Fallout 5 is far from over. As Todd Howard, director / executive producer / Vault Boy-esque mascot from Bethesda Game Studios says, Fallout 5 will follow The Elder Scrolls 6, which is still in pre-production. Maybe we’ll be able to play into the 2030s, with climate change.
Far from it, as soon as the new Bethesda RPG is mentioned, we’ll think about where it will be set. When The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced with a teaser of some of the mountains we were going to do, we immediately tried to figure out what it meant to be set in High Rock or Hammerfell or whatever. Of course, the first question that needs to be asked when we squint at the very distant prospects of Fallout 5 is: where to go next?
When Bethesda takes over the Fallout series, it sets the formula. Each person starts and then moves to a different slice of the USA with their own historical monuments to deface and local fauna to monsterize. It’s easy to imagine who next repeats the trick. Fallout New York maybe, where atomic pizza rats fight radcats over scraps in broken bodegas.
In the years of Interplay, Fallout was different. The first takes in southern California, and the second northern California, with some overlap at the bottom of the map (and a bit of Nevada sidling to the east). Revisiting the location means seeing how it has progressed over the 60 years between the stories of the two games. The village boy who was rescued from the raiders in the first Fallout is now the president of the republic with electricity and modern medicine. The war with the super mutants is over, and one of them is the city sheriff. For many ordinary people in Fallout 2, today is better than yesterday.
A recurring theme from the first Fallout is that the desert isn’t as bad as the Vault residents expected. The rad count was lower, and some of the settlements were happening OK. (Corrupt casino owners and loan sharks aside.) Vault 13 overseers preach isolationism, but the world only becomes a better place when people work together. The slow return of civilization in the New Republic of California Fallout 2 is built on that theme. Heck, he even rejected the idea of using bottle caps as currency and started printing his own money.
But in Fallout 3, we go back to the bottle cap and the blown building. In Washington DC’s Wasteland Capital, it’s like the bomb fell on a living memory — even though 36 more years have passed in the timeline. The same goes for the Massachusetts Commonwealth in Fallout 4, where we build a settlement from scratch ourselves. Even in the Mojave Wasteland of New Vegas, one civilized place is a holdover who survived a war in a forcefield rather than something new. Finally, Fallout 76 eliminates the possibility of reflecting progress by rolling the clock just 25 years after Big Oops.
To escape the tired walls-with-holes aesthetic and the Bones story that grew to define Fallout, we had to go back to New California: a setting with asphalt roads and a city bigger than a baseball stadium. No place that would serve the mission goal to restore power by restarting the old generator again. (Did anyone count the number of times it happened in the game? Did they have a Twitter account or something?)
After the New Vegas event (assuming a bad ending is not canon), NCR is probably in the Imperial phase, taking all the decades and dividing. Perfect for factions that can compete, with companies like Gun Runners and malcontents inspired by Followers of the Apocalypse having their own search line. Stories of corruption and organized crime instead of cleaning up raider camps.
The best part of Fallout 4 is when you solve a mystery with Nick Valentine. A setting with a busier city location than the quaint, half-empty streets of New Vegas would be perfect for that kind of story noir. Try Chinatown, a classic neo-noir set in California that’s all about the state’s water shortages and what they do-like the first Fallout.
If you really want raiders and monsters they will be on the border, but in NCR we can get Fallout games in fairly civilized places that are super mutants and ordinary citizen ghouls rather than outcasts and enemies — and a playable option for that. once. In a place where the mattress doesn’t look dirty and there are people who have long buried all the dead in the middle of doing fun things, they might finally play a Fallout game based on the theme of resilience and anti-isolationism instead. reset the clock for another survivalist fantasy.
And, as a last bonus, it doesn’t require a tortured explanation of why super mutants, deathclaws, and the Brotherhood of Steel have spread to other countries. We will be in the place of origin, where it all began.
