Bethesda has yet to confirm when the next Fallout game will arrive, what it will look like, or how far along it currently is. The current safest answer is still that Fallout 5 is expected to come some time after The Elder Scrolls 6, which itself still hasn’t even received a proper release date or full reveal. Recent reporting has added a new wrinkle to that wait, though, as Microsoft is reportedly looking to increase investment in major Xbox franchises like Fallout, Halo, and The Elder Scrolls in an effort to move them along faster. That doesn’t suddenly give Fallout 5 a release window, but it does make the next Fallout game feel a little less like a distant idea sitting at the very back of Bethesda’s schedule.
Whenever it does arrive, though, Fallout 5 is already facing impossible odds. At this point, Bethesda’s next Fallout game essentially has to compete with a version of itself that fans have been building in their heads for more than a decade. That imaginary Fallout 5 has no production limits, no budget limits, no engine limits, no canon problems, and no need to satisfy every corner of the fanbase at once. Bethesda eventually has to turn that dream into one real game, and that may be Fallout 5‘s biggest hurdle to clear before it even gets a trailer.
Fallout: New Vegas Remaster May Have Just Been Leaked By a Toy Company
Though a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas has not been officially announced, a major toy company may have just leaked the potential project.
Fallout 5 Is Already Competing With a Game That Doesn’t Exist
Fallout 4 launched in 2015, which means Fallout fans have had over a decade to decide what the next mainline entry should be. Rather than build hype for it, however, that wait has done something entirely different to Fallout 5. It has allowed the game to become whatever each player wants it to be in their imagination.
What’s That Weapon?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)
For some, Fallout 5 should be Bethesda’s answer to New Vegas, bringing back its iconic writing, quests, factions, and choices that feel like they permanently change the world. For others, Fallout 5 should take what Fallout 4 did well and simply make it better. Fallout 4‘s gunplay, exploration, crafting, settlement building, and Power Armor systems ultimately modernized Bethesda’s Fallout formula, and it would be strange for the next game to backtrack all of that progress.
Fallout 4 launched in 2015, which means Fallout fans have had over a decade to decide what the next mainline entry should be.
The problem is that both expectations can be true at the same time, and Fallout 5 still has to become one specific game. It can’t be every fan’s ideal sequel—New Vegas 2, Fallout 4-2, a TV show tie-in, a Fallout 76 successor, and a total reinvention of the series all at once. But nevertheless, the longer Bethesda waits, the more those expectations pile up.
A fake version of Fallout 5 has been getting better for years because the imagination doesn’t have to make hard choices. Fans can picture the perfect setting, the perfect faction system, the perfect dialogue structure, the perfect combat loop, and the perfect balance between old Fallout and modern Bethesda, but a real game has to make a decision. It has to choose where it takes place, what kind of protagonist players will have, how much the Fallout TV show matters, how reactive the world can realistically be, and how much of Fallout 4‘s DNA should stick around.
That’s why Fallout 5 feels like it’s facing impossible odds before it’s even announced or revealed. At this point, it’s no longer Fallout 4‘s legacy that Bethesda is competing with. Rather, it’s years of imagined sequels that have already fixed every problem, restored every missing feature, and delivered every dream setting without ever even needing to exist.
In fact, the first trailer for Fallout 5, whenever it finally arrives, will probably prove just how impossible that job is. Bethesda could use it to show off a brand-new iteration of the Wasteland, and some fans will immediately wish the game had gone somewhere else. It could show fresh and innovative role-playing mechanics, and others might worry that the game’s combat hasn’t been prioritized.
A fake version of Fallout 5 has been getting better for years because the imagination doesn’t have to make hard choices.
Fallout 5 could embrace, with open arms, the TV show’s growing place in Fallout canon, and some players will undoubtedly worry the games are relying too much on sources outside the games. Or, it could ignore the show almost entirely, and others will likely wonder why Bethesda isn’t taking advantage of one of the biggest mainstream moments Fallout has ever had. None of this necessarily means Fallout 5 is doomed from the start, only that, when it does finally choose to arrive, it will be walking into a conversation that it has been left out of for a very long time.
