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So What's Next for the Fallout Franchise ? FO5, New Vegas sequel or remasters/remakes ?
- Thread starter FarSight XR-20
- Start date
Sure. I just tried to play it after a few months and it wouldn't actually load until I downloaded a GFWL SDK file to the game's folder. It needs to be cleansed of that shit completely.
Hasn't a Fallout 3 remake been hinted at forever? That's my guess. Or maybe a F3/NV remaster collection or something.
Fallout 5 isn't coming out until after Starfield and Elder Scrolls probably - so 2030.
I think 76 was supposed to be their big in-between time consumer, but...yeah.
Fallout 5 isn't coming out until after Starfield and Elder Scrolls probably - so 2030.
I think 76 was supposed to be their big in-between time consumer, but...yeah.
That is why something will give IMO.
No way Microsoft spends $7.5 billion and agrees to just sit on the franchise if Bethesda tells them, under their schedule, the next entry in their second-biggest IP won't be ready for another decade, likely missing this gen entirely.
Maybe in the near term, they commission a team for a remake or pump some more resources into the FO76 team for a next-gen upgrade, but I would be shocked if we don't see a Fallout 5 teaser for XSX year 2 or 3 after the decks have been shuffled, and new resources pumped in, to make sure they can get a proper original Fallout to market in the next 3-5 years after the sale is finalized.
If you ever seen drips in the Blackwall Tunnel or the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, you'd know our Vaults would be leaky as hell.
I would guess it's already begun, and that they're reviewing all the concepts/pitches that Bethesda already has on file and figuring out the direction they're going to go. I feel like these types of games need a ton of lead time from a world-building perspective, and that you have to get moving early on that.
I'm guessing MS will target 2025 for the next installment.
That and the radiation seeping through would make us Mer-Folk.
London Underground is now just a giant sewer we can swim through with our gills.
Nothing for a long while, all the studios are probably at capacity unless there is a team somewhere that is free. Maybe a remaster squeezed in somewhere.
I'd love more Obsidian Fallout, but don't think it really needs to be New Vegas 2. Let them do something in a similar vein, since Fallout 5 could quite comfortably be 10 years away.
what i want: Fallout New Vegas 2
what it will be: Fallout 3/NV remake.
i wouldn't mind a 3/NV remake but i'd just rather a new game. i don't think we're getting Fallout 5 for a LONG time. like years after whenever we get a new Elder Scrolls which is coming after Starfield which we haven't heard much about.
Bethesda aren't doing a new Fallout any time soon. Microsoft would be quicker to let Obsidian work on Avowed and then start New Vegas 2. By that time we probably still won't have Elder Scrolls lol.
what it will be: Fallout 3/NV remake.
i wouldn't mind a 3/NV remake but i'd just rather a new game. i don't think we're getting Fallout 5 for a LONG time. like years after whenever we get a new Elder Scrolls which is coming after Starfield which we haven't heard much about.
Bethesda aren't doing a new Fallout any time soon. Microsoft would be quicker to let Obsidian work on Avowed and then start New Vegas 2. By that time we probably still won't have Elder Scrolls lol.
They are never remaking or remastering these games guys, they are held together by duct tape. Bethesda puts their games out where they can. If they though NV and 3 were remotely viable to port, they would have half a decade ago.
acquistions work in different ways but i don't see MS "commissioning" BGS to do anything.
maybe if starfield and/or ES6 get delayed into infinitum or one of them bombs
Fallout 3 wouldn't be surprising. It was a very successful title and it's now old enough. It remains my favorite 360 game.
Yep. Fully expecting Bethesda Game Studios to become a two team studio capable of developing both Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles simultaneously; maybe if Starfield's an enormous success they'll have the 2 teams on a 3 game rotation.
Whilst I highly doubt they'll milk either franchise into the ground, there's absolutely no way they let enormous money-makers like Fallout and Elder Scrolls rest for >5 years/entire generations at a time.
If not expanding Bethesda Game Studios, you can bet they've mulled over handballing one or both of these franchises off to Inexile or Obsidian, both of whom are ridiculously logical fits for a Fallout and a new Fallout/Elder Scrolls, respectively. One Fallout game is worth more than Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, and whatever Inexile is working on combined, and one Elder Scrolls is worth even more than that. You can bet MS is already counting their beans and working out how to get a new Fallout out by 2025. And for that reason I suspect it'll be a NV/3 remake first, with a Fallout 5 to follow.
