Fallout 5’s Announcement Has Gamers Concerned About Their Own Mortality

As a franchise, Fallout is in a bizarrely good place right now, particularly considering the fact that there hasn’t been a single-player entry in the main series since Fallout 4 dropped all the way back in 2015.

Fallout 76 continues to draw in new players and roll out regular updates, while even games like Fallout Shelter remain popular, with the developer conitnuing to support that in meaningful ways in 2026. The Prime Video adaptation has been a huge win in its own right, adding to the lore in a meaningful way whilst respecting the time of both new and existing fans.

All of that said, we really do want to play Fallout 5 at some point, but given what we have already heard from the developer, it really could be a long time before we get to do so.

Fallout 5 Is Coming Eventually

You could easily be forgiven for having forgotten this already, but Todd Howard gave an interview to IGN back in 2022 in which he dropped a fairly innocuous quote that has enormous consequences for the developer’s plans for Fallout 5:

“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.”

That was four years ago and a lot of people would have hoped that we would have seen a lot more of The Elder Scrolls VI by now. That game is still very much MIA and, if what Howard said at the time remains true, then it’s going to be a really, really long time before we get to play Fallout 5.

Fallout Fans Are Coming To Terms With Their Own Mortality

Over on Reddit, one player referenced that quote for the community with a picture of a Vault Dweller’s skeleton, and there is absolutely a bleak world where a bunch of Fallout fans simply don’t get to see the next game in the series.

One fan made a sarcastic, but very salient, point in response, saying, “With the success of the Elder Scrolls TV show they would be fools to make Fallout sooner.”

“If it wasn’t for Starfield, ES6 would already be out. At least we’d be chewing on that while a new Fallout is in development. 10 years of no new Fallout titles, actually new or remastered, while being pop culturally significant with a TV show out is just terrible product management,” another added.

The only tiny silver lining is that Fallout 5 is an absolute inevitability at this point, but given how long AAA development cycles are these days, it’s going to be a long old wait. Let’s hope Elder Scrolls at least gets an update this year, so we’ve got something new from Bethesda to look forward to in the meantime.