports that its PS5 port was apparently close to completion.

And now – barring Fable, which was previously confirmed for a PS5 launch – it looks like Microsoft may be priming players for more exclusivity. As highlighted by Windows Central, some Xbox Insider members have received surveys asking about game exclusivity and where they would play the title – or if they would play it at all if it's not on PS5 or Switch 2.

These reportedly included questions about Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and the upcoming Hideo Kojima game, Physint, which Xbox Game Studios recently became the publisher of, following Sony's decision to cancel the project. Kojima himself has said he doesn't know if Physint will release on PlayStation.

However, it's the final question that is likely to raise the most eyebrows. The question asks players to imagine every Xbox game – barring Call of Duty, which Microsoft is legally required to release on other platforms until at least 2033 – was an exclusive. However, it adds "For Minecraft only, existing titles would no longer be available for purchase on PlayStation or Nintendo consoles, and would not receive any new content updates."

I don't think people would be happy if Fallout 5 or Elder Scrolls 6 were exclusive to Xbox for sure, but the idea of removing Minecraft from PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, as well as no longer giving updates to those versions, is so brazenly a bad decision that even being floated is concerning.

Minecraft on Nintendo Switch has sold over 4 million physical copies in Japan alone, and the worldwide number is likely to be much higher, while the PS4 version of the game had over 17 million players as of 2019 – and given that a native PS5 version didn't release until 2024, again, that number is likely to have far surpassed it. Obviously, it's just a hypothetical for now, but I can only imagine that taking Minecraft away from millions would have a backlash that makes complaints about Sony's killing physical games look like nothing much.

As Minecraft sells over 425 million copies and attracts 300,000 new players a day, the evergreen sandbox game is getting its first dimension in 14 years

A viral, fan-made Fallout game that used Claude AI to take the post-apocalyptic RPG series to New York is no more, following an apparent cease-and-desist notice from Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax.

Earlier this week, an AI enthusiast took to the global town square to unveil Fallout: New York. Using Claude Opus 5.5, the browser game featured 117 unique locations, 112 characters, 46 weapons, and 0 audio files, but, well, every sound was made using code, so that was fine.

At the time of writing, the video attached to the tweet has been viewed 3.5 million times, though the reaction isn't entirely universal. To some, a pungent pile of AI slop. To others, the brimming sign of a bold and bright future. Regardless, at least one of those 3.5 million works for ZeniMax's legal department, so the project is no more.

Sharing the apparent cease-and-desist notice to Twitter, the creator behind the AI game has some choice words for Bethesda and the gang.

"Hey, [Bethesda], how about you make a Fallout game instead so I don't have to?" they tweet. "Sorry to everyone who enjoyed the game! But the suits got involved and the fun is over."

While few onlookers are surprised, the self-described "AI creative" had initially hoped Bethesda would leave them alone. In reply to someone who said Bethesda would come knocking on the original post, the Fallout fan had the following to say:

"It's all free and I make 0 money on it. I hope they don't ask me to take it down. I really love Fallout and this was just a fun tech demo. But I should add a quest where you have to serve someone papers, but they keep running away."

Yeah, about that.

RPG legend behind Fallout: New Vegas does "everything" he can to stop save scumming, but he wishes he'd "been more cynical about player behavior" in Pillars of Eternity.

If you've played XCOM, you know the feeling of seeing a 95% chance to hit, taking the shot, and missing. But that's just how statistics work sometimes. Josh Sawyer, the legendary RPG director behind Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, really wishes players understood that – or, at least, he wishes he'd been more cynical about player behaviour when designing some of his games.

The crux of the issue is this: players see a 95% chance of a given action being successful, and they're shocked – nay, appalled – if the random number generator doesn't come up in their favor. There were long-standing design conspiracy theorists who believed that games like XCOM were regularly cheating players. The truth, of course, is that these games do cheat – in your favor. Dispatch developer Adhoc spoke about this as recently as this past March.

"Many people don't understand probability very well and many of them are resistant to having it explained to them," Sawyer says in a Bluesky thread. "This leads some designers to creating mechanics that work like the player's instinctive (read: fucking wrong) understanding of probability, further confusing everyone."

You'll find a pretty elegant solution to this kind of problem in Baldur's Gate 3, which solves the problem of poor statistical awareness the same way as tabletop Dungeons & Dragons: it lets you watch the actual dice roll. Somehow, it feels a lot more reasonable seeing a 1 appear on a virtual die to represent an automatic failure than it does to miss a 95% shot – even though both, in theory, have a 5% chance of occurring.

These are the kinds of problems game designers are often faced with: players complaining about something that isn't true, but which feels true. Take, for example, the case of the gun in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory which players were convinced was absolutely overpowered. The devs ultimately solved the "problem" by nerfing not the gun's damage output or accuracy, but rather how powerful it sounded. The devs nerfed the audio, and the complaints quickly stopped.

These sorts of problems get all the more complex in RPGs, where players are faced with long-term decisions to make that can drain their resources or even change the outcome of the story. That often leads to players taking the path of least consequence, even when it means they start wasting their own time by reloading their saves over and over again.

"I do just about everything I can to not encourage save-scumming," Sawyer says.

One such example was in Fallout: New Vegas, which notably doesn't let you blast open locks with a gun, instead forcing players to invest in a lockpicking skill to get at those goodies. Many RPGs of that era would let you blast open locked containers at the risk of destroying the contents inside, but the problem is that many players would rather just save scum to get the loot rather than putting their skill points into lockpicking.

"A lot of my job involves thinking about what players are going to do when presented with a mechanic or a choice," as Sawyer explains in a follow-up post. "Even if players wouldn't consciously articulate why they would blast locks with a shotgun rather than invest in Lockpicking (admittedly a skill tax), they would veer toward that behavior," Sawyer continues. "It requires being a little bit cynical about player psychology but I think if you don't do that you wind up with very frustrated players."

In the case of Pillars of Eternity, Sawyer says "I wish I had been more cynical about player behavior." In that game, you restore your health and ability uses by taking a rest. You can rest either at camp, which consumes a unit of camping supplies, or by returning to town and hitting an inn for a nominal gold cost.

"Many players' aversion to the *idea* of losing a battle is greater than their aversion to marching 10 minutes out of a dungeon to buy more healing supplies," Sawyer says, "so they freely dump Per Rest abilities in every fight, rest after every fight, and then curse the designers for making them go back to town."

This is a problem I've been thinking about a lot as I make my way through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Out in the open world, you can restore your HP and MP by resting at benches placed throughout the map – but each bench use costs a cushion item. The cushions are dirt cheap, but fast traveling and healing in towns are both free, so I just keep doing that, even though I'm objectively wasting my own time.

"This also applies to narrative choices," Sawyer adds. "Sometimes designers will create a quest where players can choose options a) b) or c) and it's our job to ask 'Why would anyone want to pick c?' Sometimes it's okay for an option to be there because it would feel weird if it weren't there. But in most cases we're trying to create some sort of thought process in the player's mind. We want the player to weigh their own values against what they're being asked to do. The decision doesn't need to be torturous, but it should take a bit of reflection, I think."

Earlier this year, a Bloomberg report suggested that Sawyer was leading a new Fallout project at Obsidian. Just a couple of weeks ago, Bethesda announced that Obsidian is, indeed, making a new Fallout game. We don't officially know whether or not Sawyer is heading up the project, but I think it's safe to guess we'll see some of his anti-save scum ethos in whatever form it ends up taking.

These are the best Fallout games of all time.

Right now, it's anyone's guess when Fallout 5 might arrive. However, we do know it's happening, somewhere in the bowels of Bethesda, and one former developer from the studio believes taking the franchise out of the US would be a welcome shot in the arm.

Chatting to GoHumanize, via Insider Gaming, Bruce Nesmith, a quest designer on Fallouts 3 and 4, lead designer on Skyrim and design director on Oblivion Remaster, believes there's enormous potential in taking the property fully international. "It can go to any city that has a really distinctive style to it. You look at the places they’ve already taken Fallout and it’s Las Vegas, Washington DC, Boston and they’re all places full of style," he says.

"It would be very tempting to go outside of the country too even though Fallout is highly rooted in Americana," he adds.

London and Paris, the capitals of England and France, respectively, are two examples that "could be amazing," he mentions. And those would definitely be easy candidates here, offering large, sprawling metropolises for the devs to turn into post-apocalyptic wastelands. But they're too easy, in my view.

Head up to the Scottish Highlands, or over to Ireland. Or maybe some part of Australia. Each would be fascinating to see in this context. His point about Fallout being firmly planted in American culture can still echo through these locales in fascinating ways.

Imagine the culture clash of a post-nuclear Glasgow, where the city's now-mayor is an Elvis obsessive. Or the locals believe themselves to be in some distant state because American culture is all they had access to for generations. In some ways that wouldn't be too far removed from modern day whenever Country 2 Country happens in the dear green place.

The possibilities are endless. Todd Howard's been clear the series is unlikely to go outside North America, but never say never. Although, really, I think we all just want the thing to happen at all, regardless of what the setting is.

Fallout's iconic Vault Boy exists because the devs were struggling to solve an old-school RPG problem

Even as Fallout has evolved into a mega-franchise with massively popular open-world games and TV show spin-offs, certain elements of the original 1997 RPG remain – things like the SPECIAL stat system and the iconic Vault Boy mascot. As it turns out, these two creations were very closely related.

Fallout was originally meant to use the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS), a tabletop RPG system published by Steve Jackson Games. In this iteration, Fallout had a bunch of different characteristics between skills, advantages, disadvantages, and quirks, all of which had to be rendered in a way the player could understand at a glance.

"For every single one of those characteristics, we had to make an icon, because the game used the icons when the skill or advantage or disadvantage was displayed," OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains in a new YouTube video. "We used an icon next to its name so that later on, if something happened related to that skill in places we didn't have a lot of room for text, we could use the icon."

The work of creating all those icons fell to an artist named Arlene Somers. "I think there were over a hundred, maybe close to 200 when you summed up all the different things," Cain says.

Cain was starting to lose his color vision around this time, so he encouraged Summers not to use color as a differentiator for the icons. It started to become more and more difficult to create icons that were distinct enough from each other to tell them apart at a glance – which was the whole point of the icons in the first place.

The solution came from art director Leonard Boyarsky. "Leonard had the idea that the skilldex – where we had the title and the description – instead of putting the icon there, we do a cartoon of somebody performing the action or looking like the attribute that was in question," Cain explains. "He even referenced Monopoly, the rich uncle Pennybags, and he created it. He sketched it up and we all thought it was really cool."

Artist George Almond further refined the Vault Boy design, and the job of actually drawing all the final Vault Boy icons fell to fellow artist Tramell Ray Isaac "He drew hundreds of these things," Cain says. "If you're going through Fallout, they appear in the skilldex. They're all over the manual. They're in the opening cinematic. And now, of course, it's on mugs and bobbleheads and all kinds of things. It was a really creative thing he did."

Famously, however, Vault Boy is part of why Fallout had to drop the GURPS system, as it was one of the key issues Steve Jackson himself took issue with. According to a 1998 PC Gamer feature, Jackson didn't like the violence in the opening cinematic, the small-scale characters, or the Monopoly-inspired Vault Boy. Cain expands on those objections a bit in the video.

"Among other things that Steve Jackson Games didn't like about Fallout was Vault Boy," Cain says. "They specifically singled out Vault Boy as needing to be removed. They didn't like it. We explained the Monopoly reference. They didn't like it. They thought it tonally didn't fit. Keep in mind, we already had done the cinematic and they didn't like it there. There's other things in the cinematic they didn't like, but they didn't like Vault Boy there either."

Unwilling to accept these kinds of demands, the devs ditched GURPS in favor of their own home-grown stat system, and eventually, SPECIAL was born. So, in a way, Jackson's objections to Fallout accidentally gave us two of the series' most iconic legacies.

Correction: A previous version of this article identified artist Arlene Somers incorrectly. We regret the error.

Where would the best Fallout games be without Vault Boy?

Storied RPG studio Obsidian is now a part of Bethesda. That news came alongside Xbox's latest round of layoffs and reshuffling, and it's not entirely clear what it means for the studio's future. Apparently, it'll be little more than "a change in reporting structure" – according to a leaked memo from Bethesda president Jill Braff, anyway.

"The creative identity and strengths that make Obsidian distinct will remain at the core of their studio and work," Braff says in an email to employees, obtained by Aftermath. "[CEO] Feargus [Urquhart] and the Obsidian leadership team will continue to lead Obsidian, with the studio reporting to me. Bethesda Game Studios will continue to lead the Fallout franchise."

Earlier this year, Bethesda and Obsidian announced that they were collaborating on a new Fallout game, 16 years after the two studios worked together on the beloved Fallout: New Vegas. That project became official shortly after behind-the-scenes reporting suggested that Microsoft had swooped in to kill Obsidian's Avowed sequel and put the devs to work on Fallout.

