A new report claims that Fallout 5 is now officially greenlit and is moving forward in it’s development phase, although much of the project is still currently unknown including the game’s developer. But if you’re a fan of the iconic Open World series of games from Bethesda, this is surely a welcome news for you as the next game in the series has now entered active development stages. It’s important to remember that the last Fallout title came out around a decade ago, not counting 2018’s Fallout 76 of course, which wasn’t a mainline entry in the series but an MMORPG that takes place in the same universe.
The confirmation comes from the latest episode of the Xbox Two Podcast where Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden spoke about the current direction of the series and it’s future at Bethesda Game Studios. He said that he doesn’t know which studio will be developing the new Fallout game but he believes it won’t likely be the core teams from Bethesda as they’re mostly busy on additional DLC for Starfield and of course Bethesda’s magnum opus, The Elder Scrolls 6, which would be a watershed moment in gaming when it finally comes out.
According to Corden, much of the new forward push for Fallout 5 actually comes as result of the cancellation of ZeniMax Online’s next MMO, codenamed Blackbird due to Microsoft’s recent widespread layoffs. As Corden says, MMO’s are highly expensive to build and they’ve to compete against behemoths such as World of Warcraft and even Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls Online, so Microsoft decided to outright cancel ZeniMax’s unannounced MMO and invest that budget into Fallout instead which is a highly established IP and would lead to a “surefire win.”
“From what I heard, it was a case of ‘Do we want to sink a ton of money into getting this [project Blackbird] to a point where it can compete with the established players in the market, or do we want to allocate that investment towards making Fallout 5?'” Corden said.
However, Corden also stated that he doesn’t have enough information on Fallout 5 to write a full story on the game, as of yet.
