Bethesda has repeatedly referred to the imminent Fallout 76 as a spin-off game, but many fans still see it as a major shift that could turn the traditionally single-player Fallout franchise into a multiplayer series. And they have good reason to be concerned: it’s happened to Call of Duty: Black Ops IV and of course there’s the token campaign contribution to Star Wars: Battlefront II.
Despite there still being – what we consider to be – a strong market, many games are wrongly going about just tapping into the young, online gaming scene and ignoring all us single-player, campaign mode die hards.
So, possibly in an attempt to placate worried said gaming demographic, Studio Director and Bethesda Demigod Todd Howard recently reiterated that the company isn’t done with single player games. So, we can lower our plasma rifles…for the time being at least.
“It doesn’t mark the future,” Howard tells GameIndustry.biz. “Corporately we’ve done a mix; people forget sometimes. Elder Scrolls Online is one of the biggest online games in the world, we have Fallout Shelter which we keep updating, and Elder Scrolls: Legends.”
Remember this? It meant the time between games was a lot less
Concerns that Bethesda will stop producing single-player titles is something the company has been addressing ever since the official reveal of Fallout 76. At the same event, it also confirmed that Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield would both be single-player titles in an effort to set nervous fans at ease.
“Anyone who has ever said ‘this is the future and this part of gaming is dead’ has been proven wrong every single time,” Howard said. “We like to try it all. For a long time we wanted to try a multiplayer game and we had this idea. We shouldn’t be afraid. We should try it.”
All of this suggests that Fallout 5 will be single-player, and hopefully, it will have more of a storyline than Fallout 4. And considerably less focus on world-building. You may grab your plasma rifles again.
Added to which, it seems the days of Bethesda licensing the Fallout franchise out to any other gaming studio, you know like Obsidian, for instance, are evidently long gone. After the unexpected success of New Vegas, Bethesda wants Fallout all to itself.
Fallout 76 launches on November 14, 2018. Fallout 5 is still unconfirmed. Duh.
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