Fallout 5 is coming after the next Elder Scrolls game, Todd Howard says

After Starfield, which is coming to Xbox Series X and Windows PC next year, and after The Elder Scrolls 6, which is now “in pre-production,” there will be a Fallout 5. So says Todd Howard, creative director at Bethesda Game Studios, in a new interview with IGN that was chiefly about his team’s next game, the spacefaring RPG Starfield.

Reacting to the lengthy period between Bethesda Game Studios games and how long sequels tend to take, Howard told IGN, “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, but they do take a while. I wish they came out faster, I really do. We’re trying as hard as we can, but we want them to be as best as they can be for everybody.”

Howard and company officially announced Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 back in 2018, and the former is finally coming out sometime next year. (It was delayed from November this year.) A similar development window for the latter would peg the next Elder Scrolls game somewhere around 2027, which makes the prospect of the next Fallout game’s release window simply too soul-draining to actually type out. That, of course, assumes that only Bethesda Game Studios itself would dedicate five years to each of its upcoming games, and that primary development wouldn’t be handed off to, say, one-time Fallout developer Obsidian Entertainment, which is currently busy with multiple role-playing games of its own (Pentiment, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2).

The most recent mainline Fallout game, Fallout 4, was released in 2015 for PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. Bethesda Softworks released a successor, Fallout 76, in 2018, to mixed reaction. But Bethesda has continued to expand and improve upon its multiplayer Fallout game, and will release a new update, The Pitt, this fall.