Fallout 5 Might Arrive Much Sooner Than We All Thought

It’s no big secret that the next major Fallout title, widely assumed to be ‘Fallout 5’, might be years away. It’s set to follow The Elder Scrolls 6, a game that is taking a very long time to emerge from Bethesda Game Studios, and post-apocalyptic gaming fans everywhere have long since resigned themselves to waiting an age for the next Fallout title to arrive.

However, thanks to a recent report, fresh hope has surfaced for Fallout fans. It has been suggested that XBOX might be about to invest more heavily in titles like Fallout, leaning on the almost 30-year-old franchise and accelerating development.

Which is good, because per the current timeline, we could still be five to eight years away from a new Fallout game.

Will Fallout 5 Be Exclusive to XBOX?

In recent days, XBOX has found itself in a tumultuous spot. The delivery of a stellar showcase during Summer Game Fest was a big win, and some ground was gained by buttering up fans in Los Angeles, but that was followed by a downturn as impending layoffs were announced, along with some radical operational changes.

We recently covered a report from The Information, which claimed that Microsoft could be considering ‘spinning off’ XBOX into a wholly owned subsidiary, much like some other brands that sit under Microsoft’s titanic umbrella.

This report also mentioned that Asha Sharma’s XBOX is intent on super-charging three core franchises, amongst others: Halo, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls. These are big-budget, heavy-hitting games that boast millions of fans apiece, but it has been a good while since any of them have produced much of note to gain traction.

It was noted that Sharma plans to ‘increase spending’ with certain studios to iterate faster on new games.

Presently, Fallout’s universe is centered around Fallout 76, a post-apocalyptic MMORPG that has been running for almost a decade. It’s a title that never stops expanding, and the live-service model has plans for many more years of operations, according to Bethesda, but fans are still hungry for that traditional single-player Fallout experience.

It has already been almost eleven years since the last single-player Fallout release in Fallout 4, and that gulf is stretching ever onwards the longer it takes for Bethesda Game Studios to produce a new Elder Scrolls game.

But if this new initiative from Asha Sharma, which reportedly has the backing of Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, pays off, then it could herald a faster turnaround for Bethesda on the next big Fallout game.

Are you hopeful that we’ll get Fallout 5 sooner than expected? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Modern Warfare 4 is getting campaign early access