With a well-received TV adaptation leading to a resurgence in popularity for Fallout video games, 2024 has been a pretty good year so far for Bethesda. Now that a second season of Fallout has been greenlit, the expectation for Fallout 5 is higher than ever, but Bethesda’s Todd Howard says that there are no plans to rush out a new mainline Fallout game just yet. Thanks to the ongoing popularity of Fallout 76–new DLC for the game has launched–the company plans to bring the franchise back in a more meaningful way.
“For other Fallout games in the future, you know obviously I can’t talk about those right now but I would say sort of rushing through them or we need to get stuff out that is different than the work we’re doing in 76, you know we don’t feel like we need to rush any of that you know right now,” Howard said in an interview with MrMattyPlays. “The Fallout TV show fills a certain niche in terms of the franchise and storytelling. [I] totally get the desire for a new kind of mainline single-player game. Look, those things take time. I don’t think it’s bad for people to miss things. We just want to get it right and make sure that everything we’re doing in a franchise, whether it’s Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or Starfield, that those become meaningful moments for everybody who loved these franchises as much as we do.”
It’s worth noting that new Fallout games are being planned, but in a previous interview, Howard said that these will take a “good five-ish years” to still be made. Another fascinating tidbit from the interview was that Bethesda has no plans currently to bring the modernized versions of Fallout 1 and 2 to console, and looking to the stars, the company is planning to release annual expansions for Starfield that will answer some of the game’s biggest mysteries.
“We want to, more or less. How long that continues? Hopefully for a very long time, but that’s what we’re planning for,” Howard explained. “The one after this, there will be another one. and I don’t know that our goal is to answer every question we sort of look at it and say ‘Hey what’s what’s a good angle,’ what do we want to add to the game as far as an experience or a tone, or those kinds of things, if that makes sense.”
Starfield’s first big expansion, Shattered Space, launches later this year. The game’s big June update added new missions, a new bounty-scanning mechanic, and opened up the Starfield Creation Kit to all modders, although some players are upset that the new Track Alliance missions cost $7 to access.