"Together, the teams will build on their longstanding relationship and the early work already underway on a new Fallout project, with more to share in the months ahead," Braff says in the leaked message. "This structure supports the franchise-led model we've been strengthening while keeping accountability for both the studio and the franchise clear."

For much of the past decade, Obsidian has put its resources into developing original IP, including The Outer Worlds, Grounded, and Pentiment, as well as a fresh take on its Pillars of Eternity series in Avowed.

While I love New Vegas as much as anyone, and a new Fallout game is long overdue, I have a hard time restraining my cynicism over Obsidian's future. The studio was clearly passionate about its own, internal IP, and this talk of "franchise-led" development feels all too familiar. We have, after all, spent years watching studios like Ubisoft and Activision slowly turn their vast rosters of internal studios into little more than support houses for big franchises like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty.

Baldur's Gate 3 publishing lead Michael "Cromwelp" Douse shares those concerns about Obsidian. "I can't imagine what it must feel like to have independent agency and then, suddenly enough, find yourself working *under* a competitor," he writes. "I can't imagine that feels great." Especially with reports of 25% of the studio being laid off as part of the transition.

Another Fallout RPG was in development at Obsidian Entertainment before Bethesda pulled the plug "a while ago," ex-studio lead says.

Just yesterday, we learned that Bethesda is taking control of Obsidian Entertainment amid all of the Xbox reshuffles – but not everyone is sure it's a good move.

Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian Studios publishing director Michael "Cromwelp" Douse is one such person, stepping forward to share his concerns of the management handover on Twitter.

"I can't imagine what it must feel like to have independent agency and then, suddenly enough, find yourself working *under* a competitor," he writes. "I can't imagine that feels great." I suppose his take makes sense, but commenters don't necessarily agree.

One person points out that the two studios aren't necessarily "competitors" anymore, so to speak, as they've both been under the wing of Xbox for some time now, prompting Douse to respond.

"Putting aside the fact I was referring to a time prior to the sale, the fact that you think two entities under the umbrella of one parent company can't be competitors tells me you've never had a corporate job," he replies – and that does check out, as they certainly can be.

But, again, it's important to note that both Bethesda and Obsidian have been working together for a while now. Two months ago, they unveiled their mysterious, collaborative new Fallout game – although we're not quite sure what it is just yet.

At that point, Bethesda said Fallout 5 is in pre-production and unveiled both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters, so it could be any of these… or perhaps something else altogether.

Only time will tell, I suppose, but, again, Douse's worries here aren't out of place at all. The industry is suffering quite a difficult time. After all, Microsoft's plans to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox hit both Bethesda and Obsidian previously, with the latter reportedly seeing around 25% of its studio impacted.

Following 1,600 redundancies from earlier this year, another 268 layoffs of that total 3,200 were announced yesterday. You know, the same time that news of Bethesda's new management over Obsidian dropped – so, yeah… it's not really a strange time to have a bit of anxiety about it all.

Searching for some new games to keep on your radar? Browse through our roundup of all the upcoming Bethesda games to look forward to.

Bethesda Game Studios is now managing Obsidian Entertainment – news that comes just two months after the studios unveiled their mysterious, collaborative new Fallout game.

Xbox Game Studios has managed Obsidian for over seven years now, following the acquisition of the legendary RPG developer in November 2018. The team delivered Grounded and its early access sequel, Pentiment, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2 during this time.

While the change in leadership is certainly big news, it does make a degree of sense. Bethesda is of course the the studio behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, franchises that Obsidian and its leadership are strongly aligned with. This news is especially intriguing right now, seeing as we know there are various projects in the works currently that are relevant to both teams.

There's the new Fallout game that Bethesda confirmed it was working on alongside Obsidian back in July – but it's not clear which Fallout game this is. In the same breath, Bethesda also had said Fallout 5 is in pre-production and unveiled both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters as well.

So, could it be Fallout 5 the two are collaborating on? I'd wager it's more likely to be the Fallout: New Vegas revamp, seeing as Obsidian headed the original back in 2010, or potentially something else entirely.

It's exciting news nonetheless, especially when the industry is otherwise suffering quite a difficult time. After all, Microsoft's plans to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox hit both Bethesda and Obsidian, with the latter reportedly seeing around 25% of its studio impacted.

Following 1,600 layoffs taking place earlier this year, another 268 layoffs (of that total 3,200) were announced today, as was news that Rare, World's Edge, and the Halo franchise will be moving under operational control of Activision Blizzard.

I'll be keeping my own fingers crossed for what's to come from the dynamic duo now that they're working more closely together than before, that's for certain. Who knows – perhaps we'll see something entirely new come from the two rather than just a remaster. Only time will tell for sure.

Searching for more new games to keep on your radar? Browse through our roundup of all the upcoming Bethesda games to look forward to.

Bethesda is among the many game studios affected by the ongoing mass layoffs at Xbox, which are set to cut 3,200 jobs by the end of the 2027 fiscal year. At least 1,600 employees have already been let go, including Skyrim and Fallout veterans with decades-long careers like Christiane Meister and Ray Lederer. It apparently was a rude awakening for staff at the storied studio, who'd hoped their work on such legendary franchises would insulate them from Microsoft's cost-cutting.

"There was an impending sense of doom, and it was like, man, is it going to be us?" Anne Barrett, who worked at Bethesda Game Studios Austin, tells The Guardian. "We thought we were safe. I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating."

Employees seemingly didn't have any more insight into the layoffs than the public did. They worried over the same reports of mass job cuts that the rest of us were all reading. The Guardian reports that they all learned of the mass layoffs when Asha Sharma published her "resetting Xbox" memo for the world to read. An hour later, people were called into meetings where they learned who had been fired.

"I remember, I laughed the whole day because I was in complete disbelief," Barrett says. "I was like, there’s no way they’re doing this. That’s how I processed it. Some of my co-workers were just devastated. I mean, breaking down. They did not understand what was going on. We had people who were just in really dark places. I think it hit me probably the next day. I felt like, wow – I just spent seven years doing all this. In college, people called me Bethesda because it was my dream to work here. And that was just … gone."

There are numerous upcoming Bethesda games in various stages of production, including the likes of The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Series fans have been waiting well over a decade for both of those RPGs, and they'll likely be among the biggest titles Xbox has ever released. Yet it's still been willing to cut the veteran talent who helped make the previous entries great.

"I don't know how you create games at the quality level we were without the institutional knowledge that's been lost," Barrett says. "We have proprietary tech. Our titles have a very well-known visual identity. And when you lose the people who built the tech, when you lose the people who were improving it, you can't just throw new people at that problem, right? You can’t replace an artist with someone brand new and say: 'Now replicate what they were doing 15, 20 years ago.' The company has said that they can do it. I disagree."

Barrett says that her "view of the industry has definitely been damaged." arguing that "there’s been a loss of sight over why AAA games were so valuable to players. It wasn't just that they were big and shiny. It was that [the studios] had the resources to invest in creativity. What I see now is the same formula over and over and over again. In any entertainment industry, if you do that enough times, people get tired of it. I would love for us as an industry to get back to actually being creative and investing in that creativity."

EA devs feel "the threat of layoffs at all times," especially after Saudi Arabia acquisition: "It's hard to see how teams or games that underperform wouldn't be dissolved."

What made the original Fallout RPG so great wasn't just its dark humor or apocalyptic setting or branching choices, according to co-creator Tim Cain. What made Fallout great was actually how it was made.

Part of the team responsible for the original Fallout - and now part of Obsidian Entertainment, a studio working on an all-new Fallout game - Tim Cain recently spoke about an aspect of the series' creation that often goes "overlooked" by many developers and fans alike nowadays.

In a new vlog posted to his YouTube channel, Cain brings up something called the Abilene paradox, which refers to how a group of people might refuse to push back on a bad idea because they're afraid to rock the boat. Maybe you're too shy to say you don't want to eat at a restaurant you know is crappy, just because everyone else seems excited about it.

"That happens all the time in video game development," Cain says, but instead of submitting to a crappy restaurant, developers might go along with a not-so-great feature for a game. "Too many people think that discussion is argument, and discussion is not argument."

The famed game dev mentions how he's worked with people who want to be told what to do, rather than having deep discussions. "If you treat discussion as argument then ideas will never be questioned much less really tested," he explains. "And, so, your game will go out with a bunch of things that somebody thought should go in. No one ever pushed back on it. Nobody ever implemented it, tested it, and went, 'No, that's not very good. We should change that.'" He's also seen the same pattern in publishers and fans in online forums, too.

"So, this gets back to why I think Fallout was a great game," he goes on. "Fallout was great because we pushed each other during development and we pushed each other pretty hard. We asked ourselves difficult questions about what we were doing. Should that creature look like that? Should that character talk like that? Should that map be that size? We questioned ideas. We would discuss them. We would defend them. And we would offer better ones... This is something that's kind of overlooked, I think, in development now."

There aren't yet many details available about Obsidian's Fallout game, but it's reportedly being directed by New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer. Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters might not be enough to fill the wait to Fallout 5, however.

Fallout 4 fans let out as a sigh of relief as Bethesda quadruples the RPG's mod limit without breaking everything in new update

Fallout co-creator Timothy Cain, whose most recent portfolio entries include the likes of The Outer Worlds 2 and its predecessor over at Obsidian Entertainment, thinks developers have a lot to learn from bad games – not just successful titles.

It's a tale as old as time, as Cain describes in his latest YouTube video (below). A game becomes a smash hit – think anything from indie to AAA, Meccha Chameleon to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – and the industry goes wild with copies or clones, attempting to recapture that same success.

This might even lead to other folks copying the bad aspects of "good" games. As Cain puts it, they may "blindly copy" them. These bad aspects could be obvious, and so they're not often overlooked – but "bad" games are, on the other hand, and that takes valuable lessons away from aspiring devs, according to Cain.

"In general," as he says, "bad games are ignored, especially if they weren't part of a popular franchise and or never sold very well." This checks out. When they're sequels of "good" titles, they're not as oft forgotten.

But, "there are so many games out there that one game came out, it wasn't very good, and it was forgotten," Cain explains, concluding, "and I'm saying you could learn a lot from games like that."

Honestly, I get what he means. I'm immediately reminded of that quote about those who don't learn from history being doomed to repeat it, and of the concept of survivorship bias – the overarching theme of the Fallout mastermind's video, actually.

In his own words, "the whole point of this video was [to] please remember about survivorship bias. The qualities of successful games… may not be those qualities which made them successful. And conversely, look at failed ones because some of the things that they share in common may be the reason that they failed."

It's a much-needed message for the industry (and any outside of it as well, for that matter).

Comments see viewers agreeing with Cain, too. "It's the slow path to eventually making the same video game over and over again," reads one. Another adds, "such a simple concept, but you're totally right, they don't ever analyze what makes a game bad."

Fallout co-creator says turn-based and real-time RPGs both have "loud vocal advocates" who won't play anything else, so devs can't please everyone.

Fallout 4 fans have been bracing themselves for the worst this week after Bethesda Game Studios announced an update with "Creations improvements" and more to come later to Skyrim, too – but, as it turns out, the patch isn't all that bad.

As Bethesda outlines in a new post over on Twitter, the new Fallout 4 update – which did indeed roll out yesterday as planned – contains various bug and crash fixes, as well as changes to the Creation Kit.

Perhaps most notably, however, it increases "the BA2 archive limit from 256 to 1024 to better accommodate larger collections of mods." In other words, the patch essentially quadruples the amount of Fallout 4 mods we can have.

That's a pretty solid improvement, if I do say so myself – one that's perhaps even worth the script extender and load order breaking a bit post-update, as they always do. I'm not alone in thinking so, either, as a thread over on Reddit proves.
Fans are largely pleasantly surprised, to say the least. "Wait holy shit this is actually a goated update just for the BA2 limit," reads one comment. "Now I can't wait to start a new playthrough!"

Another user exclaims that the "BA2 limit was out of left field and massive," as folks explain it "literally quadruples the engines mod count," which, you know… is kind of a big deal.

Plus, the update also apparently allows mods on PlayStation consoles to employ the use of custom assets – something fans have been asking Bethesda to implement for years now, as replies on a separate thread point out. Good news all around, eh?

For those of us who prefer Bethesda's more, erm, fantastical games, Skyrim's update sounds as though it'll be similar, increasing mod limits for console users and such – a nice change of pace to the studio's usual disappointing (sometimes, downright upsetting) patches.

Here's everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 if you're craving something new from Bethesda – we certainly are.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain has weighed in on the different reasons why devs might opt for turn-based or real-time combat in their games, and while both have their place (and dedicated fans), he reckons that for some RPGs, the choice should be obvious.

