Talking to Dualshockers for the 25th anniversary of Fallout, Feargus Urquhart, CEO and co-founder of Obsidian Entertainment, said that “if we ever got the opportunity to make another Fallout game, we’d make it. There’s not even a question of whether or not we would do it, it’s just ‘Will the opportunity arise?'”
Obsidian developed Fallout: New Vegas, considered by many fans to be the best Fallout game. When Microsoft acquired Bethesda, it raised the question of whether Obsidian might be let loose on Bethesda’s series again, to which the studio responded with a simple shrug emoji.
Since New Vegas, Obsidian has been responsible for RPGs like South Park: The Stick of Truth, the Pillars of Eternity series, and The Outer Worlds. The studio has plenty going on right now, having just released survival game Grounded, and medieval murder-mystery Pentiment is due on November 15. There’s also Avowed coming up, which is a first-person game sharing the Pillars of Eternity setting, and The Outer Worlds 2 is in development as well.
But after all that, when Obsidian looks at what games to make next, Fallout will probably be on the list. “At some point we’ll start looking into what those next games are going to be, and I would be surprised if Fallout is not on that list,” Urquhart told Dualshockers. “If we were to do Fallout, it has to tie in with what Bethesda is doing with Fallout and a lot of other things, but I would always personally say my hope is that before I ride off into the sunset, I’d love to make another Fallout game.”
Urquhart was director of Black Isle Studios, Interplay’s RPG division, when it created the Fallout series. He’s one of four designers credited with creating the SPECIAL system, and was lead designer and producer on Fallout 2. He left to found Obsidian in 2003, though as he told Dualshockers, “I hung around at Interplay for probably an extra year because I wanted to work on Fallout more. I love Fallout.”
Bethesda director Todd Howard has said Fallout 5 is coming after The Elder Scrolls 6, and The Elder Scrolls 6 is still in pre-production until after Starfield is released. Basically, we shouldn’t expect another Fallout game from Bethesda this decade, which leaves plenty of time for Obsidian to clear its slate and have another crack at it.
If you’ve got a hankering for post-apocalyptic roleplaying in the meantime, inXile, the studio founded by Fallout 1 and 2 director Brian Fargo, has made two RPGs in a similar vein to the originals with its Wasteland sequels. Wasteland 3 in particular is pretty great.