Is Fallout 5 confirmed? Here’s everything Bethesda has said about the next Fallout game

Following the success of the show based on the property, the Fallout series has been riding a wave of renewed interest. The video game industry often sees a developer or publisher striking while the iron is hot, so you may be wondering if Fallout 5 is around the corner. I’ve got bad news for you.

As of right now, Fallout 5 has not been revealed and has only been spoken of in brief.

It is, as far as we know, still in pre-production.

To disappoint you further, based on my observations of Bethesda and their current development position, it is unlikely we will see Fallout 5 from them any time soon. It exists, but the developer seems to have other priorities.

What do we know about Fallout 5?

We don’t know much about Fallout 5. Or, really, anything at all aside from its existence. We knew as far back as late-2021 that preliminary work was being done on the title. More recently, Todd Howard said that he worked with the creators of the Amazon Prime show to avoid conflicts with the story planned for Fallout 5. He told Den of Geeks, “Well, there were some things where I said, ‘Don’t do this because we are going to do that in Fallout 5.’”

However, the only thing that has been alluded to is groundwork planning. Nothing has been revealed, so no one outside of Bethesda can say with certainty how much development has gone into the game. While it’s likely to run on Starfield’s Creation Engine 2, that in itself hasn’t been confirmed.

And it could be a very long time before we actually hear anything. Currently, Bethesda is working on The Elder Scrolls VI, and while we’ve seen a teaser for that game, it didn’t really start production until the completion of Starfield last year. At that point, Peter Hines stated that it could be years before we see Skyrim’s successor. And if that game is still far out, then it will be years plus years before we can play Fallout 5.

There is some potential that Fallout 5 or an interim sequel could be handed off to another studio, such as Obsidian, but that would probably also mean years of waiting. There is no groundwork for another studio to build off of. They’d presumably have to build from the ground up without causing needless overlap with what Bethesda has planned.

That leaves the possibility of a spin-off title, like, say, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. That’s perhaps more likely, but if something like that is in the works, it has not been confirmed or even hinted at.

Image via Bethesda

Rumored features for Fallout 5

Considering that we’ve established that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, any guesses on what gameplay features will be included are wildly conjecturous. Even within the development team – even within Todd Howard’s brain – nothing will have been set in stone and could change before the game even enters full production.

If you hear otherwise, I’d recommend you take it with a massive grain of salt. Even if something has been hinted at in Fallout 4 or Fallout 76 or the show, things could change drastically in the years before Fallout 5’s release. Extrapolating on previously known information won’t produce anything that can be considered accurate, because everything is up in the air until the rubber hits the road. Ambitious ideas might fail in the prototyping stage or prove to be intolerable in playtesting.

Where it takes place. When it takes place. What the protagonist’s role will be. What the story will be. Nothing is certain, everything can change, and right now, it’s not even worth speculating. You can certainly dream about it and hope for certain features, but guessing how things are going to look will probably result in a different picture from how they actually wind up looking.

When will Fallout 5 be released?

There is no release date for Fallout 5 because, as far as we know, the game only exists in the conceptual stage. It’s reportedly in pre-production and isn’t expected to go into full production until after the release of The Elder Scroll VI. That game isn’t planned for release until years from now.

You could look at the typical development cycle of a Bethesda game, but I’d warn that won’t get you far as project size and development length have changed drastically over the years. It was 7 years between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, but we’ve already exceeded that timeframe. Heck, it’s been 15 years since Elder Scroll V, and a whopping seven years since the teaser trailer. Starfield came eight years after the release of Fallout 4. So if you put an eight-year timeframe onto the potential release of The Elder Scrolls VI, you get a bit of a depressing picture.

So, if things go as planned, we won’t see Fallout 5 for many, many years. Even if we took an extremely wild guess and say that Elder Scrolls VI will be released in 2026, that could mean Fallout 5 arrives in 2034. If we’re really optimistic and say that things springboard off of Elder Scrolls VI and go swimmingly, the development cycle for a new Fallout could be three years or more. If things don’t go smoothly – and that’s totally a possibility – it could be even longer than that. This goes beyond whether or not a release date has been announced. It’s possible that a release window hasn’t even been decided internally within Bethesda. According to reports; it’s too early. That’s not to mention; guessing – or even knowing – a game’s release date doesn’t get it into your hands faster. It gets here when it gets here.

What platforms will Fallout 5 be on?

Again, as stated previously, nothing has solidly been announced for Fallout 5. Anything said beyond that is conjecture, plain and simple. That includes platforms. The only safe bet, as it stands, is PC. That’s because it’s the only platform that you can be almost certain will still be around when Fallout 5 finally releases.

Remember: we could be years out from an actual release. Bethesda has stated that Elder Scrolls VI is coming first, and we know very, very little about that release. With no gameplay trailers or solid release window, we can only speculate on when we’ll see it.

So, we’re talking years. In that time, the next generation of consoles could be upon is. Forget the Switch 2; we could be in Switch 3 territory for all we know. One thing we can say is that, because of the series’ history, it’s very likely that it will be on consoles. Since Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft, it’s possible that Microsoft will consider exclusivity for Xbox, but considering what their business strategy is indicating, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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