As spotted by PC Gamer, Cain discusses the matter in depth in a new video on his YouTube channel (below). He acknowledges, of course, that there are pros and cons to both types of combat.

Real-time combat, for example, is more fast-paced, and "a lot of people just like that better," Cain says. "They think turn-based is too slow. They hate when they're just sitting there waiting while the enemies all take their turns, and [are] like, 'Why am I here?'"

This type of combat also "allows for player reaction," meaning that dodging or blocking an attack, for example, are down to you as the player to do the correct inputs at the right time. In a similar vein, this means that "offensive and defensive abilities are used at the same time" rather than on separate turns. Cain also reasons that real-time is a great choice for first-person games.

However, there are also issues with it. For example, he says, "I frequently see rules designed for turn-based being used in real-time games with no change."

In Baldur's Gate 1, which uses real-time-with-pause combat, he says he'd often get "annoyed" when he'd cast a fireball, only for the enemy he was aiming for to move out of the way of the target area and one of his own characters get in the way. On that note, turn-based combat is a lot more tactical than real-time, he says – there's a lot more strategy than in a real-time game where "prediction is more chaotic and positioning is way less reliable."

Cain continues: "Both sides, real-time and turn-based, they have their loud vocal advocates, to the point where some people will only play real-time games and some people will only play turn-based games. So don't think you're going to pick one of these and [be] like, 'I have solved the issue.' There will be a group that goes, 'Oh, I won't play your game because you picked this combat.'"

With that said, there are ways to reduce the issues of each genre, he says, such as real-time-with-pause, or adding ways to speed up turn-based combat. In recent years, we've seen many major JRPGs add time-saves to turn-based combat, for example, like Metaphor: ReFantazio's insta-kills.

But even if there's no perfect solution that everyone is going to love, there are some rules that can be applied when it comes to determining which kind of game should be given what type of combat, Cain suggests. "If you decide you want it to be a first-person RPG, you almost certainly want it to be real-time. But if you want to do an old-school party-based isometric RPG, you probably want to be turn-based, or at the very minimum, real-time-with-pause," he says.

For devs, he argues, "it depends on which of those solutions ameliorates the problems you dislike the most and leaves problems that you don't really care about."

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says Morrowind on Xbox changed everything for console RPGs: "It stunned me."

Not releasing a new Fallout game alongside the popular Amazon Prime TV show might seem like a missed opportunity, but Obsidian Entertainment co-founder and Fallout: New Vegas writer Chris Avellone reckons the decision was likely a "personal" one for the devs.

It's now been over a decade since Fallout 4, so to say fans have been patiently waiting for the next mainline entry would be an understatement. Thankfully, Bethesda has now revealed the tiniest glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel with confirmation that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," albeit with The Elder Scrolls 6 remaining the team's priority.

Beyond that, it's also been confirmed that remasters of both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are on the way, as well as a new game that's being developed by New Vegas studio Obsidian, which raises the question – why didn't Bethesda align any of these releases with the first or second season of its TV show? Asked about why we've not seen more Obsidian-led Fallout games or a new title to coincide with the show on a new episode of the Human Can Opener podcast on YouTube (below), Avellone gives his thoughts.

"I think whatever the decision was not to do that, it didn't feel like a business decision," he begins, saying that to him, it appeared to be a more "personal" one. "But I don't know for sure," he adds.

What "personal" factors might have come into play here are another matter that Avellone doesn't elaborate on, but to suggest it wasn't a business decision would certainly track. After all, the TV show saw the existing series surge in popularity as fans new and old were inspired to jump back in. Just imagine how popular a brand new game would have been if it launched around the same time? Well, it's not like the Fallout TV series is over yet, so who knows, perhaps one of those upcoming releases will align with one of the future seasons.

Fallout 3 was "not what we intended" after tech constraints in 2008, says Bethesda vet Nate Purkeypile, so it's time for a "better" remaster.

Former Bethesda artist and Fallout 76 lead Nate Purkeypile is just as glad as you are that Bethesda has a Fallout 3 remaster on the way. Purkeypile worked on the original RPG back in 2008, so he's acutely aware that it could have been better.

Purkeypile tells The Examined Game host Steven Lake in a new YouTube interview, "I'm personally looking forward to [the Fallout 3 remaster], because we were, like, super tech-constrained making Fallout 3." The dev says, "you could only place so many lights," plus textures were small, and devs were "constantly worrying about the memory budgets, or how much stuff you're putting on-screen... So it's not like it's exactly how we intended."

Recalling video game development in 2008, nearly 20 years ago, is like revisiting an archeological site. Culturally, no one could decide if video games were really art, but teams crunched hard trying to at least make something good. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain recalls in a 2023 YouTube video on the subject, "Many, many people worked many, many hours more than eight in the '80s and '90s, and even into the early 2000s. Part of it was passion, part of it was necessity. There was just no way to get games finished without crunch."

Then, in terms of technology, 2000s gaming was stone and bronze compared to the iron tools we have today. Unreal Engine only went up to 3. No one sat around evangelizing about 4k resolution, because there was none to be had. Developers had to be flexible with their limited options, but some didn't like to be, so Purkeypile says, "I get why people are more upset over movie remakes and stuff. But, in the case of games – and particularly the art side of it – it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

"Even before I was doing games professionally," the developer remembers, "I started making games before we had color. So, I was seeing [development] change dramatically over time."

The past 20 years of technological evolution we benefit from now is helpful not only to new games, but also to remakes. Purkeypile emphasizes, "I think a lot of these remakes have been done, frankly, better lately, too."

He continues, "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas, for a while, I think a lot of those updates were like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and, like, threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games coming out."

Ideally, the Fallout 3 remaster ends up a perfect balance between the old and new world: more faithful to its original developers' ideas in 2008 while also being a genuinely competitive modern title.

Fallout 3 is a masterpiece and I hope the remaster comes to Switch 2.

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.

You can't buy Fallout 5 or Elder Scrolls 6 yet, but you can buy Bethesda's new $160 Nuka-Girl statue

Bethesda is now 40-years-old, which might inspire you to reminisce about all the incredible Fallout games the developer has released, and every astounding The Elder Scrolls game it's launched, and then you start wondering – hey, what about Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls 6? What's going with those guys, since Bethesda overlord Todd Howard keeps assuring everyone the projects are well underway, though he knows it's taking a while? Bethesda now replies shhh, just buy a $160 Nuka-Girl statue instead.

The 1.72-pound sculpture now available for pre-order on the official Bethesda Gear Store is the closest thing to an anniversary gift you're getting this year. It's an uncanny replica of the Fallout franchise's Nuka-Cola mascot, a woman wearing a saran-tight, white space suit, which Bethesda proves with a close photo of the statue's butt on its product page.

"Beautifully-detailed and standing 12.8 inches (32.51 cm) tall, this collectible is sure to command a lot of attention wherever you display it," Bethesda writes in the Nuka-Girl statues item description. That's certainly an efficient way to describe why someone would want to purchase an oversized PVC statue of a lady with her butt out.

For its 40th, Bethesda has also swapped its usually muted, black-text logo for a foreboding, glowing red one it says, in a Twitter post, was "inspired by our roots." Old fans are glad to see it borrows its font from '90s-era Bethesda, and the new-old logo is printed on the 40th anniversary t-shirts the company recently added to its merch shop.

As for the pin-up Nuka-Girl, she's loyal to one corporate overlord only – "Nuka-Cola" brands the rocketship she leans against. A 13-inch version of the statue from collectibles maker Gaming Heads is similarly festooned in soda pop branding, but its standard version costs $499. If you really must quench your thirst, the official Bethesda statue offers a more affordable girl. She's no Fallout 5, but – well, yeah, she's no Fallout 5.

Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction": Bethesda breaks silence on long-awaited RPG.

Since he's the guy who created the original concept for Fallout and led the first RPG's development, it's reasonable to put some weight on what Tim Cain thinks is most interesting about the series. In a new video, he revisits an old sentiment of his that Fallout is about exploring "the ethics of a post-nuclear world."

"There's a famous quote of mine – I even looked it up because I said it once, like 25 years ago. 'My idea is to explore more of the ethics of a post-nuclear world, not to make a better plasma gun,'" Cain says in a new YouTube video. That quote, in fact, dates back to a 2002 chat with Fallout fansite Duck and Cover, published when the original Fallout 3 – which is better known as Van Buren, and which Cain was not directly involved with – was still in development.

The older, crankier portions of the Fallout fanbase have regularly revisited that quote as a way to dunk on the Bethesda era of the series, but Cain himself is more interested in using it to explain why he likes post-apocalyptic settings so much.

"People have trotted that out for all kinds of things they want to support," he explains, "but what I was saying there is the ultimate reason I liked [the post-apocalypse] and why I liked making Fallout was this absence of authority, allowing you to explore morality. It wasn't so we could make cool plasma weapons and power armor and all that – although that's cool. But that wasn't the reason. If Fallout's a cake, that stuff is the icing."

The gooey cake at the heart of Fallout is, instead, "that gray morality stuff," Cain argues. "You will run around the world and you see some people trying to do good and rebuild civilization. You will find other people being really bad and killing people and raiding settlements and saying, 'We're just trying to survive.' Sometimes they're not even pretending to do that. They're bad. They know it. They don't care. They don't want to work."

That's the world as it exists in the game, "but to the player," Cain says, "I've always wanted the game to ask, 'What will you do? Okay, here you are, blank slate player. What are you going to do? How are you going to behave when no one tells you what to do? Are you going to be a good person or are you going to be a bad person?'"

While Cain says "I love the Ultima series," one of the cornerstones of RPG design, those games "expect you to be good. Fallout has no such expectation. It's an entirely different kind of game." The post-apocalyptic setting offers a world without any kind of moral authority – whether legal, cultural, or religious – and lets you make your choices as you will.

That impetus to let players do what they want is why Fallout has a series of slides at the end showing the consequences of your actions over the course of the game. "We created them and put them in because, when the game ended, we wanted the player to know we watched you," Cain says. "The designers anticipated some of the horrific stuff you did, and here are some slides explaining all the horrible stuff that resulted from your actions. And good stuff, but also bad stuff."

For Cain, that lack of moral judgment is essential. "I love gray morality," he concludes. "I love it. It makes people self-reflect. Something a lot of people don't do. I mean, just look at politics or online. I love that about the game. It also makes people want to replay, which is a big part of Fallout. Replay, make a new character, act differently."

Certainly, our list of the best Fallout games can generate no controversy.

Bethesda has rumbled back to life. Nearly three years after Starfield and with The Elder Scrolls 6 nowhere in sight, the positive reception to the announcement of the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters is hardly surprising. With the help of Obsidian, between 2008 and 2011 Bethesda cemented itself as the rightful king of the open-world RPG, Fallout 3 and Skyrim bookending the kind of development run we'll probably never see again.

A long-awaited return to the Capitol and Mojave Wastelands is welcome, but while these remasters aren't quite too little, too late, they serve as a reminder of just how neglected one of the biggest and best RPG series has become.

This November will mark 11 years since Fallout 4, with Fallout 76's eighth anniversary falling just a couple of weeks before. And until last week, there was nothing to suggest another game was anywhere close to the horizon – based on Bethesda's previous release cadence, 2033 was a solid guess for a potential Fallout 5 release year. That's not far short of two full decades since the series' last traditional, single-player RPG launch – an unforgivable drought for a series that has over the past few years, been transformed into a mainstream, global franchise thanks to the critically-acclaimed Amazon Prime series.

In the last week, admittedly, the Fallout slate has filled up significantly. First up will be next year's "prequel story to Fallout 3" heading to Fallout 76. The Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters seem likely to follow relatively soon after, potentially positioned around Fallout season 3 and the Fallout Shelter show. Fallout 5 is officially in pre-production, but could easily follow as many as five years after Elder Scrolls 6, which still feels a long way off. Obsidian's new Fallout project seems likely to plug that inter-franchise gap – perhaps some time in 2029 or the early 2030s.

Kick in the head

It's that last project that's currently most mysterious, but also the clearest indication of what Fallout and Xbox actually need: help from the wider ecosystem. Xbox and Zenimax are full of studios that could have, over the six years since the acquisition, been running wild in the franchise playgrounds that are currently open only to Bethesda. Clearly, the kind of AAA, open-world RPG that Todd Howard wants to make takes many years to complete, but I see no reason why no other studio has been allowed to do more than sniff in the direction of the Fallout and TES brands.