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yes, this. there's skyrim SE but it started as a test to get Fallout 4 running on current gen. so that was just laying around essentially
i wouldn't write off a Fallout 4 remaster but i doubt that's what anybody here particularly wants
A fallout more in the style of FO1/FO2 spearheaded by either inXile or Obsidian but with the bulk of the work handled by an external studio like Splash Damage would be a fairly decent way to keep the torch lit without occupying a full MS studio. Make it smaller scale, even.
Is it likely Bethesda's acquisition will result in serious changes to the engine? I found the jankiness of FO4 and FO76 hard to deal with. Now they can share tech with other MS studios, I wonder if they will?
gamebryo/creation/whatever is quite proprietary. i dunno if outside talent would necessarily "fix" it but maybe
I'm going to guess Microsoft will want to nudge them towards a New Vegas sequel. It's easily their most popular and would sell an ungodly amount of units.
I don't think we're getting a new Fallout for a long, long time. Fallout 76 will be expanded upon, but outside of that, there's not a good fit.
Fallout 5 is the only answer. Obsidian is locked into a ton of projects right now, with Avowed, Josh Sawyer's new smaller RPG, the second Outer Worlds expansion, and Grounded in full development and Outer Worlds 2 starting pre-production. They're not going to be free for some time.
If Fallout 4 was in a better place technically, I could see them farming out a new spin-off game to a second-party studio, like they did with Obsidian so many years ago, but that also seems incredibly unlikely. Any game built on the Fallout 4 engine, even with the changes they made for Fallout 76, would feel incredibly dated, especially with it looking more and more like Starfield is coming next year with a ton of engine improvements.
I also can't see remasters making sense for anyone. Xbox puts a ton of time and resources into backwards comparability for a reason and remastering games that are ultimately not that old seems like a fool's errand to some degree.
Fallout 5 is the only answer. Obsidian is locked into a ton of projects right now, with Avowed, Josh Sawyer's new smaller RPG, the second Outer Worlds expansion, and Grounded in full development and Outer Worlds 2 starting pre-production. They're not going to be free for some time.
If Fallout 4 was in a better place technically, I could see them farming out a new spin-off game to a second-party studio, like they did with Obsidian so many years ago, but that also seems incredibly unlikely. Any game built on the Fallout 4 engine, even with the changes they made for Fallout 76, would feel incredibly dated, especially with it looking more and more like Starfield is coming next year with a ton of engine improvements.
I also can't see remasters making sense for anyone. Xbox puts a ton of time and resources into backwards comparability for a reason and remastering games that are ultimately not that old seems like a fool's errand to some degree.
I hope something can be done. Apart from some graphical polish, it feels like it hasn't changed in a decade. Even with their wealth of content, Bethesda games don't feel AAA to me.
Obsidian only has Grounded(which is already in EA) and Avowed upcoming while Bethesda Softworks has Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 to be released which will probably takes longer
Really depends on what sort of mechanical framework FO:NV sequel should be built on - Fallout 4, Starfield or the hypothetical Fallout 5?
A remaster of New Vegas (and 3) would be an awesome stop gap for Fallout. Assuming it is the same quality as Skyrim's was. I'm going through New Vegas again now, and even with max settings and a few graphical mods it's still rough to look at.
You know what makes less sense though?
Letting your second biggest IP from a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition rot on the sidelines for an entire generation because one of your other studios, fully capable of working on this franchise, had plans to develop, IDK, Outer Worlds 2.
Something somewhere is going to give, it might not be that, but something will. Mark my words.
You don't spend 7.5 billion on an acquisition like this because you plan on letting it's 2 most prized properties continue on a cycle of only releasing new mainline entries of a given series once every two generations. Or allow yourself to become a prisoner of the sunk cost fallacy because you invested some initial resources into a development path for a much less lucrative property before this deal was made.
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There was this 20 months ago:
It turned out to be nothing iirc. Don't know what happened.
Xbox isn't going to just dump a promising new franchise, which its creators seem really thrilled about, overnight to chase sales for an IP that has been serviced pretty extensively over the last decade.
