Fallout 5 teased by Bethesda, but we're in for a wait

With the runaway success of Amazon Prime's shiny new Fallout TV series leading to a surge in interest around the video games, you might well imagine Microsoft and Bethesda would be hoping to capitalise by bringing us a new game sooner rather than later.

Alas, this is not the case. Fallout 4's recently released new-gen update has not gone down too well, the Fallout London mod has been indefinitely delayed, and Fallout 76 isn't ever going to give us a fully single-player experience in quite the right way,

The sad reality is that Fallout 5 is no more a priority now than it was before the Amazon series released. That's according to Bethesda boss Todd Howard, anyway.

"I’m going to avoid putting dates on anything," Howard said when asked by IGN if the success of Fallout had changed anything.

"I’ve learned that the hard way. So obviously, our focus as far as new development right now is Elder Scrolls VI, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not making plans for other things."

He continued: "We’re still doing a lot of work, obviously on Fallout 76, and we see the community, so many people, going into that game and kind of rediscovering it and just so happy with where that game is at. It really does, and I mean, this has one of the best communities in all of gaming.

"Surprisingly, it’s a very, very nice apocalypse, and we’re doing a lot of Starfield work as well. So we have some really good updates that are going to get announced soon for that game. So, a lot going on here."

While The Elder Scrolls VI may actually arrive sooner than we expected, it's still years off. That means Fallout 5 is even longer away, to the point I'd be amazed if we were playing it on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series consoles.

Of course, just because Fallout 5 isn't the focus doesn't mean Microsoft and Bethesda aren't making plans to get another studio to work on a Fallout game in the meantime. Obsidian is right there, after all.