Bethesda Wants to Make Fallout 5 a Game for Hundreds of Hours

While the second season of the "Fallout" series attracts a new audience to the franchise, representatives from Bethesda shared their vision for the series' future in an interview with Game Informer. The studio still doesn't provide specific information about Fallout 5, but design director Emil Pagliarulo shared his vision for the next full-fledged installment of Fallout.

According to Pagliarulo, the new installment should retain everything fans love about the series: an engaging story, familiar systems, and a sense of freedom. However, the developer aims for a much larger scale. He would like Fallout 5 to be a project not for 20 or even 100 hours, but one that you can dive into for 200, 300, or even 600 hours—these are the kinds of titles, he says, that Bethesda creates.

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Impressive project length has long been a hallmark of the studio. Fallout 3, Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Starfield allow hundreds of hours of world exploration and side quests, often barely touching the main story. For many gamers, this sense of endless adventure is the main advantage of Bethesda games.

The team isn't planning to simply repeat past formulas. Pagliarulo wants the new Fallout to be a modern game.

For the future, my hope is simple: to continue doing what we're good at while also evolving. Evolve in the direction the industry and players have moved, rather than being stuck in the past. For example, in the remaster of Oblivion, many forget that you couldn't run in the original. Of course, we added this feature. Such things are important. The industry has moved forward, and we want to move with it.

Emil Pagliarulo

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Studio director Angela Browder added that every Bethesda game is a lesson. With Fallout 76, the studio learned how to do multiplayer and what happens if a release is met coldly. This experience taught the team to listen to gamers, strengthen their strengths, and handle challenges.

Starfield was another significant milestone—it's the studio's largest project, where developers literally "created space." While space won't appear in The Elder Scrolls VI, all the insights from Starfield will contribute to the next "Scrolls" installment.

Browder also emphasized that Bethesda has an experienced team with a long history, and the knowledge from each project isn't lost. The studio carefully reads player feedback and takes it into account even in the early stages of development. Sometimes ideas from comments or discussions resurface years later—gamers just don't always see this long chain. She disagrees with the notion that Bethesda ignores feedback: developers read everything, although due to the scale of Fallout and the franchise's popularity beyond games, it can sometimes be challenging.