Bethesda Talks Fallout’s Future And Lessons Learned
In 2008, Bethesda released Fallout 3, a groundbreaking adaptation of the to-that-point isometric Fallout franchise to a gameplay style close that veered close to its beloved Elder Scrolls series. Within seven years, we not only received a new spin-off entry by Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas, but also an all-new mainline entry from Bethesda, Fallout 4. It’s now been more than a decade since Fallout 4, and though fans of the series can enjoy things like the online RPG Fallout 76, which initially launched in 2018, and the successful Prime Video series, which started in 2024, the wait for a new mainline single-player entry has proven arduous.
In 2018, Bethesda revealed The Elder Scrolls VI through a short teaser. It has been more than seven years since that reveal, and based on the recent updates the studio provided Game Informer as part of the conversations surrounding our Fallout retrospective, it sounds like the game may still have a ways to go. For years, Bethesda alternated between The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, releasing Oblivion in 2006, Fallout 3 in 2008, Skyrim in 2011, and Fallout 4 in 2015. That trend broke with Fallout 76 in 2018, and deviated further in 2023, when Bethesda released Starfield, an ambitious new IP set in space.
“We are better developers for having made a multiplayer game, we are better developers for having developed our own IP now, because it’s new muscles,” studio director Angela Browder tells Game Informer. “It’s tested us in a different way. It’s taught us a lot of things that we never could have known otherwise. And I do think even as we go into titles that are IP we’ve made before that we classically understand, we’re still better developers for having done it, because your brain thinks differently once you’ve done those kinds of things. And I think it’s only going to make every title we do better.”
In 2022, Howard told IGN that Fallout 5 will be the next game Bethesda sets its sights on after it finishes The Elder Scrolls VI. “We’re going to do Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s going to be pretty full going forward for a while,” he told IGN. ” In 2021, he also told IGN that the studio has a basic idea of what Fallout 5 will be, saying the developers “have a one-pager on Fallout 5, what we want to do.”
Bethesda is currently focused on The Elder Scrolls VI, but according to director and executive producer Todd Howard, Bethesda has other projects in the hopper. “The majority of the studios are on VI, but I’ll say this: We always overlap,” Howard tells Game Informer. “So, we’re very used to overlapping development.”
During my in-depth conversations with Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard, Emil Pagliarulo, and Angela Browder, I asked them what they’d most like to accomplish with the Fallout franchise going forward. Here’s what they had to say:
Todd Howard
Director and Executive Producer
“I will say, first, looking at 76, we’ve never stopped developing Fallout. We’ve had a full team on Fallout for a long time. So, Fallout, as a franchise, is the one we’re still doing the most work in above anything. Now, the majority of our internal studio is on Elder Scrolls VI. We are doing other things with Fallout that we haven’t announced, and you know, there’ll come a time for that. I get the sort of anxiety from fans, like, “Well, what else? What else? Feed me!” But, look, we’re working on stuff, and we do like to wait. And so, I think there’ll be a moment to talk about that, and we want to make those special moments for our fans.”
Emil Pagliarulo
Studio Design Director
“I would be happy with a game that is as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love, you know, and to give them a story that they can get into and systems that they love and really just an experience that they play not for 20 hours and not for 100 hours, but an experience they can play for 200, 300, you know, 600 hours, because that’s the kind of games we make. That would be my hope going forward: Keep doing what we’ve done, and also to evolve. And evolve in a way that is where the industry has gone and where players have gone, so you’re not stuck in the past. Like, in the Oblivion remaster that came out, people forget in the original Oblivion, you couldn’t sprint. So, of course we’re going to add that in the Oblivion remaster. Things like that. The industry moved on, and so, we want to move on with it.”
Angela Browder
Studio Director
“I think every one of [our past games] is a learning experience, right? Let’s take Fallout 76 – Yes, we learned how to make multiplayer; we also learned what it means when you ship a product that doesn’t necessarily hit really well right away. And we learned about investing and listening to our players and strengthening who we are and what we are, our own ability to resiliency and adversity, all these kinds of things, right? When you talk about Starfield, we made the biggest thing we’ve ever done in our entire lives: We made space. I’m scared of space, I think space is really scary, but we made space! All of those are, while it may not be, like, “Oh I’m going to put space in Elder Scrolls VI,” – do not write that I’m putting space into Elder Scrolls VI; [laughs] we’re not going to put space in Elder Scrolls VI! – everything that we learned by putting space into Starfield goes into Elder Scrolls VI. It’s all learning.
We’re very blessed to have a very long-tenured team, as well. And so, all of those learnings from every single one just keep going with us, and I think that one of the things that you can see the natural progression as we’ve made our titles is we do listen to our players. When we start our big, big list, part of what we write down is everything our players want. We do listen to our players, and we do take that in, so that all wraps into this moment of what it all is going to be like. It’s one of those interesting things. You never know if people are seeing the correlation between, like, “Six years ago you said this thing. I listened to you, I swear. Because, look, it’s right here!” People don’t always follow those very long threads, but the amount of those threads that exist are a lot. Some day, I just wish I could draw like a mind map of, like, “This guy said this thing on Reddit 12 years ago that never left our brains, and here you go! It took us a little while, but it’s there!
There’s sometimes this preconceived notion that we don’t read or look at or listen to any of it. We read all of it. I mean, all of it. And, especially Fallout, it’s interesting because as it’s expanded its scope, the amount of feedback we get on it is more than just gaming now, right? And so, it can be a little overwhelming, but we do read it all.”
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