More Fallout games planned, says Bethesda’s Todd Howard

If 2024 ended now, its biggest cultural contributions would be whether the phrase ‘genny lec’ is considered witty banter or not, texting Baby Reindeer quotes to each other, and Fallout. The travails of Lucy MacLean and the Ghoul awakened something in us all, reminding us how brilliant the games are on which the Prime show’s based. And that collection of games is going to get bigger, says Bethesda’s Todd Howard.

Speaking to Variety, he confirms the studio’s planning more Fallout games but reminds us that projects like this take a long time.

“The TV show, I feel like it took us 15 years from when I first started talking about it,” says Howard. “But it was five years since Jonah [Nolan] and I first talked.

“And games take a good five-ish years. So we’re in plans for future games in this series, and nothing to talk about right now, but we’re always planning.”

For context, Bethesda’s other juggernaut franchise The Elder Scrolls last saw a major release in 2011, and since then we’ve had nothing but the enigmatic rolling hills of that E3 2018 Elder Scrolls VI announcement trailer to satiate us. So if anything, five years is an optimistic time frame.

Until we do see a fresh take on the wasteland from Bethesda Game Studios though, there’s always the existing source material. An idea that’s occurred to millions of players already – Howard reports that daily active users are up by as much as 600 per cent across the Fallout series.

“Depending on the ‘Fallout’ game, you’re looking at a 4-6x increase in daily players, which is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of doing this.

“Having an event that brings that many people into games that you have and who have never played your games before, that’s a big thing. New players who have never played a game or never played one of our games. It’s a really, really unique moment.”

Fallout’s having its Drive to Survive moment, then. We can only hope the next game Howard’s team is planning doesn’t involve one character becoming unassailably OP and cruising through three years’ worth of fights unchallenged.