The possibilities are huge; a stealthy, Dark Brotherhood immersive sim made by Arkane Austin instead of shuttering it after Redfall; a Ghoul-led game using the State of Decay tech from Undead Labs, which just got sold off; an Age of Empires conversion from World's Edge, which has been diligently plugging away on DLC and remasters for that franchise. Xbox's affinity for beefy guys with guns across the Gears, Doom, and Halo series could have led to an amazing power armor shooter. There are certainly studios whose work doesn't mesh with Bethesda's oeuvre so neatly, but within the Xbox ecosystem, they're surprisingly few and far between. And all that is to say nothing of Obsidian, a studio that not only made one of the best Fallout games, but eventually took its fate into its own hands and made Avowed and The Outer Worlds as its own answers to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

That none of those studios have been given a Bethesda license is a mistake, but it's a mistake compounded by the fact that Bethesda isn't equipped to handle them at the pace that should be required. Its two most important IPs have been left to languish for more than a decade. Starfield is a primary cause for that, but so is Bethesda's size. The studio has remained deliberately small by the standards of a major studio, and at about 450 staff isn't capable of being a two-game studio, especially since switching between three different franchises means it can't pull off the kind of juggling act that the similarly-sized Insomniac - which has launched a whole suite of Marvel games over the time since Fallout 76 – has been able to achieve.

A hit of Jet

It's likely that the Fallout release cadence will pick up now. The remasters are the start of that process, and the Obsidian game and Fallout 76 expansion will help. But while Xbox's recent deluge of lay-offs have hit hard, the fact still stands that the publisher is sitting pretty on some of the industry's highest profile RPG brands and what remains of the studios that created them. With only the likes of CD Projekt Red as major competition, the question is whether new Xbox chief Asha Sharma will be able to do what predecessor Phil Spencer couldn't, even as the company haemorrhages staff. If CDPR is able to push out three major RPGs in quick succession, could the much larger Xbox be in a position to follow suit instead of squandering the opportunity? Or, is such a massive entity prone to slow manoeuvring, like trying to turn a Brotherhood of Steel zeppelin?

But, whether or not that all comes to pass, it doesn't change the fact that as a gaming series Fallout has been left behind by its creators for far too long, and no number of remasters will help speed up the ongoing wait for its next major iteration, especially as the years tick on.

The Elder Scrolls Online is struggling with "team bandwidth" after Xbox layoffs hit Bethesda and ZeniMax, leading devs to limit a store for in-game items.

Fallout 3 designer Bruce Nesmith previously shared his hopes that a remaster of the game would make the combat better than it was in 2008.

Last week, Bethesda dropped a load of info about its post-apocalyptic RPG series: Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," New Vegas developer Obsidian is returning to the series for a new entry, and Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters.

Granted, this felt a bit like jingling keys to distract from Microsoft's massive wave of layoffs – something one workers' union has already called out – but it's naturally a very exciting prospect to fans.

Speaking to FRVR around the time The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered released in 2025, Nesmith shared his thoughts about a potential remaster of Fallout 3, admitting that the gunplay in the 2008 RPG is "not good."

"It didn’t hold up to shooters at the time," he explained, "a lot of work was done on that for Fallout 4."

And it's true, Fallout 4 did feel more akin to what would be a traditional first-person shooter of that era, making it so players didn't have to rely on the V.A.T.S. quite as much.

"I anticipate seeing a lot of that work [we did with Fallout 4] go into it [Fallout 3 Remastered]," Nesmith explained. And granted, Oblivion Remastered did make some changes to the combat compared to the 2006 original, namely giving new movesets to the melee weapons. So perhaps Bethesda will end up making the shooting in Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) feel more like Fallout 4.

Modders remastering Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 are not bothered by Bethesda's official version: "Our project has been a community-driven passion project for almost a full decade"

A group of Fallout 4 modders who call themselves the Fallout 4: Capital Wasteland Team have released a statement saying that they intend to continue work on their mod, which aims to rebuild Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4, despite Bethesda announcing that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters are in development.

In a statement released on Twitter, the team says that while they are excited for the upcoming remasters, the Capital Wasteland mod will continue development and the project is completely separate from Bethesda Game Studios and its work.

"The F4CW Team is incredibly excited to see Fallout 3 officially receiving a remaster and we can't wait to see what they have in store," the statement begins. "That said, we'd also like to reassure our community that F4CW is continuing development. Our project has been a community-driven passion project for almost a full decade now, and we're committed to seeing that our work, creativity and dedication continue!"

The modding team is consists of dozens of contributors, and progress is very slow. It is very likely that, despite 10 years of development time invested in the mod, the official Bethesda games will launch before the full project is complete. However, from previously released updates it appears that Capital Wasteland is something very different from a typical remaster anyway.

Fallout: New Vegas director says RPGs should be messy and force players to make hard decisions: "No person can fix everything"

I was a late bloomer to Fallout. I saw it aplenty in the magazines during the late 1990s, but it wasn't until a year after Fallout 3's 2008 release that I loaded it into my PlayStation 3 console, and it became my late Game of the Year. Playing a title that was a mix of first-person shooter and RPG genres was a new feeling for me; the feeling of awe was something I hadn't felt since I first played Half-Life in 2000.

Like all my favorite games, I purposely stop playing them for a long while to maintain that feeling of surprise and joy each time I return. Metal Gear Solid 2, Half-Life 2, and Tomb Raider are a few of these titles for me, and Fallout 3 quickly joined their ranks. But as the years passed, it became harder to play the game. I didn't own an Xbox, and my PC was out of action. Thanks to Crossover, a macOS app that lets me play a bunch of Windows games on my Mac, I can play Fallout 3 again – but as a day one Switch 2 owner, I've been dying to play it on my new Nintendo console. That dream might actually become a reality now that a Fallout 3 remaster has been officially confirmed by Bethesda.

New Nuka Cola, but with a Switch 2 taste

I've loved owning a Switch 2 since its June 2025 launch. The previous model was also a day-one buy, and could always be found in my backpack. The same applies to the latest console. Now I can play my existing games with a glossier finish, as well as new games that couldn't run on the original Switch.

But while it's been fun to play Street Fighter 6, Kirby Air Riders, and plenty of the other best Switch 2 games out there already, I'm dying to know whether the Fallout 3 remaster will make the jump. I know I could wait for Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition, which is already confirmed for Switch 2. But I've always preferred the third entry to to 2015's Fallout 4 due to the graphics and the RPG elements and will accept no substitute.

It's July 2026, more than a year on since the Switch 2 debuted, and up until Bethesda revealed the official remaster alongside an update on Fallout 5, I'd been wondering why Nintendo hadn't delivered its own Fallout 3 port yet. Now that the remaster is officially in the works, there's little need for a Switch 2 port – if the Fallout 3 remaster launches on the console at all, that is. I hope it does; it would be a match made in radioactive heaven.

Liberty Prime with an extra shine

If the Fallout 3 remaster did make its way to Switch 2, I'd love to see features like less loading times, more NPCs across the open wasteland, and, as a treat, a redesigned inventory system that uses the Switch 2's touchscreen.

Combining it with a fresh coat of paint that’s similar to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered could be a great way to lessen one of the few pain points I've always had with Fallout 3. I've found the method of arranging every bit of loot to be a cumbersome process. But just having it ready to play on-the-go via my Nintendo handheld, regardless of having that option available now via Steam Deck, sounds incredibly enticing to me.

With the sim-spinoff Fallout Shelter having been available on Nintendo Switch consoles since 2018, Fallout 3 seems primed for the platform. We're in an era where there's a Fallout TV series as well, which still feels surreal. It's really good, too, and with its second season having wrapped up in early February, it feels like the stars are aligning for the Fallout 3 remaster to come to Switch 2.

As I'm reaching the four-year mark since I last played Fallout 3, I'd love to go back into the world again on my Switch 2 instead of having to carry my Mac around for the pleasure. By all means, I'd do it anyway. But to help my back and my Mac's battery life, it'd be great if Bethesda sees my plight and adds it to the voices. It's time for Fallout 3 to join the Switch 2 party – I'll bring the Nuka-Cola.

Check out the best Fallout games of all time, from spinoffs to mainline entries.

As some fans are filled with dread following Bethesda's confirmation that both The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 are being developed using the shiny new Creation Engine 3, words from New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer from six years ago might provide some reassurance.

Since Bethesda's flurry of news last week about its upcoming projects, there have been many concerns raised about the studio using Creation Engine 3 – an updated version of its proprietary engine – for the two biggest RPGs on its slate. Fans worry about bugs and the devs potentially prioritizing modders over the games themselves, but according to Sawyer in 2020 that's now doing the online rounds, it's actually a very easy engine to work with.

During an old stream of Fallout: New Vegas (below), Sawyer was asked if he had "a hard time" developing New Vegas thanks to Fallout 3's "buggy engine," to which he was quick to respond: "No, not at all."

He continued: "I will criticize other stuff in Fallout 3 and 4, [but] this engine is incredibly easy to make content for. Look into my eyes – without GECK [New Vegas' official editor and modding tool] and without the pipeline of this engine, we never would have finished this game in 18 months."

Sawyer reiterated that "this is the best content creation pipeline of any game that I've ever worked on, easily," but that doesn't mean it's without its issues. "It's buggy, you're right, it's very buggy. It's buggy and unstable and it's frustrating, but it's incredibly easy to make content for. Like, no one's gonna sit here and say, like, 'No it's not that buggy.' Like, yeah, it's pretty buggy, but it's fine. Like, that's a trade-off."

He went on to talk about the GECK tool, too, calling it "fast" and saying that "searching is super easy, finding references to things is super easy, scripting is very powerful," and that "iteration loops are super fast." All that made it "awesome."

In fact, Sawyer said that "the only shortcoming of the tools was the dialogue tool." He explained: "We built our own dialogue tool to sit on top of that, and that was fine. Like, it took a little bit of investment for us, but that was it."

Looking back about what Sawyer had to say about the ease of Creation Engine and how quickly things could be made with it, I can't help but wonder if that might be on Bethesda's mind today. After all, last month, it was reported that Xbox is apparently pushing for faster development on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises – something which might prove even more difficult now that a number of Bethesda staff have been laid off.

Needless to say, if a familiar-feeling, easy-to-use engine can help facilitate the demand for more games, it's little wonder that that's the one that's been chosen.

16 years after Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series and Todd Howard "could not be more excited."

Todd Howard warns he is no longer thinking of retiring, he will persist until the end of days, asking you to buy Skyrim - and to release a few more games, we imagine.

Todd Howard has been at Bethesda Game Studios since 1994, when it was creating Terminator games, making a massive splash on the studio's popularity after taking on the director's role for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the game that established the Bethesda RPG for years to come.

Since then, he's directed Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim, and Starfield. And while he's only in his mid-50's now, by the time his Game Director roles on The Elder Scrolls 6 and presumably Fallout 5 come to an end, he'll likely be nearing retirement age.

Speaking to Jason Schreier, Howard is asked about his eventual retirement and says, "The truth is there was a period of time a while back where I pondered what does it look like? Not is it imminent, but what does it look like? And I no longer do."

He explains, "I see the work we're doing. I just love it. I love working with these people. It's really not something I think about."

Howard adds, "Some folks in our industry that are a little older than me, they're just making great stuff, too. So, it's not something I've been thinking about."

One such name who is a "little older" is Hideo Kojima, who on his 60th birthday just under three years ago said he has no plans to retire, and wishes to create things for the rest of his life. But worry not for now, Todd Howard will be around to sell you copies of Skyrim on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout boss Todd Howard says "you'd be surprised how many great ideas I get" from Reddit.

Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has revealed he's constantly lurking on Reddit and claims the team is consistently taking that feedback on board.

In a thread on r/Games, Howard chimed in with his first Reddit post since the launch of Starfield – well aside from reacting to one post six months ago that modded a cardboard cutout of him into Fallout 4 as the immortal snail – saying "Hey Reddit. I’m a professional lurker and read your comments all the time."

And given Reddit's reactions to Bethesda games at times – just look at any New Vegas thread – this may have sounded vaguely threatening, but Howard adds, "Many here do and we deeply appreciate all the passion for our work."

The thread in question was the post from Bethesda outlining the future of the studio. This post included news about how Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, Obsidian is making a new Fallout game, and an update on the production of The Elder Scrolls 6. Howard explains, "Today’s info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we’ve been working on the past several years, and a look at what’s coming. So know we’re constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard also added, "You’d be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote your favorite and we’ll do it. Maybe."

Unsurprisingly, fans really want Oblivion Remastered to be fixed after a year. One user says, "Please get Virtuous to keep patching Oblivion and give it as much love as you guys gave Skyrim, because it feels abandoned right now, which is a shame."

Meanwhile, another has fears that the upcoming Fallout remasters will share a similar fate, saying, "Pay Virtuous whatever amount needed for the remasters to function well."

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Bethesda unceremoniously dropped a cache of news about its upcoming games today as the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 drags ever closer to 10 years. In a lengthy Twitter post, we learned that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters are in the works, and buried in the middle of the reveal blitz is the next Fallout 76 expansion, titled Raven Rock.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," reads Bethesda's announcement. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over.

