In the wake ofFallout’s success onPrime Video,Bethesda’s timetable for the next game in the series seems increasingly untenable. The studio has said thatit won’t start work on Fallout 5 in earnest until it has shipped The Elder Scrolls 6. With estimates placingTES6’s launch in2028(which would make sense givenStarfield’s 2023 release), the next Fallout game likely wouldn’t hit store shelves — if brick-and-mortar stores still exist at all —until 2032. If you’re keeping track, that’s 17 years afterFallout 4, 14 years afterFallout 76, and eight years after the Fallout TV show’simpressive debut.
Want To Play A New Fallout Game? Wait A Decade.
Bloated game development cycles have been unsustainable for years now, as the failure of this year’sSuicide Squad—Rocksteady’s first full-length game in nine years — illustrates. Fallout being adapted into another medium — one with much more reasonable turnaround times — makes the problem all the more obvious. As game development tools have gotten better, the computers developers work on have become more powerful, and all of the tech has become more widely available, the process to make a game now takes… two to five times longer? That doesn’t seem right.
As the tools have improved, ambitions have also scaled up. Now a triple-A game needs to look significantly better than the previous game in the series, be significantly bigger, and take significantly longer to finish. Whereas movie lengths have stayed the same and TV seasons have gotten shorter, every new game in a series is expected to be bigger than the one that preceded it. It’s a silly expectation, and if we want to play the next game in a series we love before our grandchildren can shave, we need to get okay with smaller games. The upside is that smaller games also means more games, more often.
Fallout: New Vegas Is The Way
That shift seems inevitable to me, but it may take a while to arrive. In the meantime, there’s an easier solution that can be implemented without too many grand, sweeping changes laying the groundwork. It already happens sometimes, it just needs to happen more frequently. That is: publishers and developers should be more open to allowing other studios to work on games in their series. This happened back in 2010 whenObsidianused theFallout 3engine to makeFallout: New Vegas, and players got one of the most beloved games in the series in the process.
I saw a piece recently about how Bethesda should just let another studio make Fallout 5. I don’t disagree, but that also isn’t exactly what I’m saying. I think Bethesda should just let other developers take a crack at making Fallout games. I thinkRockstarshould let other developers take a crack at making GTA games. And I thinkNintendoshould let other developers take a crack at making Zelda and Mario games, too. Firaxis could make a Fallout game in the style ofXCOM; it could even be branded as a sequel to Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. inXile could bring the CRPG chops it honed on theWastelandgames to the Fallout universe for a game that threw back to the original Interplay and Black Isle games. And, hey, why not, Obsidian could make Fallout: New Vegas 2?
Six years passed between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. At least seven will have passed between Super Mario Odyssey and whatever comes next. GTA 6 (as I’venoted many times) will arrive 12 years after GTA 5. At some point, this is just a bizarre business model. It would make sense for only one developer to touch a series if games only took a year to make. But when 65 million people just finished watching a hit show, why is the answer that, if they want to play a new game in that series, they can either pick up a six-year-old MMO or wait another decade?
I’m not advocating the return of shameless cash grabs. Instead, I’m arguing that the series we love will be better if their developers can get comfortable with loaning them out for a while.
