Bethesda hasn’t shipped a single-player Fallout game since 2015. That’s the number worth sitting with before anything else. Fallout 4 came out, and then the mainline series went quiet for a decade while Fallout 76 and assorted franchise spinoffs absorbed the attention.
For a series this popular, that’s a strange way to run things.
The confirmation everyone missed
Bethesda finally said the words in July, buried in a long statement that also laid out a handful of other franchise projects. On the surface it reads like good news.
“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,” the post reads. “We also know many players want to revisit previous Fallout experiences. While we’re not announcing any dates today, we have been working on remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.”
Remasters of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Multiple projects in development. A long-range destination.
Read that last phrase again. “Long-range destination” is not the language of a game arriving soon.
Your console probably won’t be invited
And that’s where the bad news starts. If Fallout 5 is still a distant target, there’s little to no chance it lands on the current generation of consoles, at least not as its primary home.
Component prices are up. Hardware prices are up. A large chunk of the people who played Fallout 4 on day one are simply not going to be holding the machine that runs its sequel.
Part of the delay traces back to The Elder Scrolls VI, which has swallowed an enormous amount of Bethesda’s resources. The catch is that we haven’t seen anything of that game either. Two flagship projects, both invisible, one studio.
The PlayStation problem is worse than the hardware one
Xbox has pivoted back toward exclusivity, which raises the obvious question of whether PlayStation owners get to play Fallout 5 at all.
Say it does cross over to the PlayStation 6. There are still thousands of players who’ve publicly committed to skipping that console entirely after Sony’s decision to forego physical game releases. A disc-free future was a line in the sand for a lot of people, and they drew it before the hardware even arrived.
So the pool shrinks twice. Once on price, once on principle.
What’s left to actually look forward to
None of this threatens the game commercially. Fallout is a big enough name that a certain level of success is guaranteed regardless of how many people are locked out. That’s the uncomfortable part. The math works even when the audience doesn’t.
The brighter corner of all this is the Prime Video adaptation, whose third season arrives next year. And those remasters should land well before Fallout 5 does, which makes them the closest thing to a release date anyone’s got.
A decade of waiting, and the thing we’re being offered to fill the gap is two games we already own.
