Once it completes work on Starfield sometime next year and then transitions to full-scale production on The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda says its next project will be Fallout 5. That tidbit of information was shared by Todd Howard, the studio’s creative director, in an interview with 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,” Howard told the outlet. “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.”
Bethesda announced it was working on both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 at E3 2018. Based on the studio’s current development cadence, it won’t release the latter until sometime in 2027. And if spends another five years working on Fallout 5 after that, the sequel won’t arrive until sometime in the next decade. By that point, both Microsoft and Sony could announce and release new console hardware. Catastrophic climate change could also become so bad that a game about a post-apoclypse would become redundant. Either way, Fallout fans have a long wait ahead of them before the next mainline entry in the series arrives.