Xbox Badly Needs A ‘Fallout’ Game Before 2054’s ‘Fallout 5’

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Fallout is having a moment, thanks in part to an excellent new TV series on Amazon that some are calling the best live-action video game adaptation of all time. That has sparked a resurgence of interest in the last four games in the series, with Fallout 4, deeply discounted, rocketing up Steam’s most-played lists with 160,000 concurrents last night. A game that came out in 2015 and was doing 15% of that at best, before all this.

That has to have raised some eyebrows at Microsoft, where of course they were hoping that Fallout was going to be a success, and of course they know it’s a valuable IP for them, but can they really afford to wait for Bethesda to finally get around to making Fallout 5? Can they not make some other Fallout game set in that world with one of the dozen other talented developers they’ve scooped up, including the one that already made one of the most beloved installments in the series?

We’ve talked about the timeline before, but with 5+ years spent on Starfield and probably another 4-5 after that for Elder Scrolls VI to come out, even if Fallout 5 is reportedly Bethesda’s next game after that, we’re looking at 7-10 years, realistically, to have that in our hands. Until then, the main source of Fallout content is likely to continue to just be Fallout 76 updates, which sure, has grown into a good game, but released in 2018, it’s hardly a “new” installment, and Bethesda’s tech has never aged well.

The point is that Fallout is no longer under the sole discretion of Bethesda. While Microsoft may not go so far as to take away Fallout 5 itself and give it to someone else, having someone make a separate Fallout game before then seems wise, even if in the past, in the post-New Vegas era, Bethesda rejected the idea of giving up any control over the IP.

Microsoft of course now owns Obsidian, the studio that made Fallout: New Vegas which is usually ranked as the top 1-2 game in the franchise, depending on who you ask. It also has a heavy influence on the Amazon show, which is set to grow next season.

Obsidian is about to release Avowed this year, barring any delays. Not exactly their take on Elder Scrolls perhaps, but set in a fantasy universe. After that, the plan is reportedly to return to make Outer Worlds 2, the sequel to their own original sci-fi universe.

It may seem a bit “corporate” for Microsoft to demand they…not do that and make a Fallout game instead, as reportedly Microsoft mostly lets studios just work on what they want. But that can often backfire, as we saw with Arkane’s Redfall, and outside Microsoft, we saw Rocksteady want to make a Suicide Squad game instead of another single player superhero title, and that has been one of the biggest disasters in the industry (yes, Rocksteady, not Warner Bros, did actually pitch that).

At a certain point you have to exercise some measure of direct control over your IP, and keeping Fallout on a shelf until the middle of the next decade seems like an exceedingly poor idea, and they can’t keep hewing to Bethesda’s sprawling timelines indefinitely. I do think they may internally view Starfield as an iffy detour, given how it ultimately played out, and now that’s pushed both Elder Scrolls and Fallout out five years each.

It may not have to be Obsidian. They have many, many talented studios that could dip into the Fallout universe. This wouldn’t have to be some massive, FO5 scale game, but something set in that universe that isn’t a mobile title or DLC for a six year-old MMO. There has to be some way they can figure this out, and honestly, they should have been working on some solution for this already.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.