Obsidian is “unlikely” to develop the next Fallout game, as it will instead focus on its smaller RPGs such as The Outer Worlds and Avowed.
This was announced by Startmenu editor-in-chief Lex Luddy, who made the announcement on the Giant Bomb podcast yesterday. Here, Luddy confirms to podcast host Jeff Grubb that there have been “discussions” about getting Obsidian to work on another Fallout game. However, he says the studio declined because he now wants to “move away” from bigger projects.
I can say that debate [Грабб] raised a few years ago when Obsidian was contacted about Fallout: New Vegas 2 it was true. I also know that Bethesda isn’t the only one who said, “Hey, we don’t want anyone else making this game.” Some of it Obsidian said, “The scale was too big for us, which we gave up.”
Fallout is not currently in development […] It’s highly unlikely that Obsidian will be the people who make the next Fallout.
Publicly, Obsidian has occasionally expressed interest in returning to the series one day. In 2023, studio head Feregus Urquhart said he would “love to do another Fallout” before retiring, but confirmed there were no plans at the time. He also said that the team was “very busy with Avowed, Grounded and Outer Worlds 2” and that things haven’t changed since then.
However, it’s no secret that the community would love another Fallout game developed by Obsidian. Fallout: New Vegas is often cited as a fan favorite game, and as we can see, it still has a healthy player base after the release of the TV series. So much so that there were queues of people who wanted to play New Vegas on the PlayStation 5, as the game can only be accessed through cloud games. We are also seeing a huge increase in mod downloads for New Vegas as players continue to create new additions for the nearly 14 year old game.
But even if Obsidian doesn’t take the reins for the next Fallout game, it’s likely that someone else will. Xbox is reportedly looking for ways to release a new Fallout game “early,” which goes against Bethesda’s plan to delay Fallout 5 until after The Elder Scrolls 6. Todd Howard also said that there are “discussions” about bringing in another team to work on the series, so it looks like Bethesda understands that there needs to be another Fallout game before Fallout 5.
