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The studio is extremely busy, but once the current schedule clears up, then Urquhart said it will look at what it can do next. “At some point we’ll start looking into what those next games are going to be, and I would be surprised if Fallout is not on that list,”
Someone should steal the Fallout 5 one-pager pitch from BGS and slip it into Obsidian’s future project list. 
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Obsidian would probably make a spin-off of Fallout before Bethesda even starts with the concept for Fallout 5.
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If Obsidian do make another FO, it will be a spin off like Vegas, nobody is doing 5 but Todd
Not that it really matters, people just want another FO and people loved New Vegas
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Yeah, this is something Todd Howard has made very clear in interviews - he has no interest in passing off the mainline series of games to another team, Fallout 5 will come from BGS. A spin off from Obsidian though is totally possible, but I’d guess we’re waiting until Obsidian aren’t busy with Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. Actually I half wonder if they’ll wait till they have access to the Fallout 5 framework.
Would (kinda) defeat the purpose if they waited for Fallout 5. I would hope they could take what’s being done with Starfield and run with it.
It certainly wouldn’t help the present lack of Fallout in the lead up till 5, but equally IF Microsoft wants to expand Fallout into side games to make the franchise more active they’d need to be looking at the gap between 5 and 6 as well. While not the only way it could happen, I imagine the best scenario for an externally made Fallout game in the Creation Engine is to wait until there’s a more modern framework to go off. Let Bethesda upgrade the engine, set how they want the visual style for the sequel and build out the assets then use that to kickstart a new Obsidian game.
The framework (Starfield) and engine (Creative Engine 2.0) already there. If Obsidian makes a Fallout game they likely want to make their own game, not something closer to DLC for BGS’s game.
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Obsidian is a smaller studio than BGS and that’s before you even factor in that Obsidian is split across multiple teams, they aren’t necessarily in a position to just make a BGS scale game without having a Fallout framework in place in beforehand - like they did with New Vegas. It’s not just about having an engine in place that can handle it - it’s having all the functionality built out and upgraded for Fallout specifically and having access to the asset library and so on, especially considering Obsidian’s lack of familiarity with the engine which already wasn’t built with external teams in mind and when Bethesda games studios IS going to be doing all this work in the near future anyway.
I’m not saying it’s impossible or anything, I’m certainly not in a position to know the inner workings of these things - maybe they can totally just take the Fallout 4 framework and upgrade it for Creation Engine 2.0 to bring it up to modern standards, maybe they can rework the framework of Starfield and make a Fallout game - maybe they can cobble together some combination of the two. I’d LOVE to see a new Fallout game sooner rather than later, I just think it’s more likely for any Creation Engine Fallout spin offs that they’ll wait till they have Fallout 5 in place and aim to bridge the gap between 5 and 6 rather than having a more challenging production in the hope of getting it out what would end up not all that long before Fallout 5 anyway.
Has he really specifically said he is OK with spin offs? I do recall that after NV released he or Bethesda in general said from there on out they only would make Fallout games.
If I recall from recent interviews it’s been more of a case of not ruling out spin-offs but that they weren’t looking to make a new Fallout specific team or have anyone else work on Fallout 5 while they were busy with other games.
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I guess I don’t see what a “Fallout framework” entails. Starfield basically does everything that Fallout does and more, just in a different setting.
I suppose that the Settlement stuff might be a little different but who is to say an Obsidian Fallout game focuses less on that and more on story?
They’ve already said that CE2 was created not just for Starfield but for ES6 also
I don’t see why that wouldn’t extend to a new FO game also
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There’s definitely going to be a lot of crossover in gameplay functionality between Fallout and Starfield when they’re both open world shooters - but you’d still end up with some engine functionality that needs upgraded. Like I said, I’m not really in a position to know about these things so maybe I’m wrong on that count - but I do think the biggest thing is going to be more the asset library. The guns, the environmental toolkits, enemy models. Having all of that stuff in place is going to make a difference to the scale of production for a spin-off game. Bethesda Games Studios has 500+ employees currently working on Starfield who will soon be working on Elder Scrolls then Fallout. Obsidian has 125 people working on Avowed, last it was reported. It could end up being another couple years before Obsidian is even in a position to start a new Fallout game, by that time it’s not even going to be that long before the much larger BGS starts working on Fallout 5 and gets all this stuff in place for them anyway. It just seems to make more sense to let that much larger team do the work they’re gonna do anyway then let Obsidian re-utilise it.
ES6 probably won’t be out to 2027, that means we probably won’t see Fallout 5 until 2031. Obsidian could start a Fallout spinoff in 2024 and have it out by 2029.
If your concern is mostly assets, out sourcing can take care of that. There is also no reason to assume that a spin off is the same scope as a mainline game.
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This gives me hope we might actually see a Fallout game before 2035.
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I still believe that Bethesda Game Studios should have a separate studio and team for Fallout. There has to be people there that perhaps just want to work on Fallout and if there is, they should make a Fallout studio in my opinion.
I’d assume Xbox would be very in to this idea as it is an explicit example of the merging → collaboration → gamers getting a new fallout way sooner than they would have otherwise. Bethesda would be the decision maker though as Booty or whoever wouldn’t force anything.
2027? Jesus that would be depressing to be honest, but I can see it, four years after Starfield.
Again though, you’re talking a more complicated, more expensive production relying on a lot of outsourcing for the sake of getting a new Fallout game out maybe 2 years early when we’ll already have to wait 7 more years to reach that point. It’s certainly possible they’ll do just that, and it’d be nice to see, I just half think with both teams under the same roof they’d be more likely to wait an additional few years and use Fallout 5 as a framework and save a bunch of extra work and money on the production. If schedules lined up they could start during Fallout 5’s production and piggyback off that.
Fuck it’s depressing either way thinking about how far away any major Fallout is, I hope whatever happens they have some spin offs or remakes planned in the meantime.