Todd Howard Won't 'Rush' Next Fallout Game and Wants 'to Get It Right' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 17 June 2024 / 1,524 Views
Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard in an interview with YouTubers MarMattyPalys says they won't be rushing out the next Fallout game as they want "to get it right."
"For other Fallout games in the future, obviously I can't talk about those right now," said Howard. "But I would say sort of rushing through them, or we need to get stuff out that is different than the work we're doing in [Fallout 76], you know.
"We don't feel like we need to rush any of that. Right now, the Fallout TV show fills a certain niche in terms of the franchise and story-telling. I totally get the desire for a new kind of mainline single-player game, but those things take time. I don't think it's bad for people to miss things, as well.
"We just want to get it right and make sure that everything we’re doing in a franchise, whether it's Elder Scrolls or Fallout or now Starfield, that those become meaningful moments for everybody who loves these franchises as much as we do."
Fallout 76, the online multiplayer action RPG, last month surpassed 20 million players. The game released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in November 2018.
The Fallout franchise has seen a boost in popularity and sales since the release of the Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime. The franchise recently had nearly five million players in a single day, including over one million players on Fallout 76.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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i enjoyed all the fallout games and excited for the next entry
Just get Obsidian to make a Fallout game after Avowed releases later this year. That will take alot of the pressure off of Bethesda and give them more time to nail TES 6 and Fallout 5.
Aren't they focusing on The Outer Worlds 2 concurrently? I mean, I guess Fallout could be started by the Avowed team, but it would be weird to have two teams working on very similar games at the same time.
They are, but it would take pretty much the full Obsidian studio to make a proper modern AAA Fallout game anyway, Avowed and Outer Worlds are more AA than AAA, and have about half the hours of content that a AAA Fallout game has, so they could each be made by about half the studio, but the full studio pretty much would be needed for a proper full sized Fallout game.
The Avowed team could get started on Fallout and then once Outer World 2 releases in probably late 2025 or 2026, the Outer Worlds 2 team could move over to Fallout as well. We'd probably be looking at something like:
2024- Avowed
2025/2026- Outer Worlds 2
2029/2030-Fallout
It's still a pretty long wait for a new Fallout game, but less of a wait than Bethesda's Fallout 5 will surely be. Development on Fallout 5 presumably won't begin until after TES 6 releases in probably 2028 or 2029, so we're probably looking at something more like 2033-2034 for Fallout 5 from Bethesda. So Obsidian should be able to get a Fallout game out 4-5 years faster than Bethesda can.
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How do we know yet that Avowed isn't comparable in size/length to what Bethesda pumps out? I don't recall a noticeable difference in quantity of content from The Outer Worlds and Fallout.
- This is assuming they even want to make a FO game, or that in that case, MS is willing to force a studio to make a game they don't want to. Maybe they do want to make it, but I suspect it's far more exciting to make your own IPs.
Obsidian revealed in an interview last summer that Avowed is closer in size and scope to The Outer Worlds than it is to Elder Scrolls/Fallout. The Outer Worlds has a completionist rating of 39 hours according to How Long To Beat, Fallout New Vegas has a completionist rating of 131 hours by comparison. If you look at main story on How Long to Beat, Outer Worlds was 13.5 hours, Fallout New Vegas 27 hours. You can also compare the dev team sizes, Outer Worlds was said to have a 70-80 person dev team, which is squarely in the AA zone, Fallout 4 from Bethesda 4 years earlier had 130 developers at Bethesda plus another 40 or so developers outsourced from a 3rd party studio, for 170 devs total, while the more recent Starfield from Bethesda was estimated to have 500 peak developers. AAA development takes alot of devs these days, the new generation really boosted the number of developers required for AAA development. Meanwhile Obsidian's 298 developers are currently split between Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed, so I do think it would take both teams combining to do Fallout justice.
As for your second point, Obsdian's head, Feargus Urquhart, did say in 2022 that they would love to make a new Fallout game, but were too busy to at the time due to Avowed, Pentiment, Grounded, and Outer Worlds 2. Since then Grounded released and just recently got it's final update, and Pentiment also released and is now finished. With Avowed nearly released now, and Outer Worlds 2 likely aiming for a 2025 release (it began development Summer 2019 before the first game had even released), they should in theory be available to start work on a new Fallout, if they are still interested like they were in 2022. Surely Xbox will be pushing for it at least, Xbox will surely want to capitalize on Fallout's new-found popularity from the Amazon show, and they can't do that if the next Fallout game takes so long to make that the Fallout show has ended it's run with like 5 seasons made, before Bethesda can release TES 6 and then Fallout 5.
Hiring some people who will test the game and fix glitches before release, and even after, would be nice (and about time) ...
I think we all know they aren't rushing.
By not rush does he mean 2030 not rush or 2035 not rush.
Playtest the whole gaddamn game before release sheesh
Bethesda and rush lol.
They will take their time, release an absolute carcrash of a game then 1-2 years later after tweaks and changes and overhauls it’ll turn into a gem.
So whatever their “non rush rush” is, tack on 1-2 years to play the classic game.
I dont believe that.... watch them rush this, and f*** it up.
Well, given that Bethesda, and Todd in particular, never really understood Fallout, I don't think they will ever get it right, no matter how much time they take - so why not just give it to Obsidian, since original creators of Fallout are there - if anything else, they could at least make something like Fallout Classic isometric CRPG.
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