"In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year: Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

Unironically, this is one of the most exciting new Bethesda announcements in a long while. The Fallout 76 team has proven itself capable of telling compelling stories at the scale of mainline Fallout games with substantial narrative expansions like Steel Dawn and Steel Reign, which together tell one of my favorite interpretations of the Brotherhood of any game in the series. I'm thrilled about the potential to see the same development team explore that faction even further in a Fallout 3 prequel story.

We also have a writeup on everything that was announced about the future of Fallout as well as The Elder Scrolls, which is all relatively exciting if you can get past the stink of Xbox's recent layoff bloodbath, which definitely impacted Bethesda proper as well as many other Xbox studios. For what it's worth, the labor union representing Bethesda Game Studios employees in the US and Canada suggested in the wake of the company's announcements that it was simply a distraction from the bad news, and that fans would do well not to "fall for it."

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day"

Behold, the terrifying march of time: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 launched in 2015, yet both games still bookend their respective series. Bethesda hasn't released a new mainline installment for its two best-known RPG series in over a decade, and Starfield didn't scratch quite the same itch for many.

So, today's motherlode of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls news, unceremoniously dropped online this morning, was a welcome release from years of waiting, rumors, silence, and more waiting. Here's a one-stop look at everything Bethesda revealed today, on the heels of layoffs that have cost the studio several design veterans from these series. (Bethesda boss Todd Howard called the layoffs a "really tough" part of a "change" to the studio.)

Fallout 5 is in pre-production, which could mean anything from a small group of developers putting white boards through the ringer to ideas on a napkin in Todd Howard's desk. Bethesda's active development priority is The Elder Scrolls 6, which, the studio says, is going well despite having nothing to show eight years after that notorious announcement teaser.

Both of these games use Creation Engine 3, the latest evolution of the game-making software, tools, and resources that have come to define Bethesda's style.

Remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are in the works, though we don't know who's making them or when they'll arrive. Original New Vegas developer Obsidian has returned to partner closely with Bethesda on the Fallout series, but its project is equally unknown. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered was notably in the hands of third-party dev Virtuous.

Similarly, Zenimax Online Studios will work more closely with Bethesda proper even as it continues support for The Elder Scrolls Online, which sounds difficult given its more severe layoffs.

Fallout 76's 2027 expansion, Raven Rock, will act as a "prequel story" to Fallout 3. Mobile hit Fallout Shelter is on track for more seasonal updates after reaching over 250 million players, and is also the focus of an "unscripted" TV project in the works at Amazon Studios and Kilter Films. Work on Fallout season 3, the next chapter of the hit TV show, continues apace.

According to Bethesda's latest figures, Fallout 4 has sold 35 million copies and Skyrim has passed 65 million, putting the studio's latest high-profile releases at a combined 100 million copies sold, which somehow makes this decade-and-change of non-news feel even more surreal.

Starfield, meanwhile, has seen over 17 million players, and is entering Year 3 of post-launch support with plans for further gameplay refinements, additional stories, and future Starborn content.

"Across Bethesda Game Studios, we're building for the future of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Starfield," the studio's announcement concludes. "We're investing in our technology, bringing teams closer together, supporting our live games, expanding into new forms of entertainment, and developing the next generation of Bethesda RPGs."

And yes, the real announcement is, ultimately, more waiting.

"Don't fall for it": Union says Fallout 5 and Elder Scrolls 6 news shouldn't distract you from huge Bethesda layoffs as Xbox CEO praises the series' "remarkable" achievements

Bethesda just announced a whole lot of news about the future of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, and if you find the timing of it all a bit suspicious, you're not alone. United Videogame Workers-CWA says the announcement is an "intentional" distraction from the layoffs happening at Bethesda.

"The timing of this kind of press is intentional," UVW-CWA says in a Bluesky post. "How are they going to make these games when Bethesda and Obsidian collectively laid off hundreds? Don’t fall for it."

UVW-CWA is a direct-join union representing game workers across the industry, but it does not represent any one specific workplace. The CWA part of the name is for the Communications Workers of America, which supports several workplace unions at various Microsoft-owned game studios, including Bethesda.

The timing of this kind of press is intentional. How are they going to make these games when Bethesda and Obsidian collectively laid off hundreds? Don’t fall for it.

— @videogameworkers.bsky.social (@videogameworkers.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-17T20:21:37.854Z

Employees across Microsoft's gaming divisions staged protests last week in support of those affected by the Xbox layoffs. Game Developer reports that unions are also taking legal action against Microsoft.

According to CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth, "The unions CWA and CWA Canada have jointly filed unfair labor practice complaints against Microsoft alleging the company has unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining [for] a collective agreement."

For her part, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is celebrating the historic success of Bethesda's various franchises on Twitter. "The achievements of these franchises are remarkable: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has crossed 65 million units sold, becoming one of the 10 best-selling games of all time, Fallout 4 has also crossed 35 million units sold, joining the top 25, and Starfield will soon reach over 1 billion hours played," she says.

But at a certain point, you have to start asking whether the developers who actually made those games have actually seen the fruits of their success. Certainly, they're not getting royalties – come on, this is the video game industry – but many aren't even getting to enjoy continued employment. We've only gotten anecdotal details on individuals who have been laid off, but we know their numbers include Christiane Meister, a 27-year veteran of everything from Morrowind to Fallout 4, and Dane Olds, a 20-year vet with a similar list of credits.

But hey, Fallout 5 is coming! And The Elder Scrolls 6! And Obsidian's making a new Fallout game of its own, finally – never mind the reports that Microsoft canceled the studio's Avowed follow-up in order to have it build something for the far more popular franchise. I'm certain that the developers who remain at these studios are putting their all into their work, but it's tough to see today's announcement as much more than Microsoft's attempt at jingling keys in front of the eyes of gamers who've grown increasingly exhausted of the industry's most cynical business practices.

Todd Howard says layoffs at Bethesda were "really tough": "We're going through a change so that we focus best on the franchises."

As Bethesda announces what's going on with the future of the studio, director and producer Todd Howard has acknowledged the layoffs that have hit the studio as part of Microsoft's latest batch of staff cuts.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Howard calls the cuts at Bethesda Game Studios "really tough" for him and his colleagues. This latest round of cuts saw staff at the studio laid off as part of Xbox's seemingly now-yearly mass layoffs – including 18-year veterans of the company like Ray Lederer. Bethesda as a whole also got hit hard as we also saw fellow ZeniMax Studios id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios face heavy cuts.

Howard adds, "This is Bethesda's 40th anniversary, and there have been periods where we've gone through changes," referring to a portion of the 1990s where the studio was on the brink. But now, he says, "We're going through a change so that we focus best on the franchises and what we need to do to deliver for everybody."

Word over the last week is that Xbox has been pushing Bethesda to focus on marquee titles with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, while the wider ZeniMax studios work on Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein.

Howard also spoke about his personal feelings on the layoffs with Windows Central, saying "I've been doing this a long time, whenever you've worked with people for, in some cases, many decades, and they're no longer here, that's really personally very difficult, and difficult for our teams."

These interviews have come alongside word that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, and that Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series for a new entry. But with layoffs across Bethesda and Obsidian, as one workers union has already suggested, it's hard not to see this as Microsoft trying to change the subject.

Video game fans are currently quite unhappy with everything going on at Xbox, with thousands of developers losing their jobs, and calling into question how these diminished numbers will affect development going forward. So a big blowout of every Fallout project everyone wants to know about – with nothing to actually show from them – arguably feels more like an attempt at a distraction or reassurance, rather than it being the right time to drop this news.

It's official: Obsidian is returning to the Fallout series. 16 years after the launch of the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, the venerable RPG studio is returning to the post-apocalypse for a new entry that appears to be entirely separate from Fallout 5. You can count Todd Howard himself among those excited about the news.

"The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment," Bethesda says in its announcement about the future of Fallout. "We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

"We could not be more excited to work with Obsidian again," as Bethesda boss Todd Howard tells Bloomberg. Bethesda's level of input into Obsidian's game also isn't clear, but he says "the Fallout franchise is managed out of here and our staff and our franchise teams."

Howard doesn't offer much concrete detail on what Obsidian's game will look like, but believes the "timing is right" for the project to get started. Bloomberg previously reported that Obsidian was working on an Avowed sequel which Microsoft canceled to make room for this new Fallout project.

As part of this news blast, Bethesda also confirmed that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," and will presumably be released some time after The Elder Scrolls 6. The long-rumored remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were also finally confirmed, so if you're looking for an excuse to learn why these titles are ranked so highly among the best Fallout games, you're about to find one.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

After seemingly endless amounts of speculation and rumours, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters have been officially announced by Bethesda.

This happened in a Twitter post where Bethesda Game Studios acknowledged the future of the studio following Microsoft's latest massive wave of layoffs – including the future of its big three: Starfield, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout. While Starfield got some more proof of life and Elder Scrolls got a pretty simple "we're working on it," Fallout fans are eating right now.

Not only has Bethesda outlined the future of Fallout by confirming that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, and that the rumours are true and it will be working with Obsidian Entertainment on a new Fallout game, but the past of the series is also getting some love as Bethesda finally confirms those remasters are happening.

"We also know many players want to revisit previous Fallout experiences." Bethesda says, adding: "While we're not announcing any dates today, we have been working on remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas."

This duo of remasters has been heavily requested and heavily rumored since the release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered in 2025, and while it's not exactly been a massive secret, this is the first time Bethesda has outright mentioned it's happening. Fallout 3 was first released back in 2008 and marked Bethesda's first outing with the franchise, while New Vegas was helmed by Obsidian Entertainment – a studio at the time filled with ex-Fallout 1 and 2 staffers – and is widely considered the greatest game in the franchise.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Fallout 5 is in preproduction at Bethesda as the studio prioritizes The Elder Scrolls 6.

Bethesda broke its silence today, releasing a lengthy look at the studio's pipeline and the plans for its biggest franchises. Fallout is a key focus, with Fallout 5 essentially simmering in the background.

"Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3, a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch," Bethesda explains. "It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools, rendering, and systems that define our games.

"Fallout 5 is currently in preproduction. The Elder Scrolls VI is our primary development focus today, with the majority of our team currently working on the next chapter of the franchise."

The Creation Engine 3 suite "extends beyond our teams to the technology, tools, and systems that will power the next generation of Bethesda RPGs," the studio adds.

Though the next mainline installment is years away, Bethesda stresses that "Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today. Fallout 5 remains our long-range destination, and we have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now."

This suite of projects includes remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, though Bethesda is "not announcing any dates today."

Partially confirming reports, Bethesda says original Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment is once again working on the franchise, though it doesn't give specifics beyond "a new Fallout project." Other reports claimed a different Fallout RPG had been in development at Obsidian before Bethesda axed it a while ago, forcing it to be similar to Fallout but not connected to the IP.

The live Fallout games, Fallout 76 and Fallout Shelter, will continue to receive new content as well. A new Fallout 76 expansion, Raven Rock, is coming in 2027 and described as "a prequel story to Fallout 3." New seasonal content awaits Fallout Shelter players, not to mention "an unscripted Fallout Shelter television project is also in the works with our partners at Amazon Studios and Kilter Films."

This flurry of announcements follows quiet years for Bethesda – its biggest franchises have gone untouched in-house for more than a decade – and a recent wave of layoffs that hit the studio as part of wide-reaching cuts ordered by Xbox.

In today's statement, Bethesda says its constellation of studios is "investing in our technology, bringing teams closer together, supporting our live games, expanding into new forms of entertainment, and developing the next generation of Bethesda RPGs."

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day."

Xbox subsidiary Obsidian got butchered along with most of the parent company's children during mass layoffs earlier this month, making the original Fallout: New Vegas team even more scarce. New Vegas writer Chris Avellone did the math, and it looks like only 16 of Fallout: New Vegas' total 73 developers still work at Obsidian.

"Some of the ex-NV developers were among those laid off last week, unfortunately," Avellone explains in a July 14 Twitter post on the topic. 21-year veteran art director Dan Alpert was impacted, as was animator Shon Stewart, and assistant art director Paul Fish. "Shon in particular was a big surprise when I heard about it," says Avellone, "he's a great animator."

But many New Vegas developers had already been long gone from Obsidian. Character artist Kevin Manning has spent the last seven years at Riot Games, for example, junior artist Megan Morse hasn't worked at Obsidian since 2012 and is currently an artist at Exodus studio Archetype, and Avellone himself left Obsidian – which he co-founded – in 2015. He's currently fiddling with secret "other projects, including RPGs," he says on Twitter.

Obsidian is now toiling over a new Fallout game – which may or may not be the new Fallout game we already knew about, Fallout 5 – after Xbox canceled its planned sequel to 2025 action-RPG Avowed. So while it isn't exactly thrilling news that only 20% of Fallout: New Vegas developers have jobs at Obsidian after 16 years of layoffs, game cancellations, new opportunities, and plain, old life, it's not a big surprise to me, either.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain returned to Obsidian in 2025 for an unrevealed project, and co-creator Leonard Boyarsky has spent the last decade at Obsidian. This doesn't satisfy the people on Twitter who begged Avellone for his Obsidian stats to begin with, but so little does.

