Bethesda Confirms Fallout 5, But Get Ready To Wait

Fallout 5 is real, if a certain video game designer, director, and producer at Bethesda named Todd Howard, is to be believed. Howard, who has helmed the development of previous entries in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series, says the studio will start working on Fallout 5 after it is done with The Elder Scrolls 6.

"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," Howard was quoted as saying by IGN. But that's about everything we know about the upcoming game. In November of 2021, the Bethesda executive told IGN that the team has "a one-pager on Fallout 5" that details what the studio wants to do with the highly anticipated title.

The last direct entry in the series was Fallout 4, which arrived all the way back in 2015. A spin-off called Fallout 76 was released in 2018 and got an update called Wastelanders in 2020. However, the game was met with bad critical reviews, thanks in no part to performance issues, buggy game systems, and a general lack of motivated pacing among other flaws. Fallout 5 might prove to be a redemption project, but it's not coming anytime soon.

Bethesda is currently busy with The Elder Scrolls 6, a game that is currently in the pre-development stage. Announced at the E3 game conference in 2018, the AAA title currently has no official release date — or any target release date, for that matter. Bethesda will touch the game after the release of Starfield, which is lined up for a release next year. Given the ambitious scale of Starfield, Bethesda will keep its focus on the space-faring RPG for at least the next few months to iron out any kinks that players face during the initial release phase.

That, and the "pre-development" tag attached to The Elder Scrolls 6, are a clear sign that Bethesda won't go into full steam production mode on its next post-apocalyptic action RPG anytime soon. With a production schedule that already seems distant in the future and the pressure of exceeding expectations (read: redemption) for the next outing in the series, it looks like The Elder Scrolls 6 won't arrive until 2024 at the earliest.

As for the game itself, it has been officially confirmed that it will be a PC and Xbox exclusive, which is not surprising. Any way you look at the situation, it appears that Fallout 5 won't make its debut for the next few years, going by the most conservative measures. Until then, keep the grind on in Fallout 76.