Fallout 5 reportedly is now in development. According to Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden, the next installment in Bethesda's highly successful post-apocalyptic RPG has now been officially greenlit.
Details are still incredibly light; we still don't know which studio is development Fallout 5, and he believes Bethesda Game Studios' core teams are already busy working on new Starfield DLC as well as The Elder Srolls VI.
Bethesda has not officially announced Fallout 5, although Todd Howard told IGN back in 2022 that development on the game would begin after the completion of The Elder Scrolls VI, which was first announced to be in preproduction back in 2018. Howard told IGN back in 2022:
"Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while. We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well.”
Now, obviously, Bethesda has not yet released The Elder Scrolls VI. The game only entered active production in 2023 following the launch of Starfield.
According to Corden though, Bethesda wants to focus on its Fallout series. And that focus came at the expense of ZeniMax Online's next MMO, codenamed Blackbird. The mysterious MMO was canceled as part of Microsoft's recent round of layoffs.
Corden explained that MMOs are expensive to make and face stiff competition with alrady established games in the genre, such as World of Warcraft and even ZeniMax's own The Elder Scrolls Online. So rather than sink money into a risky venture, Microsoft opted to cancel ZeniMax's unannounced project and invest in a new Fallout, as that's an established IP that's viewed as a "surefire win."
"From what I heard, it was a case of 'Do we want to sink a ton of money into getting this [project 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?'" Corden said.
It's worth noting that Corden did state that he doesn't ahve enough information on Fallout 5 or who is developing it to write a full story, so take this information with a grain of salt.
Fallout has always been a popular franchise, but it really gained renewed interest thanks to the success of Amazon's Fallout television series. The critically acclaimed show helped drive new players to Fallout 76, the franchise's first online multiplayer game that was released back in 2018. Gamers also returned to the post apocalyptic New England Commonwealth in 2015's Fallout 4, the last mainline single-play game in the series.
With it being 10 years since the last true single-player Fallout game, fans are understandably eager for Fallout 5. Let's hope these rumors are true. For its part, Microsoft chose to spotlight Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 for its last major announced at the Xbox Games Showcase back in June.