"I wasn't sure about a few people on the list, so this may get revised," Avellone adds on Twitter. "Still, better than nothing and a lot better than yelling back and forth."

Fallout: New Vegas writer says he feels "embarrassed" by some of the Fallout TV show dialogue, but has no notes for "really cool" Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Unlike, say, Mass Effect or Fable, you won't find any outright, objectively good endings in Fallout: New Vegas. There are more morally justifiable outcomes, but none that are straight ahead bright and optimistic. But the RPG's director, Josh Sawyer, nonetheless has a preferred conclusion – based on power dynamics.

"I mean, some people would say like, 'I love Caesar,' and great, but it's kind of hard to hand everything over to an individual like Caesar or Mr. House," he tells The Examined Game. "It feels dangerous. And then with [New California Republic], you just realize like, man, they've got a lot of problems. Like, they have a lot of problems right now. They're doing things for a lot of very questionable reasons."

The NCR is a nebulous faction, within which you may find people who are using its resources and reach to build a better tomorrow for the Mojave. But Sawyer argues, "it's difficult to wrestle with that and come away and say like, yeah, I think NCR is great."

Thus, he thinks the most worthwhile Fallout: New Vegas outcome is to give New Vegas itself the independence it so desires. "I know it's going to be dysfunctional, I know it's going to be bureaucratic, I know there's going to be corruption, but also it hasn't been tried yet, right?" Sawyer muses. "Like we haven't organized this yet, so let's give it a try."

I won't argue, given how many political situations the real world is in where it seems like any sort of alternative would be an improvement to what's happening. Plus, a running theme of Fallout is how different factions are all perpetuating the same tribalism and constant desire for power. Going for an independent New Vegas ending breaks the region out of that back-and-forth.

It's not a conclusion I've personally gotten in any of my New Vegas playthroughs... mostly because I've only played to credits once. Usually, I like to play New Vegas just to disappear into the wasteland, pretending I'm in Mad Max and going where I'm needed.

If only there was a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas coming, so others and I could have an easy opportunity to experience New Vegas' ending as Sawyer most likes. One can dream, eh?

Fallout: New Vegas level scaling is designed to teach players that "this is not actually Fallout 3," Josh Sawyer says: "You're going to get your ass handed to you if you're not careful."

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says Obsidian took a different approach to level scaling than Bethesda did with Fallout 3 to teach players that "things work a little differently" here, and that "you're going to get your ass handed to you if you're not careful."

Speaking to The 41st Precinct in a video interview you can check out below, Sawyer talks about going back to the OG Fallout when designing a new spin of his own on the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

More specifically, Sawyer loved that the critical path of Fallout 1 "is very open." If you really want to and know where to go, you can waltz right to the late game areas and skip a big ol' chunk of the story. Funnily enough, Sawyer also says that one of Fallout's co-creators, Tim Cain, told him that's down to a bug, but hey, everyone enjoys it enough so it's a feature now.

And a good thing it is, as it made quite the impression on Sawyer.

"I loved how open it was, and so, with New Vegas, I was like, 'I want to get that feeling back where we have difficulty gates,' so we took some of the level scaling out," he says. "It's a much more compressed level scaling range. That's why if you go to Quarry Junction, a Death Claw will just chop your head off. It's to teach the player, 'hey, this is not actually Fallout 3. Things work a little differently. You're going to get your ass handed to you if you're not careful.'"

To bring things to their most basic terms, enemies in Fallout 3 will increase in level and use better equipment to match your level. Return to an earlier locale in the late game and it'll be a nastier place than you remember.

Fallout: New Vegas enemies can certainly get meaner themselves, but only to a point. As such, you don't have to worry about Goodsprings turning into an endgame area if you return at a much later point. It does mean, though, that some of Fallout: New Vegas's areas will punch you in the face if you're not equipped. Think of it as a suggestion that you probably shouldn't be here until you level up. Once you do, though, you'll be able to steamroll foes in a way that isn't typically doable in Fallout 3.

Sawyer goes on to say that this approach to game design meant Obsidian could offer the player the chance to follow Fallout: New Vegas's story, as in Fallout, by skipping parts – albeit with the added challenge of surviving nastier areas.

"What that meant is that we could make the story – you can find Benny immediately," he says. "Like, you can go from Goodsprings straight to Benny. And that's the Water Chip. The design of that is you follow an information trail. I'm looking for this guy, I go here, he's not here but he says go here, go here, go here. But at any time, you can shortcut that. You can go through Scorpion Gulch and you can get to Novak and talk to Manny and then go to Boulder City. Or you can go straight to The Tops if you can figure out a way to get there. So, yeah, I was trying to embody that open spirit of Fallout 1."

I'd say Sawyer and Obsidian's approach to Fallout certainly landed, which is why New Vegas is so fondly remembered even today. It makes the future interesting, too, as Microsoft is reportedly kicking around plans to get Sawyer to head up another Fallout game to capitalize on the success of the TV show, especially as Bethesda won't be getting to that for a long time thanks to The Elder Scrolls 6. According to one former Obsidian lead, there was another Sawyer-led Fallout RPG in the works that ultimately got kiboshed, so it might not be the first time such a project nearly came to fruition. Maybe this time such a thing will stick and see the light of day.

Microsoft lays off Bethesda vet behind Todd Howard's "crazy" Fallout 4 idea, "too many Skyrim weapons to count," the Dwemer, and Mudcrabs – and he may leave games altogether.

Xbox studios are hemorrhaging generational talent amid Microsoft's layoff wave, with one Bethesda veteran highlighting the loss of an artist responsible for so much of the studio's history that, "If you've played a BGS game you've had his art on screen 99% of the time."

Ben Carnow, a Bethesda veteran of nearly 20 years himself, puts a spotlight on former lead weapon artist Dane Olds in a Bluesky post.

A LinkedIn post from Olds confirms, "I have been laid off alongside so many passionate and talented colleagues."

Like countless game developers now facing a horrible job market after layoffs, Olds indicates he may leave the games industry altogether, even after 20 years at Bethesda. "I'm now looking for work inside and outside of the game industry. If you can use my expertise in weapon art, character art, team building and management please reach out to me," he says.

Carnow says "Olds is my truest friend" and "an artist of legendary skill." He outlines just some of the key contributions Olds has made over the years, including: "Too many Skyrim weapons to count. All the Dwemer creatures. MUD CRABS. Like half the guns in Fallout 4. Loads of weapons in Starfield."

"Laid off by Microsoft," Carnow concludes.

In 2023, Bethesda ran a developer spotlight featuring Olds and discussing his work. "Fallout 3 was my first big AAA game so that's very special to me," Olds said at the time. "Skyrim was an amazing experience because I got to help define the look and feel of the Dwemer art in the game as well as getting to make all of the steel weapons and many artifacts like the Mace of Molag Bal. Oh! It also features one of the few creatures I've gotten to make – the mudcrab."

Olds was also pivotal in the development of Fallout 4's expanded weapon system. "On that title Todd [Howard] came to me one day and told me he had this crazy idea to make all our weapons moddable and that he wanted it to change the way they looked and played. So, I started in on the pipe weapon set and the rest is history. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to make that system work and I learned a ton working on that game."

Much like Olds, Bethesda also laid off 27-year veteran Christiane Meister, a core artist who made major contributions to Skyrim, especially the Khajiit and Argonian designs, as well as Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 4, and Fallout 4.

Cases like these are precisely why remaining Bethesda developers expect work on The Elder Scrolls 6 to be impacted by Microsoft's layoffs, fearing crunch, quality dips, or delays for the already long-awaited game.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is reportedly so desperate for another Fallout game that it's reassigned Fallout: New Vegas maker Obsidian to the series at the expense of a planned Avowed sequel and other projects.

Fallout and Elder Scrolls union says Bethesda layoffs didn't hurt Microsoft's "14 layers of management" – "We lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers."

Obsidian Entertainment is reportedly early in development on another Fallout game, but it's apparently not the first time the studio has tried to jump back into the radioactive wasteland since making Fallout: New Vegas. According to Obsidian co-founder and former developer Chris Avellone, the studio had been working on the idea some time ago until Bethesda got involved.

Amidst all the turmoil in Xbox's suite of developers, Obsidian has seemingly also been affected by layoffs and project restructurings. And as Xbox eyes up its biggest franchises, Bloomberg reports that the studio behind arguably the best Fallout game is hoping to repeat its magic trick.

Part of that report claimed Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer had been directing another game that was similar to Fallout in many ways, but wasn't actually named after or related to the franchise. Asked about that project online, Avellone says he heard from sources at the studio that Sawyer's old project was actually "intended to be a Fallout game" before series steward Bethesda "put the kibosh on that a while ago, so it had to change its direction/tone from Fallout to something 'similar' to Fallout." No reason was given for Bethesda's alleged disapproval of the project.

The RPG veteran also alleges that an Avowed sequel, which was reportedly scrapped to make way for a Fallout game, is "still being worked on (for now) in the hopes of being 're-pitched'" later down the line in some form. Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2 DLC are seemingly still on track.

Needless to say, I wouldn't take this as bulletproof confirmation of anything since Avellone hasn't worked at the studio for over a decade and his sources may be a little rusty.

Bethesda boss says the company must focus on its "strongest franchises" as Xbox layoffs reportedly hit The Elder Scrolls and Fallout makers hard.

Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian is reportedly making a big creative pivot following the latest Xbox layoffs, turning its attention to a new Fallout game and canceling a planned sequel to its 2025 RPG Avowed.

Per Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Microsoft's Xbox restructuring has resulted in the loss of 25% of Obsidian's overall workforce, a devastating downsizing with equally seismic implications for the studio's slate of new projects. Bloomberg reports that Obsidian had been making good progress on a sequel to Avowed, an underrated RPG overshadowed by generational launches like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and massive blockbusters like Assassin's Creed Shadows. That, alongside other unannounced projects, are reportedly canceled.

Instead, Obsidian is said to be working on a new Fallout game, which lines up with Xbox's updated messaging, not to mention explicit guidance from Bethesda president Jill Braff, that tentpole franchises like Fallout need to be a bigger focus going forward. Details of the new Fallout are unclear - including its relation to the already confirmed Fallout 5 - but New Vegas director and Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer is said to be at the helm.

Bloomberg reports that Sawyer had previously been working on an RPG similar in structure and theme to Fallout, but without the Fallout name, at Obsidian. It's unclear if this new Fallout project is related.

I'm disappointed that we're missing out on a potential Avowed 2 due to even more layoffs at Xbox, but some Obsidian employees are reportedly continuing to work on the project in the hopes that it's one day revived. On the other hand, as much as any new developments that emerge as part of Xbox's reset are somewhat overshadowed by such a massive amount of lost jobs and livelihoods, there's no denying the potential in a new Josh Sawyer-directed Fallout game.

After 37 years at Microsoft, veteran who led Xbox Backward Compatibility program has been laid off: "I look forward to watching how Xbox evolves going forward"

As Bethesda is reportedly hit hard with layoffs from Microsoft, president Jill Braff has apparently told staff of the plan to focus on the company's strongest franchises going forward.

This week, Xbox announced its fifth wave of layoffs since purchasing Activision Blizzard, with this ongoing wave set to see 3,200 staff laid off over the next year. From the sounds of things, Bethesda is going to be one of the most affected targets of these layoffs, with former Bethesda project lead Jeff Gardiner reporting that 35 staff at Bethesda Game Studios are losing their jobs, while id Software is being gutted, reportedly losing 95 staff members.

On top of that, ZeniMax-owned studio Arkane is in the process of "beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options," while Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games have broken off from Xbox during this latest restructuring, with the latter two going independent.

The layoffs at id Software are a major surprise, as they come alongside reports that Bethesda is set to change focus to its biggest franchises, which reportedly features Doom and Quake – two franchises primarily developed by id Software – alongside the expected push for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. While these were first reported by Bloomberg, an internal email from Braff acquired by IGN seems to back this up.

"These shifts also reflect the realities of our industry and business – and our responsibility to ensure Bethesda is operating from a more stable foundation." Braff says, adding: "To be successful in the future, we need to change course. We must strengthen our business, return to sustainable growth, and ensure we can continue investing in our franchises and our players."

She continues, "To best position Bethesda for future growth, we are shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises." Braff adds, "By working more closely across the organization, sharing expertise and capabilities, and focusing our investments on the opportunities with the greatest potential, we believe we can better support our franchises and IP with meaningful long-term potential."

