As the second season of the Fallout TV show kicks off, Bethesda explains its cross-promotion plans to keep up interest in the games until Fallout 5 is ready.
The incredible success of Amazon’s Fallout TV show saw a huge spike in players for all the old Fallout games, especially Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, but higher-ups at Bethesda and Microsoft must’ve been kicking themselves for not having a brand-new game ready.
Fallout 5 is in development, with Bethesda acknowledging its existence as early as 2021, but despite it being 10 years since Fallout 4, series director Todd Howard seems to be feeling no pressure to accelerate the sequel’s progress.
He has been willing to touch upon the topic of Fallout 5 in recent interviews for the TV show and its second season (which began airing this week), but if it wasn’t abundantly clear already, Bethesda is prioritising The Elder Scrolls 6 instead.
‘Elder Scrolls 6 is the thing that most of the studio is working on right now. And just making sure something like that gets the time and attention it needs, particularly after all this time,’ Howard told The Game Business.
The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced all the way back in 2018 and has had no real updates since, not even a cinematic trailer. It’s taking so long that it’s now over 14 years since The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
There are rumours and speculation of it launching within the next few years, but Bethesda has never made any promises.
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With any luck, though, the wait between Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 won’t be that long, as Howard told Game Informer that Bethesda has ‘long pre-productions’ and is always overlapping on multiple projects.
‘We always overlap. So, we’re very used to overlapping development. And we have long pre-productions on things so that we feel good about them,’ said Howard.
He also added that Elder Scrolls 6 is ‘progressing really well’ and while he and the team wish things could go faster, ‘it’s a process that we want to get right.’
That’s all very well but Howard talked like that about Starfield too – which is rumoured to be coming to PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 next year – and that did not justify the enormous wait for the game.
Howard did touch on one detail about Fallout 5, when asked by the BBC. With the show set in the same continuity as the games, it sounds like the adventures of Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul will have some sort of impact on the next game’s story.
‘Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening. We are taking that into account,’ said Howard. Whether this means the game will overtly feature characters and plot points from the show or simply reference them, though, is unclear.
For the time being, it seems Howard and Bethesda are very much banking on the continued success of the TV show to keep the franchise relevant.
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Thanks to lessons learned from season one, there’s been more of an effort in cross-promotional material, such as adding Walton Goggin’s Ghoul character to Fallout 76 earlier this month and releasing an anniversary edition of Fallout 4.
They’ve even gone so far as to push the games on Samsung smart TVs, making it possible for people to jump right into playing them after watching the show, without needing to get a console or gaming PC.
‘We have curation where we have all of Fallout season one available to watch on Samsung TV Plus, right next to the games,’ Howard explained to The Game Business.
‘We are deliberately and intentionally trying to drive new consumers who have just finished binge watching season one to be able to get in and play these games. We’ve been doing a lot over the last few months, and we’ve seen an incredible uptick in interest from users and new users as well, who are traditionally not your typical gamers.’
This is why Howard believes Fallout is ‘in a great spot’ even without a new game, with the show already being greenlit for a third season.
It is widely rumoured that Bethesda is planning a remaster of Fallout 3, in the manner of Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. Although even with that, there’s no indication of when it might be released.
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