In spite of the fact that there’s been no sign of a new Fallout game in quite some time, 2024 has been a huge year for the beloved post-apocalyptic franchise. Earlier this year, we got Amazon Prime’s excellent show based on the series, which proved to be an incredible success by every metric, and kicked off a sudden resurgence in demand for more Fallout content- and more recently, we did get more Fallout content, if with some caveats. Fallout London, an expansion-sized total conversion mod of Fallout 4 that had been in development for years, released in full for free late last month, and has also proven to be a huge success.
How successful exactly? GOG, the platform that it was released on, recently issued a press release in which it announced that Fallout London had become the fastest redeemed platform in the platform’s history, having been redeemed more than 500,000 times in its first 24 hours. Of course, Fallout London is an entirely free download, but that’s an impressive number nonetheless- especially for a fan-made conversion mod.
And as I touched on earlier, there’s been plenty of other evidence over the course of the last few months alone that has made it abundantly clear that there’s extreme demand for a new Fallout game, with the aforementioned Amazon show having sparked drastically boosted sales and engagement numbers for pretty much any game bearing the Fallout name that people could get their hands on. Fallout is obviously a huge franchise, so there’s never been any doubt that there’s never going to be any shortage of demand for a new entry- but if the last few months have made anything clear beyond a shadow of doubt, it’s that Bethesda has made fans wait for a Fallout game far, far longer than it should have.
It’s no secret that modern AAA development is eye-wateringly time consuming, while also requiring an equally heavy financial investment, so Bethesda Game Studios is by no means the only developer out there that has seen the frequency of its output being cut down drastically over the course of the last decade or so. But while it makes less than zero sense to blame studios for taking the necessary time to make massive, big budget games, one also can’t help but wonder whether, knowing what it obviously would have known about the heavy requirements of modern development, Bethesda could have done a better job of planning for the future of one of its biggest properties.
Under ordinary circumstances, if someone were to tell you that it’s been close to a decade since the last mainline release in a franchise, one of your very first assumptions would probably be that its last major release hadn’t been successful enough to warrant at least an immediate follow up (or even one in the distant future). But this if Fallout we’re talking about. The last time we got a mainline single player game in the series was all the way back in 2015 with Fallout 4, which, sure, may have proven divisive for a good portion of the fanbase- but at the end of the day, it will still a critically well received game, and an even bigger commercial success. And yet here we are, nearly a decade later, still waiting patiently for Fallout 5.
But wait, we hear you say- what about Fallout 76? And yes, that’s certainly a caveat that sort of explains (and even excuses, for many of its fans) the prolonged absence of the franchise’s mainline series. The multiplayer RPG launched in 2018, and though it’s technically not the flagship mainline entry that many have been desperately waiting for, it is a modern Fallout game that players can dive into if more of the series is what they want. And though things obviously did not start out great for the game, with time, Bethesda has consistently improved and added to Fallout 76, turning it into a legitimately fun experience. But let’s face it- it ain’t Fallout 5. Is it a decent alternative to whet our appetites while we wait for the main meal? In its current state, it absolutely is. But it’s not a replacement, not by a stretch.
What makes it worse is the fact that we have no damn idea how long we’ll be waiting for that main course, other than it’s going to be years and years and years. Bethesda Game Studios’ last major project, Starfield, is not even a year old yet, and for at least the foreseeable future, the developer is going to be focused on delivering post-launch content and support for the space-faring RPG. After that, next up for BGS is The Elder Scrolls 6, another long awaited sequel that fans have been waiting for for far longer than they ideally should have been, and presumably, its launch (however far away that is) will be followed by post-launch support over at least 2-3 years as well. And then we’re going to get Fallout 5- all of which is to say that it’s likely we won’t be getting the next mainline game in the series for maybe another decade, if not even more.
So what’s the solution to this very frustrating problem? Because a solution is obviously needed at this point. Yes, Microsoft and Bethesda are both benefiting massively from the increased sales that the entire Fallout franchise is enjoying in 2024, but by not having a new release to line up with this resurgence in popularity for the franchise, you could also argue that they’ve left money on the table. And with Fallout 5 not releasing anytime soon, maybe the people in charge of the franchise need to look at alternative options.
More than a few times, fans of the series have floated the idea of a Fallout spinoff being developed by a different studio, similar to what Obsidian Entertainment did with Fallout: New Vegas back in the day, while Bethesda could also always choose to fill the gaps in the series’ release schedule with remakes or remasters of older titles in the franchise. The latter in particular is something that leaks have suggested as well, with mentions of a remaster of Fallout 3 having been spotted in leaked Microsoft documents during the company’s FTC trial last year.
Frankly, any of those outcomes would be preferable to the situation we’re in right now, where our only hope for more, new Fallout content in the near (or even distant) future is either expansions for Fallout 76 or a group of fans coming together to release a total conversion mod. That’s not taking away anything from Fallout London, of course, which, as we mentioned in our review, is a full-featured experience with an engaging story, an excellent map that’s brimming with atmosphere, and genuinely well-realized quests and characters. In a world where Bethesda and Microsoft can’t seem to figure out how to reprioritize Fallout, Team FOLON’s expansion-sized mod has done a wonderful job of giving us a captivating taste of the series’ beloved post-apocalyptic offerings.
Which brings us back to where we started- Fallout London releasing and being as good as it is has made the absence of a new, official Fallout game more starkly apparent (not that that wasn’t already the case). We can only hope that its popularity will compel Microsoft and Bethesda to fast-track their efforts to find a way release Fallout content with greater frequency.
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