Of course, one wonders why Microsoft took this long to shift Bethesda's focus and work on getting the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls games out as soon as possible. However, with a significant portion of the talent at id Software affected – which reportedly is focused on the coders working on the id Tech engine – it feels almost antithetical to the studio's plan to focus on its first-person shooter franchises, and evidence of the poor planning from Xbox management that has led us to this point.

Josh Sawyer isn't taking any credit for Fallout: New Vegas's conception, despite the fact that he directed the beloved RPG at Obsidian.

Like most games, Fallout: New Vegas was a collaborative effort with various leads at Obsidian spearheading different elements of the world and story, but in terms of the initial concept, it's fairly established history that studio co-founder Chris Avellone came up with the idea for the starting incident, which is the courier getting shot in the head and being buried in a shallow grave. Sawyer, as director, set the overall vision of the project, but he makes clear in an interview with The Examined Game that he wasn't involved in the initial discussions at all.

"I wasn't part of any of those early conversations," he says. "When I was at Obsidian around 2009, I had been a lead designer on an Aliens project that went very badly," he adds, referring to the canceled horror RPG Aliens: Crucible, "and it was the owners who had been talking to Bethesda. I had no idea that any of this stuff was going on.

"But then Feargus Urquhart, who's the studio head of Obsidian, he came to me and he said 'hey, we're talking to Bethesda about making a Fallout game – I think it was called Fallout 3: New Vegas or Fallout 3: Sin City – but it was a proposal that I believe [Obsidian co-founder] Chris Avellone had written, and I was completely unaware that they were doing this really, but basically he said, 'would you be willing to direct it?', and I was like, 'yeah, what? Of course.'"

Hearing this, I can't help but be reminded of a recent video from Sawyer's old Obsidian co-worker and fellow Fallout royalty Tim Cain, in which Cain explains how he "fumbled" his way through his early career, including his time at Interplay in which he created the Fallout series. According to these two generational RPG developers, the trick to success in this industry is just to really make sure you're in the right place at the right time.

"I didn't pitch New Vegas. New Vegas almost literally fell in my lap, because Feargus just sort of said, 'here you go', and yeah, it was just luck. It was just pure luck, like most things in my career," Sawyer adds.

There's a good reason Fallout: New Vegas remains on our list of the best RPGs to play in 2026.

Time has been kind to Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's ambitious spin-off action RPG. These days, players appreciate the nuances and sense of place wandering the desolate Mojave desert, but back in 2010, the game lived in Fallout 3's shadow. Once those comparisons faded, director Josh Sawyer believes the release got a fairer look.

"The reception of New Vegas, when it launched, by professional reviewers was positive, but kind of lukewarm," Sawyer says on The Examined Game podcast (below). "People were not jumping out of their seats like, 'This is amazing.' And some reviews were pretty critical."

He notes there were comments that New Vegas "feels like a mod," or "feels almost identical to Fallout 3," or "it feels like an expansion pack." My personal recollection is frustration over bugs and glitches, but viewing Obsidian's project as glorified DLC sounds about right too.

As Sawyer notes, there's a significant overlap in assets and visuals, and coming two years after Fallout 3, it would've been a difficult descriptor to avoid. He clarifies he's "not saying everyone hated it," just the sci-fi adventure didn't land quite as the team hoped.

"It was only over time that there was this sense that people were appreciative," he recalls. "It's kind of like they forgot about the fact that they were annoyed that we reused so many assets and the gameplay was largely the same."

The modding community helped here as well. You can now find a hearty mix of improvements and tweaks that make New Vegas smoother and more enjoyable to play. In any case, if you haven't already played through it, I recommend you do. Just maybe not right after a run of Fallout 3.

Fallout: New Vegas lead says Obsidian has a "Karma Police" force to make sure "however you built your character" in their RPGs, "it's not gonna be the same experience" twice.

One of many things that makes Fallout: New Vegas a standout within the franchise is how well balanced its classes are. Any build you make is distinct and gratifying, an uncommon experience when it comes to RPGs of any type. Josh Sawyer, New Vegas' director, puts this down to a special squad within developer Obsidian who sense-check the player's options.

"We just wanted to set up the player to believe, however you built your character, it's not gonna be the same experience," he tells the Human Can Opener podcast about Fallout: New Vegas. "We're not gonna let you down. We're not gonna leave you out to dry and not give you something to be excited about."

Sawyer, who still serves as a game director at Obsidian, wants to make sure the RPG remains worthwhile and intriguing to players. So, "We have an informal job on the design team called 'Karma Police,'" he says. "At a few points during development, we'll ask a designer to go through all the scripts – usually in dialogue, but also everywhere in the game⁠ – and see 'How often is Guns being checked? How often is Charisma being checked? How often is Barter being checked?'"

There's essentially a spectrum for encounters where one skill is needed, or could be more useful than another, and Obsidian aims to be within a certain threshold on all fronts. "Let's say there's 40 [checks] in Medicine, and there's like, 28 in Science. Great! Get in the ballpark," Sawyer muses. "You don't want to go huge stretches of the game and be like, 'Man, I invested in this skill and it never comes up.'"

I would agree, and I'd go further to say, if you make these internal stats too arbitrary – make them all 35 or something – players would start noticing the patterns through comparison. A little bit of randomness is good to keep us on our toes, and perhaps more importantly, to encourage replays. And if ever there's an RPG that's good for replaying, it's Fallout: New Vegas.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.

Before there was Fallout 3 in 2008, there was Van Buren – the sadly canceled, Black Isle Studios-led third Fallout – and even though it never came to fruition in the end, it could've been one heck of an RPG.

Or, at least, it sounds like it might've been. Obsidian Entertainment's Joshua Eric "Josh" Sawyer, now best known for his work on genre gems like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, seems to think it was shaping up to be quite a game.
He explains as much in a new interview with The Examined Game on YouTube (below), first noting that he "wasn't the lead" on Van Buren, that role belonged to Chris Avellone. He was the lead system designer, however.

Things were complicated over time after the team was stripped and left with a "skeleton crew," though, as Sawyer puts it. Resources "got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle." Considering the work that had been done on Van Buren, it was disappointing.

"This is such a bummer because we made a cool demo," as Sawyer recalls. "It looks very dated now, but… it was like 2003 when this demo was finished."

He notes that you can find said demo online, and after a quick search myself, I'll admit it does look pretty dated… but also pretty dang solid. It certainly fits the vibe of the first Fallout games a bit more than Bethesda Game Studios' own Fallout 3 does.

As Sawyer says himself, "I thought it was a really cool demo, and it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things." But, of course, nothing ever came from it, unfortunately.

According to Sawyer, however, publisher Interplay eventually did see it. "They said, 'Well, if we had known that you had made this, maybe we wouldn't have canceled it.'"

It's a frustrating consideration for the Obsidian dev and his former coworkers, as they "repeatedly" asked for acknowledgement of Van Buren. "We invited you over and over and over again, and you never came," he recalls. Sadly, as Sawyer concludes, "they weren't interested in it."

This all lines up with what others have said in the past. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain stated that the original canceled Fallout 3 could've shipped and been "a really good game," for example.

It's upsetting to know Van Buren won't ever see the light of day properly, I suppose – but for the time being, we do have fan-led projects like the Nexus Mods version of Van Buren that are playable for free.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.

They say if you want something you have to go out and get it, but apparently when it comes to co-creating one of the most successful RPG series of all time, that's not always the case.

In a new episode in a long-running series I call Tim Cain Talking About Stuff, the veteran RPG developer yaps about his approach to career planning and how that's changed from his early days at Interplay, in which he would just let things fall into his lap as fortuitously as they did, according to Cain. As the video goes on he actively encourages young developers to plan out their careers more strategically, but having co-created the Fallout franchise and served as designer on Arcanum, it seems his passive work ethic paid off rather serendipitously.

"I fumbled my way through my career. Opportunities arose that I was just in a good position to take, but I didn't actually seek them out," says Cain. "I usually thought very short term – what am I doing on this game I'm working on now – to the point where I rarely even thought about a sequel."

Of course, there ended up being several sequels to Fallout, but Cain left the series during development of Fallout 2, a decision he explains in a genuinely insightful video from a few years back. And while Cain says he "didn't think about a sequel to Fallout while I was making it," (or Arcanum for the matter), he was originally against a sequel altogether but was assigned to it anyway despite his desire to work on something else. Poor Tim.

"I rarely thought long term, I'm talking five or 10 years in the future. That was just not in the Tim brain space," he says.

As an aspiring creative in an incredibly competitive industry, I have a friendly jealousy toward Cain for becoming one of the most noteworthy game devs of his time despite having such a nonchalant approach to the most formative years of his career. Again, he advises young developers to not take his early approach to career planning, but it sure seems to have worked out well for him.

Fallout co-creator says too many gamers "like hating things," which "doesn't lead to a better game" for devs: "I just tapped out, and that's sad"

Eight years and 68 updates later, the wasteland has never looked better. It's funny to think that few thought that Fallout 76 had a chance of surviving, let alone thriving, back when Bethesda Game Studios first announced its shared-world RPG – assumed to be too vastly out of step with the foundational Fallout experience to succeed.

And yet here we are, with Fallout 76 hosting one of the loveliest communities in all of gaming and providing safe haven for Fallout show fans looking for continuing adventures out in the wilds. Bethesda released a major new Fallout 76 update on June 2, Infestations, so we caught up with creative director Jon Rush and production director Bill LaCoste to get an update from the frontlines of Appalachia.

Talk to me about the Infestations update, what does it bring to Fallout 76?

Jon Rush, creative director: The wasteland is a dangerous place, and sometimes us wastelanders need to be reminded of that. Each update to the game that we've made since launch has kind of been the next chapter, and a lot of the focus has been different groups moving into Appalachia and setting up shop there. But the Super Mutants, the Scorched, and all of those misprogrammed robots are kind of getting tired of that – they want some of these places back. So Infestations unlocks close to 40 unique locations in the game that were once abandoned and are now full of action. Areas that have been taken over by these nefarious groups, and it's up to us Wastelanders to take them back and reclaim the wasteland.

It's still early days yet, but are players already shaping the way you're thinking about this update moving forward?

Jon Rush: You know, Bill and I largely consider ourselves to be pretty good players of our game. When we were playtesting Infestations with our team before release, they were a pretty good challenge. Little did we know, once it went live, people would be mowing through it much quicker than we ever did [Laughter]. So that has given us the next steps forward for making the feature better. So Infestation quests will get harder – much harder. And we have plans to continue improving that feature and expanding on it for the next patch and the one after that, and so on. Player feedback is so important.

This time last year we were talking about Gone Fission, which introduced fishing to Fallout 76. How do you avoid whiplash shifting between such different concepts?

Jon Rush: In the past, I've used the phrase: 'thickening the experience of Fallout 76.' What I mean by that is that we're always looking for ways to enrich existing features and playspaces in the game. Fishing did exactly that. 'Anywhere you can swim, you can fish!' is something you probably heard us say last year – that tells me, as a player, that I should be exploring the whole map again, just to see what kind of stuff can be pulled out of the water. In many ways, that fishing feature inspired what future features will look like, in that they are designed to thicken and enrich that experience.

How does that focus apply forward to what you delivered with Infestations?

Jon Rush: Despite how obviously different Infestations may seem from Gone Fission, they actually aren't that different. Both have experiences that can take place across the entire map, perhaps in places that you haven't ever been to or haven't been to in a while. So really, the main difference here is that there's no water and that the fish fight back [laughter]. So yeah, it's about hitting those same hallmarks of us wanting to enrich the existing play experience in a new way.

To deliver Gone Fission and Infestations in the space of a year, it highlights something that's so core to Fallout – its capacity to be quite whimsical in an otherwise bleak world.

Bill LaCoste, production director: It's all about getting that Fallout feel right. We're looking for a balance between these darker, more serious tones and more levity, humorous moments. It's the balance of these aspects wrapped under a blanket of retro-futuristic Americana that makes Fallout – that's the Fallout sweet spot! It's echoed in the games and in the show, and that's where the stories are most effective. And so as we expand Fallout 76, making new features and crafting new stories, that's something we're always very mindful of.

Given the importance of that Americana vibe, does it rule Fallout 76 from taking wastelanders further afield in future updates?

Jon Rush: Americana provides such a unique timbre to the game and to the tone that, if you removed that, a big part of it may no longer feel like Fallout anymore. That's not to say that there aren't numerous other stories happening in the world outside of the United States that take place in the Fallout universe, but in the way that we present our stories, that Americana element is a crucial element to our world.

Bill LaCoste: There's also this sense of players being able to think about what's happening across other parts of the world on their own, there's some mystique there and we like that. I don't know if there will ever be an expansion beyond America, but I think there's a lot of importance in keeping it that way – so that players can think about what is happening around the world and create their own stories, which the modding community can take advantage of too!

Jon Rush: I mean, let me give a special shout-out to Fallout London! It's great to see people picturing what's happening in other parts of the world at the same time, I think it's fantastic. That's a strength of Fallout – that it can be a spark which ignites all these stories in people's heads, and it's great to explore those.