An IP taking a break doesn't mean it's rotting, it means that they're giving the medium time to grow around it. Xbox has caught extensive criticism for bleeding their IPs dry for the last ten years and turning around and pumping out a Fallout game with a team that isn't thrilled about it while that franchise still has a live service game being supported is the height of stupidity. Xbox has a LOT of IPs to service now. Franchises are going to have to take breaks and that's fine and healthy for the industry.
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There is this interesting article about the potential of a Fallout: New Orleans
Why Fallout: New Orleans is the Perfect Sequel to New Vegas
With a Fallout: New Vegas 2 now more likely than ever, there's a strong argument for the franchise to head down to NOLA instead of returning to Vegas.
gamerant.com
I would prefer Los Angeles/ The Boneyard though (initial plans for New Vegas 2 it seems), especially for lore reasons.
The National Headquarters of Vault-Tec Corp. are located in Los Angeles and I would love to see a Vault Tec faction in a game in addition of the NCR and other factions. I want to see what happened to them. All of the other Vault Tec regional headquarters only have ruins and corpses and we don't know much about Vault-Tec post-war actually.
I know that the Master took control of the demonstration Vault in LA and that some Vault-Tec VIPs moved to the Poseidon Oil Rig with the Enclave but maybe there was a fully functionnal secret vault beneath the national HQ for all of the people still working there (in fact, I think there 100% is a bunker for the Vault-Tec personnel and other higher-ups, it wouldn't make sense otherwise. Vault-Tec must had contigency plans for their national HQ).
Especially since the Secret Vault in Texas for Vault-Tec high-ranking personnel is non-canon.
Todd said that Starfield will marks Bethesda's "Largest Engine Overhaul Since Oblivion". Don't know what are the consequences for future Fallout games though (FO4 and FO76 use a modified version of the Creation engine iirc).
A remaster with the same Gamebryo's poor graphics and jankiness wouldn't make sense, especially with backward-compatibility.
But I think that a remaster/remake with:
- next-gen graphics (the last version of the Creation engine, FO4/FO76's graphics or Starfield's graphics)
- Fallout 4's gunplay
- QOL improvements
- the cut content restored
could make a lot of sense though, especially for New Vegas with all these dropped ideas and cut content (as Obsidian didn't have enough time and power to make the Fallout they envisionned).
I don't know if this is possible though and if it could be outsourced. A lot would need to be reworked.
Correct, and the IP's that will get put on the back burner are not going to be the Fallout's of the family, it's going to be the Outer Worlds 2 or lesser projects.
Xbox will absolutely dump a promising new franchise if it is the only option to get out a game in a franchise that has an order of magnitude greater earnings potential and draw for their service, which is the core focus of their business strategy.
Shifting around resources to focus on one of your strongest IP's isn't milking the franchise, it's common sense business strategy. And that strategy is absolutely going to shift to incorporate and exploit this new, monumental acquisition.
It might not be Outer Worlds 2 that gets the chop or the delay, but there is zero percent chance Microsoft just says we can ignore Fallout until Bethesda gets around to it after ES6. Which as currently slated, won't be scheduled to release until sometime next, next gen.
Sunk cost fallacy is not just about dollars, but also team morale. They should be very careful about going in and cancelling what Obsidian is working on, so they can become a Fallout factory. Imagine being excited about your new project, pouring your heart and soul into it, after being told by Microsoft pre-aquisition how they just wanted to support them and help them create the projects, they were dreaming about. Then out of the blue Bethesda is bought and you're told to throw your current project into the trash, because Fallout is a more valuable franchise. How demoralizing would that be to the teams?
Yes, it's about money in the end, but there will better opportunities to do Fallout, than to pivot teams from what they're already working on.
I mean, isn't that likely why Bethesda went the Fallout 76 route? They knew they wouldn't get back to Fallout for a decade or so, so they created a Fallout platform so they could continue to provide that franchise with content despite the long drought they're about to see on mainstream titles.
The other possibility I could see is Xbox just expanding BGS and having them work on multiple main-line games at a time. I would imagine handing Fallout 76 to BGS Austin was a way of developing that studio and giving new talent chances in leadership roles to potentially expand their role in the future. Time will tell.
Outer Worlds 2 is simply an example of how the shift could happen. A game that is simply in pre-production, not even ramped up yet. Teams haven't been defined and no major work has been committed to. And given the announcement excitement, it's clear many at Obsidian are not against returning to this franchise.
