Summary

• The Elder Scrolls 6 is a long way off, but we won't get Fallout 5 until after. It's gonna be one helluva wait.
• Meanwhile, Fallout is at an all-time high thanks to the new TV series, but Bethesda has no way to capitalise on that success.
• If Bethesda doesn't greenlight a new Fallout game soon, it'll miss the train completely.

The Fallout series has taken the world by nuclear storm. New and old fans alike are 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:flocking back to the games en masse as they itch for more from its world. But aside from a second season, there’s nothing on the horizon to look forwa🌳rd to.

There was an eight-year gap between Fallout 4 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield, and there’ll likely be a similar wait between Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 and then again between TES 6 and Fallout 5. At worst, that means the next mainline Fallout game could be 15 yea﷽rs away from launching on top of the nine years we’ve already waite🐬d. If development cycles somehow shorten (despite ballooning everywhere else in the industry), even another ten years feels optimistic.

Fallout 4 came out when I was 15. At this rate, I’ll be in my late 30sꦿ, early 40s when Fallout 5 comes🌠 out.

The show might even be finished by the time Fallout 5 is out, with several seasons under itsꦓ belt. And yet that same show is bringing in a hungry community desperate for more. None of it makes sense, and it marks a serious problem with ꧂Bethesda’s strategy and the unquenchable thirst to make every single new game bigger than the last.

Starfield’s vast, expansive galaxy was the mos𝄹t empty Bethesda map to date, as the rush to make everything bigger left no room for the tight-knit worlds packed with detail that made its past RPGs such a tre💜at to explore in the first place.

That’s why 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:New Vegas developed such a fervent fanbase. Not only was its ‘wasteland’ stuffed with interesting and witty characters ready to set us on equally exciting quests, but its intricate politics and branching questlines all made it feel as though you had an impact on the world which you could see in real-time as you explored it. Starfield on the other hand feels like a slog🌜 through endless menus to tick checkboxes in an uninteresting sandbox that has noth༒ing of value to say.

The drive to make every single sequel larger than the last means longer development cycles and shallower games, and it’s pushed Fallout 5 so far back that Bethesda 𒁃can’t hope to tap into the fever the show has unleashed… Unless it shelves The Elder Scrolls 6.

It’ll never happen, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bethesda said as much. Skyrim is one of the most successful games of all time and everyone's itching for the sequel, but Elder Scrolls hasn’t laid nearly as dormant as Fallout between games.

Every year, we get a new Elder Scrolls story in ESO, and they’re often as good, if not better than the main quests of the🔯 main games anyway. The last expansion even introduced a secret Daedric Prince who had been buried from history - ZeniMax Online is taking confident swings with the lore and opening up Tamriel like never before. TES fans just need to take the leap and they’ll quickly find the wait for TES6 to be a lot more bearable.

Fallout, on the other hand, is as dry as the Mojave. Aside from the show, the only thing waiting for fans is the multiplayer survival sandbox 76. And wh꧅ile the game has come a long way since its infamously rocky launch, it doesn’t hold a candle to how organic the worlds of the main games are. But because of how Bethesda operates, it 🅺will be at least a decade before we have an alternative.

If Not Fallout 5, Then What?

Aside from changing priorities, there are other ways to remedy the problem. As our Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley wrote, Bethesda could work on a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:smaller Fallout, drastically reducing the scope to get a new game out the door within the next few years. Another option is to share the rights. Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft, who also owns Obsidian, AKA the developer of Fallout: New Vegas and the successor to the studio that developed the original two games. It's as fit for the job as Bethesda.

We could see a game built on the back of 4, especially with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:its current-gen update out soon, much as New Veg😼as was built on 3. This would allow for a quicker turnaround than a full reinvention in the vein of Starfield and TES6, and it would mean returning to the West Coast where the show is set - perfect timing.

Of course, Obsidian is busy with a slew of its own projects like Avowed and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Outer Worlds 2, so even that looks unlikely. Another avenue would be to license the IP to someone completely new, like Ubisoft and Dead Cells developer Motion Twin’s pa💦rtnership for Rogue Prince of Persia.

Fallout didn’t start with Bethesda, and some of the best stories in the series come from other developers, so giving a new team a chance to take a crack at the world would invite a fresh perspective and open the doors to getting a game on shel🌃ves far sooner than Bethesda itself can.

Whatever the case, the way things are going, Bethesda will completely mi🐠ss the train and squander the perfect opportunity to leap at the newfound success the series is basking in. Hell, by the time Fallout 5 is here, maybe we’ll all be ghouls anyway.