Bethesda Game Studios released two major Fallout 76 updates since Fallout Season 2 concluded earlier this year, I assume the show has been a motivating force?

Jon Rush: It's been great. It emboldens the team to continue telling great Fallout stories. A strength of the show is that its creators are such huge fans of the IP and of the world, so the stories they're telling are genuinely Fallout in every way. People watch it and they want more of it, so they come to Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas, and 76 to get more of that storytelling. So it emboldens the team to see that kind of reaction. And our community has been so great – so welcoming to all of these new players into the game. I know that's something you wouldn't really expect to see in a wasteland, people being charitable and giving things to each other, but it's been really great.

Bill LaCoste: I think that the big question of 'how do I get more of this' that Jon just noted, it's like 'hey, we have these games that do this!' And I think some of those people are actually surprised when they come into the games, that they are so much like the show – with the same humor and style. Kilter Films and Amazon have done an amazing job with the detail, and with the way that the stories being told are exactly like the Fallout games.

It must be pretty energizing to see so much enthusiasm around the franchise?

Bill LaCoste: I've watched both seasons multiple times now, with other friends and family, and I just never get bored of it. That's a great feeling for us and the team, because we don't ever come into work not wanting to do something with the Fallout universe, to make it better, and to do something new for our fans to keep this world going.

Jon Rush: The Fallout show has brought in new fans of Fallout. It's also brought in new gamers, who can also then go and experience all of the games that everybody else is making! It's funny, I was at a restaurant one time and my phone case says 'Fallout' on the back, and I just put it on the table not even thinking about it. The waiter comes by and he's like, 'oh yeah, you like Fallout too?' So I asked him which game was his favorite, hoping that he would say 76 [laughter]. And he goes 'Wait, there's a game? I just watched the show!' And I'm like, 'Dude, there are multiple games, get in there!' He said he was going to download [Fallout 76] when he got home, and I said, 'yeah, good for you!'

Looking for something else to play? Check out the upcoming Xbox Series X games, or our pick of the best MMOs to play in 2026.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ZeniMax Media, the holding company overseeing video game developers and publishers like Bethesda Game Studios, might be in the midst of some pretty heavy layoffs.

Founded in 1999 as the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax now operates under Microsoft's Xbox division following its acquisition in 2021. Although it boasts various successful titles at the house of Bethesda – RPGs like Fallout 4 and Skyrim included – it could be facing some financial trouble.

Duke Nukem co-creator George Broussard confirms as much in a new online post, alleging that layoffs are underway at ZeniMax.

"Getting word that layoffs at Zenimax have begun," he writes. "Heard rumblings recently that the cuts may be much deeper than you expect. Buckle up!"

What does that mean for ongoing projects like The Elder Scrolls 6? In response to a comment stating the layoffs might not affect anyone working on Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, Broussard seems to agree they indeed don't, asking, "Oh, is that public now? That's exactly what I heard a few days ago."

As for Bethesda itself, Broussard doesn't appear to be too concerned: "Bethesda will be fine. They make all the money." It's certainly an interesting position to hold, taking into account the ties between Bethesda and ZeniMax, but I suppose it makes sense.

Xbox has been going through a time as of late, with reports of studio closures floating about the web left, right, and center. Broussard himself has spoken about it in a recent thread.

"This is the hard truth of it all," it reads. "Earnings and profit. But it is also way amplified when there is a regime change in a mega-corp, and everything changes, and new plans are put in place. The teams and employees pay the price for years of mismanagement of old execs."

He goes on to say, "a zillion devs and lots of studios are going to burn for the sins of the fathers," and "there is a lot of Xbox mgmt to blame here going back 15 years."

It's worth a full read-through, but it's admittedly not an easy one to digest. It's shaky for devs and publishers everywhere right now, and it seems it's only becoming less and less stable.

Fallout: New Vegas remake rumors heat up as Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake leaker says previous reports are credible

Fallout: New Vegas rumors have been floating across the internet for longer than a tumbleweed takes to roll across the wasteland, but those previous reports are apparently credible, at least according to the prominent leaker who routinely reveals Nintendo news before Nintendo can get to it itself.

Leaker NateTheHate's been a big name within Nintendo circles for a while now. He first tipped everyone off on the exact random evening the Nintendo Switch 2 would be revealed. More recently, he also leaked the existence of the upcoming Star Fox revival and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's remake well before those games were formally announced.

And, now, he's thrown his hat into the ring of countless Fallout rumors. Asked about the credibility of whispers proclaiming a Fallout: New Vegas remake does in fact exist, the leaker simply says, "The previous reports have merit."

Hopes for a rebuilt Fallout: New Vegas first kicked off years ago when improperly redacted court documents from Microsoft and the FTC's court battles mentioned remasters for both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were in the works. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered eventually came to pass, but fans have since been hoping that New Vegas latches on to its older brother's unofficial remaster plans. The Fallout TV show's deep references to the fan favorite game didn't hurt, either.

Windows Central also this year reported that both Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas were getting the remake treatment, citing anonymous sources in the know. Recent toy listings related to New Vegas, a 16-year-old game, mind you, added more fuel to the fire.

It's still worth taking it with a pinch of salt, but given NateTheHate's recent track record, there's no doubt that some fans are now going to be feeling extra confident that a remake is going to surface eventually.

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

16 years since its release, Fallout: New Vegas is widely considered an RPG masterpiece, but when looked at from within the context of Bethesda's notoriously tight 18-month development turnaround demand, it's even more of a monumental achievement. According to director Josh Sawyer, there was even more they wanted to do with the game but had to cut due for time.

In a new video called 'Setting Goals' shared to Sawyer's official YouTube channel, the Obsidian veteran explains how his hopes and goals for Fallout: New Vegas were defined by how little time the studio had been given to work on it. It's no secret that Fallout: New Vegas was built largely using existing Bethesda assets from Fallout 3, but that wasn't only because it needed to fit seamlessly alongside the other games in the franchise – it was also just the most efficient way to do things.

"For Fallout: New Vegas ... my goal was – well, we were constrained by the 18 months from the beginning," says Sawyer. "So, I said, 'let's modestly restructure some of the systemic things that Bethesda did. Try to do as much as we can to emulate their style of open world exploration, and let's try to just tell the best stories we can with the best quest reactivity that we know how to do.' Because there was very little else that we could do in that window of time."

Of course, it wasn't immediately clear back in 2010 that Fallout: New Vegas was about to become one of the most beloved games in the series, as the game was a technical disaster at launch. That said, Sawyer makes it clear that he was confident from the very beginning despite the time constraints he faced.

"I believed in that team," he says. "We had fantastic designers and writers, and I believed that they could make really great quests and content. So, I just said, 'Look, we can't set our sights on anything crazier than this. So, let's just make the best quest content and story content that we can.'

"And that was the goal. And get it done within 18 months, which meant that a lot of other ideas about things that we could do had to just fall by the wayside. So the 18 months wasn't a goal, it was a constraint but we had to work within it and so that's why it became so focused and I think the team did a fantastic job."

Bethesda "lectured" Fallout New Vegas designer for saying the RPG would run at 30 FPS: "'Why do you have a f***ing engine that can't run 30 frames per second?'"

As the wait for new games from Bethesda Game Studios like The Elder Scrolls 6 continues, talented fans of older RPGs like Fallout 4 are figuring out ways to, erm, make Skyrim run in them…? Yeah, you know what, that checks out.

In case you missed it – because there's a pretty big chance you have, as it's incredibly random – a Fallout 4 player known as "RPGKING" on YouTube has managed to play Skyrim in the 2015 post-apocalyptic gem after somehow getting it to run… albeit admittedly with "a few bugs definitely to work out" before releasing it as a mod to the public.

"Obviously, this won't be available" until everything is fixed, he notes in his aptly-dubbed "Beat Todd to it" video.

It's amusing to watch – I mean, how could Skyrim running on a Pip-Boy in Fallout 4 not be? The iconic "hey, you" opening scene in static-y black and white is truly a sight to behold, and even the mouse and movement controls seem to work.

It's still in rough shape for now, however, with "some lag to fix" and other issues, but RPGKING reports that "everything else works perfectly." Here's hoping it does, because I can't wait to see it up for download.

Although hilariously enough, the creator concludes his video saying he's "pretty happy with this" – only to then admit it "looks like I've got a lot of bugs to flush out still."

Regardless, fans (it's me, I'm fans) can't get enough of the chaotic idea as a whole, with folks unsurprisingly blaming the lengthy wait between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 for such Frankenstein-y mods. "This is what 15 years without a sequel does to a fanbase," one comment reads.

Another jokes, "It's a Bethesda game within a Bethesda game; I imagine bugs will be part of the experience every step of the way." My favorite reply of all, though, jests, "It's what Todd Howard would've wanted." It might just be, anon. It might just be.

Skyrim mod has you slay dragons "by debating them on the geopolitics of Tamriel," turning Bethesda's RPG into an absurd game of Civilization.

Somewhere in the ether, there's evidence of the Generic Universal Role Playing System, or GURPS, version of Interplay's Fallout, in which franchise co-creator Tim Cain dumped every adjective he's ever heard of before a botched licensing deal ultimately led the 1997 game to the SPECIAL ruleset current developer Bethesda still uses. Cain is missing most of that evidence – or he thought so, before unearthing a fat list of advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills he shares in a new YouTube video giving us a rare sniff of what Fallout development was like 30 years ago.

"I thought these were lost," Cain says in the video posted May 13. "Well, I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills had it been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout."

Interplay had Cain destroy his archive of the project after he left the company, and the developer apparently misplaced the separate archive Cain handed over before shipping Fallout in 1997. But that's in the past – Cain finally has some proof of the elaborate wasteland GURPS Fallout, and he's eager to share each exhausting detail.

In terms of attributes, strength, health, IQ, and dexterity are a given. "We were of course using all four of those," says Cain, but then there was a whole separate spice cabinet of advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics players could use.

He lists ingredients in a large pot of soup: "Acute hearing, acute taste and smell, acute vision; alertness; [...] ambidexterity; animal empathy; appearance attractive, appearance handsome, and appearance very handsome.

"Charisma; combat reflexes, common sense, danger sense; eidetic memory, high pain threshold, intuition; literacy, luck; night vision, peripheral vision; rapid healing," and you could have good reputation in various Fallout factions, including, in your Vault, Shady Sands, Junktown, the Hub, Brotherhood of Steel, and so on.

"We also added strong will, toughness, and voice," says Cain. These advantages would have all cost character points to purchase, and, "in essence, made the game a little easier in some small aspect," Cain adds. The disadvantage list gleefully kicks up the seesaw and balances that out.

In addition to a number of bad or enemy-level reputations you could earn among all of Fallout's major groups, including your Vault, GURPS Fallout also let you develop "Alcoholism. Odious personal habit: Bad breath. Odious personal habit: Pick nose," says Cain. "Color blindness, hard of hearing, low pain threshold, no sense of smell or taste – it's also called anosmia. One eye; overweight, skinny – those are both disadvantages in GURPS. Stuttering."

GURPS Fallout would have also made you vulnerable to various addictions, including to "physical adders" that adjusted your strength, dex, and hardiness of your health, "mental adders" that boosted IQ, or combat-specific drugs Cain calls "berserk drugs."

These, of course, are all separate to the "bad temper, berserk, blood lust" you could incur, or "code of honor – it's called, 'You Never Break Your Word,' combat paralysis; compulsive lying, delusion: hears voices; gullibility, honesty; lecherousness; pacifism: cannot kill, pacifism: self-defense only; phobia of insects, phobia of monsters, phobia of reptiles, phobia of darkness; sense of duty to the Vault, truthfulness, unluckiness; weak will." Phew. These disadvantages are starting to sound like the reasons for my therapy bill.

Cain says there were additionally three levels of ugliness, from mildly unattractive to, "You're the most disgusting thing ever born in the Vault," Cain explains. "You're lucky they didn't kill you as a mutant." And because this is GURPS Fallout we're talking about, you could also have so many quirks, they might have eventually cast Zooey Deschanel to play you in a movie. Two of my favorite options Cain lists are "hates cows" and "boisterous walker," which would make your footsteps fall like anvils.

As for skills, some highlights GURPS Fallout would have launched with are "jumping," "sex appeal," and Cain says, "savoir-faire, one of my favorite ones, the skill of good manners and getting along in a social setting."

"We had all of those in the game at some level of implementation in early 1997," Cain concludes.

"Tim, not to be too dark," quickly replies one fan on YouTube. "Can you release the source code for Fallout as your last will and testament?"

Not missing a beat, Cain says, "I'd have to have it first."

Xbox studio accidentally gave away the RPG that led to OG Fallout for free, so now it's giving everyone a way to play it legitimately.