But it could come in the form of a new team, a different division coming off a production, or any number of things. But the idea that Microsoft bought Bethesda and has no plans to change anything around is lying to themselves. If you just wanted exclusivity that's what money hats are for, you buy a company like this because you have a vision for what you can do with it's franchises and production to help you earn more money long term. That doesn't mean you have to become overbearing, but a purchase like this changes things, and that was the point of the purchase in the first place.
I doubt MS is going to sit on Fallout for a decade, but I don't think they are going to make another team do it if that is not what said team wants to do. They seemed to have learned that lesson previously from forcing teams to work on their other studios more valuable IPs. The simple solution then is to just spin-up a new Fallout team. I doubt there is a lack of talent who would love to get a crack at a new Fallout game.
Expansion certainly makes a ton of sense as well. That's why I said something has to give, not necessarily any one thing in particular. Maybe it's not Outer Worlds 2, maybe it's just a new team. It's honestly what I said I would prefer earlier in this thread. Keep all the content coming as is but allow people passionate about Fallout to be a part of a new studio/team that will focus on Fallout 5 for a TBD XSX gen release date. That to me is how you would foster the ideal scenario. The dream would be marrying some of the Inexile, Obsidian, and Bethesda Fallout vets that still feel passion and see what they could do to elevate the series.
Fallout 76 makes perfect sense in the way you frame it in a pre, and frankly, post acquisition world. I just don't see a world where in the post acquisition Microsoft just says, yeah, we're good, we can wait til 2025 until Bethesda has the time to do work on this. They're gonna want at least one new mainline Fallout this coming gen I would bet. And my guess is they are not going to be ok with the Bethesda model going forward, where you simply cycle through your tent pole mainline entries, resulting in a return to each only once every decade. So the question immediately arises about how you can supplement or improve that production cycle process. Because on top of Fallout, they are probably wanting to figure out how to ensure ES7 will come out before 2035 lol. Which is essentially where you would expect the current Bethesda cycle to position that game, seeing as ES6 will likely be 2024-5. Then you would have Fallout and Starfield 2 up next.
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Of course Microsoft could/should pursue an opportunity like that, but there's a big difference between something happening organically and the approach mentioned previously. If anything they should learn from someone like Bethesda. Fallout 4 shipped 12 million on day one, while Skyrim sold 30+ (or is it 40 now?) million. There are very few single player only titles that can do similar numbers in the industry.
Bethesda is super successful, so why are they even doing Fallout in the first place? Why not just do more Elder Scrolls? And why are they doing Starfield, when Elder Scrolls is a much bigger franchise? They should clearly be an Elder Scrolls only factory, working on that until the end of time, so why aren't they?
This is what they should be trying to make sense of, not turning Obsidian into The Vault, doing Fallout to fill out gaps in the release schedule.
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Frankly, you frame it as you do, but Microsoft probably sees that lag in releases as missed opportunity as well.
You are more supplementing why it is almost certain that something is going to give or change so that Microsoft can get out more mainline ES and Fallout games besides once every 8-14 years respectively.
Doing so doesn't mean you have to gut a team or company and turn them into a Ubisoft annual release factory, but it almost certainly is going to involve some new team investments, restructuring of the current projects, resources, and/or focus shifts within their umbrella to incorporate and better utilize the IP's the acquisition they just spent 7.5 billion afforded them. Otherwise, if you don't have some vision for how to better utilize these products, you should have just moneyhatted them for some exclusivity for a fraction of the cost.
Now how that almost assured new visions happens I don't know, I've only offered random speculation of where I could see that pivot happening and how I would prefer to see it. I am not going to pretend I know how best to achieve that though.
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It's really hard to get excited at the concept of another Bethesda Fallout lmao. The writing in FO3/4 is just so bad
There's not an immediate good fit. Everyone is busy working on their own stuff. But also, Microsoft has reunited all the studios that had a hand in Fallout. They should take some people who wanna work in Fallout from Bethesda, Obsidian and inXile, and build a new studio around those people. Or, I don't know, grow one of Bethesda's satellite studio so they can handle a Fallout game on their own.
Which can be fine as long as it's handled with care. Outright cancelling what Obsidian is doing, would be a mistake IMO, but there are many other ways to go about doing this. That said, I still think they should consider why Bethesda is doing Starfield, instead of endless Elder Scrolls releases..
