Everyone knows that Fallout games are designed to be played for a very long time. In the case of Fallout 76, the last major release in the post-apocalyptic series, there’s an infinite number of hours waiting to be explored. In a recent interview, the team at Bethesda Game Studios revealed that these concepts are being built into Fallout 5.
One of the lead developers working on Fallout’s next major iteration revealed that the goal is 600 hours, in an ideal world. It’s not the kind of game that can be played for just ’20 hours’, but players are going to be given enough meat on the irradiated bones to play for an extremely long time.
What We Expect from Fallout 5
Being honest, we expected nothing less from Fallout 5. With each new release in the series, Fallout has gotten increasingly expansive and ambitious. Fallout 76 (2018) is a live-service MMORPG that has never stopped evolving, so it stands to reason that Fallout 5 will be similarly impressive.
While we know very little about the game, Bethesda’s Todd Howard did recently confirm that it’ll be tied in with the ongoing television show.
In a new interview with Game Informer, several members of the Bethesda Game Studios leadership team spoke about the future of the franchise. Emil Pagliarulo, one of the most notable developers on the team and the studio’s design director, dropped a tidbit about Fallout 5’s ideal duration:
I would be happy with a game that is as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love, you know, and to give them a story that they can get into and systems that they love and really just an experience that they play not for 20 hours and not for 100 hours, but an experience they can play for 200, 300, you know, 600 hours, because that’s the kind of games we make. That would be my hope going forward: Keep doing what we’ve done, and also to evolve.
For some, those are rookie numbers, as Fallout is the kind of series that can keep providing new experiences 1000+ hours into a run. With the implementation of mods, Creation Club content, expansions, and regular updates, Fallout games have been kept alive and kicking for decades, in some cases.
Fallout 5 doesn’t have any kind of a release window, but at this rate, and with the ambitions of the studio, we’d expect it to be 2030 before we even have a teaser trailer released.
Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord server what you expect from Fallout 5.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Escape from Tarkov has received a much-needed quality-of-life upgrade
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Haha wow crazy what will they do next? Make a decent game that isn’t some multiplayer money grab? Put out one of their main series of games within a decade? Haha wouldn’t that be crazy. But nah Tod is just going to talk for years
What I’d like to see in FO5:
– Set in NYC with Escape From NY themes and vibe.
– Very vertical map layout with multiple hostile factions who control different levels and areas. A major objective is to try to infiltrate and control these zones for resources and survival.
– The areas you liberate can get randomly attacked at certain locations and have to be defended. Throughout the game you recruit and assign NPCs to different roles for defense and to help you either plan future attacks on or make deals with the larger more powerful factions.
– New dangerous creatures that fit the environment like mutant rats, two headed pigeons, and giant sewer gators. No more death claws.
– Post apocalyptic vehicles. Borrow elements from MadMax, Pacific Drive, and more recent survival horror game.
I think it’s very possible. I mean I have that many hours in 4 and New Vegas individually already so as long as it’s not awful I probably will put at least 600 hours in it
Fallout new Vegas is a great story with some jank, that I don’t enjoy playing because I get locked out of avenues. Fallout three is a great jank with some story that I don’t enjoy playing because I can go down every avenue despite being a cannibal BOS enclave raider vampire mercenary with a heart of gold.
Fallout four is a the best of both world. Great jank, some jank, you can get locked out of quest lines while being the leader of the railroaded minute institute of steel.
I have over 600 hours in4, 1000 in nv 1000 in three, via ttw, (separate counters) and maybe 600 across 1,2,tactics, and brotherhood.
For every nit pick I can find in 3 and nv, at least I don’t get contradictory information presented by holotape logs, two quests, and two companions. How ghouls work, synth memory mimicry, how synths work, how super mutants are made, the fall of the castle. It’s almost like Emil isn’t beholden to twenty year old documents that dictate the lore of an IP he is a lead writer for.