Fallout Hasn’t Been Waiting Around, Even if Fans Have Been
The strangest part of Fallout 5‘s situation is that the franchise itself hasn’t been silent during the wait for the next game. If Fallout had simply gone into hiding after Fallout 4, Bethesda’s job would probably be much easier. Then, Fallout 5 could return as the series’ big revival, and it would likely have less demanding expectations to respond to.
Guess the games from the emojis.
Guess the games from the emojis.
Easy (120s)Medium (90s)Hard (60s)
Instead, Fallout has stayed alive in several different forms since the fourth game came out. Fallout 76 has continued growing beyond its infamously rough launch, with Burning Springs expanding the game into rural Ohio as Bethesda’s largest map expansion for it so far. Fallout 4 has also remained active through the Anniversary Edition, which includes the base game, all six official add-ons, and more than 150 Creation Club items, with Switch 2 joining the list of platforms in 2026.
Then there’s the Fallout TV show, obviously, which has brought the franchise into the public eye in a way no game has since Fallout 4. Prime Video renewing Fallout for Season 3 before Season 2 even premiered says a lot about how much confidence there is in the property right now. With that, Fallout is no longer just some major RPG franchise waiting on its next mainline entry to show up, but a multimedia brand with a much wider audience than it had when Fallout 4 first launched.
So, Fallout 5 now faces the challenge of arriving after years of Fallout being kept alive by everything but itself. Many fans have been replaying Fallout 4, arguing about New Vegas, building settlements, watching the show, following Fallout 76 on its rocky journey, and imagining what Bethesda could and, in their eyes, what it should do next. It’s like Fallout 5 will be entering a crowded room once it finally decides to, and then it will need to figure out how to make itself the center of the franchise again.
Really, that’s a much harder job than simply making a bigger, better-looking open world. A larger map and improved, current-gen visuals would naturally be expected. More weapons, enemy variants, companions, and locations would all be expected as well. But while those things would certainly help Fallout 5 feel like a modern Fallout game, they wouldn’t be enough to make it feel like a decade of waiting was worth it, so the next entry needs to have a clearer, more distinct aim.
Fallout 5 has to know what it wants Fallout to be after years of the series being pulled in different directions. Fallout 4 made the series more playable and more approachable, and New Vegas remains the comparison point for player choice and faction storytelling. Fallout 76, throughout its long and arduous journey, made the wasteland more communal and ongoing, while the TV show turned Fallout into something millions of viewers can recognize even if they have never picked up a controller and played the games themselves.
Fallout 5 now faces the challenge of arriving after years of Fallout being kept alive by everything but itself.
Now, Bethesda has to decide what all of that means without letting Fallout 5 feel like it was designed by committee. Realistically, Fallout 5 can’t include every fan request, so there’s little danger there. The real danger is that it tries so hard to be the version that everyone has imagined that it ends up falling short of expectations, rather than owning its own version of itself and selling that to fans instead.
All things considered, that’s why the odds already feel stacked against Bethesda’s next Fallout game. Fallout 5 is competing with Fallout 4, New Vegas nostalgia, Fallout 76‘s long tail, the TV show’s success, and Xbox’s need for major franchise wins. More than anything, though, it’s competing with time, because every year without Fallout 5 gives fans more room to dream up the perfect sequel, and no real game can ever achieve that.
Bethesda can still win that fight, but it won’t win it by making Fallout 5 bigger for the sake of being bigger. It will win by making Fallout 5 very specific and, ultimately, hard to replace. After all this time, the next new Fallout game can’t afford to feel like a compromise between every fan-imagined version of it, but as though Bethesda had a better answer all this time.
- Released
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November 10, 2015
- ESRB
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M FOR MATURE: BLOOD AND GORE, INTENSE VIOLENCE, STRONG LANGUAGE, USE OF DRUGS
