With Starfield DLC and The Elder Scrolls 6 still on the way, Todd Howard may be prepared to cede control of Fallout 5 to another developer.
It’s a decade now since the release of Fallout 4 and yet no new game has been announced yet, even in the wake of the hugely successful Amazon TV show, which is already commissioned for seasons 2 and 3.
Rumours last week suggested that multiple new Fallout titles are currently in development, with a new Fallout: New Vegas release – either a remaster or a sequel – amongst them. There was still no hint as to when anything might be announced but now there are rumours, from a different insider, about Fallout 5.
Before the Amazon show, Fallout 5 wasn’t expected until after The Elder Scrolls 6, meaning that it could be the best part of a decade until it’s out. But a new report suggests that you might not have to wait that long, because it’s not necessarily being made by the usual team.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is assumed to be aiming for a release date of somewhere around 2028, which will be 17 years after the release of Skyrim – a staggeringly long time to leave such a successful game without a sequel.
That’s in part because Bethesda Game Studios, the internal developer led by Todd Howard, has been working on Starfield in recent years, although its poor reception has many fans wondering whether Bethesda may have abandoned previous plans for multiple DLC expansions.
This issue was discussed at length on the Xbox Two Podcast, with Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden insisting that, according to his sources, work on Starfield had not been abandoned, even after the mass layoffs at Xbox.
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The host then suggested that The Elder Scrolls 6 was still several years away from release (despite having first been announced seven years ago) but Corden corrected him by saying the game was already ‘quite playable’.
He didn’t suggest a release date, or give any indication when the game might be seen in public again, but he was confident enough to correct the idea that the game wasn’t yet in full production.
The discussion then moved on to Fallout, with Corden hinting at the possibility that Bethesda Game Studios may not be making Fallout 5, which would allow it to be released much earlier than if it had to wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 to be completed.
According to Corden, the mainline sequel is ‘fully greenlit’ and ready to move ahead, although given modern production times that still implies it’s going to be at least five years until it’s finished.
He admits that he has only one source for his information but then implies that the developer is not Bethesda Game Studios, or rather that Todd Howard – who usually takes the lead on all the games – is not the director.
Corden suggests that ZeniMax Online, makers of The Elder Scrolls Online, will be put to work on the franchise in some way, and that the reason their new MMO, codenamed Blackbird, had been cancelled was so that they could make Fallout games instead.
‘It was a case of, ‘Do we want to sink a ton of money into getting this [Blackbird] to a point where it can compete with the established players in the market, or do we want to allocate that investment towards making Fallout 5?’, said Corden.
Although Corden does not state for certain that ZeniMax Online is the sole developer of Fallout 5, it doesn’t require any inside sources to know that Microsoft would want the game out before 2033, which is the absolute earliest if Bethesda Game Studios was the sole developer.
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