Bethesda Just Dropped Big News on Fallout, Elder Scrolls 6, and Starfield All at Once

For years, getting Bethesda to say anything concrete about its games has felt like pulling teeth. Today the studio opened up all at once, with a sprawling note about the future of Fallout, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls, and there is genuinely a lot in here worth caring about.

Start with the headline that will get Fallout fans out of their chairs: Obsidian, the studio behind the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, is officially returning to the series with its own spin-off game!

That isn't the only Fallout news, either. Bethesda confirmed Fallout 5 is now in pre-production, and that full remakes of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are on the way, though nobody is putting dates on any of it yet.

Fallout is suddenly everywhere

There is more. Fallout 76 is getting a big new expansion called Raven Rock, a prequel to Fallout 3, so even the online game that stumbled at launch is getting real attention. And the Obsidian reunion matters more than a normal collaboration would, because fans have spent a decade treating Bethesda and Obsidian as rivals after New Vegas out-wrote Fallout 4 on choice and consequence. Studio director Todd Howard waved that mythology off, pointing to "a huge amount of mutual respect" behind the scenes and years of quietly wondering whether the two could find the right way to work together.

Starfield is not going anywhere

If you had heard whispers that Bethesda was quietly walking away from Starfield, the note says otherwise. Its 2023 space RPG is getting more content, including a Starborn DLC, plus more tools and features to expand what players can build through Creation Club. Bethesda flatly calls Starfield "an important part of our future." That is not the language of a studio abandoning a game.

Elder Scrolls 6 is the big one, and still a ways off

The Elder Scrolls 6 remains Bethesda's primary focus, and Howard says the team is "where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing every day." Encouraging words, with one catch: do not expect to play it any time soon. The long wait is tied to Creation Engine 3, the new technology Bethesda built specifically so it can develop several giant games at once and hand players better creation tools. The Elder Scrolls Online, meanwhile, keeps getting new seasons, and its maker ZeniMax Online is being folded more directly into Bethesda so the teams work closer together. For a sense of the patience being asked of fans: Skyrim has now sold more than 65 million copies, and people are still playing it 15 years later.

The part the good news is wrapped around

It is worth being honest about why this note exists. It arrived in the middle of Microsoft's brutal round of Xbox cuts, which landed especially hard on ZeniMax, Bethesda's side of the house. Asked about it, Howard looked visibly shaken, calling the loss of people he has worked with for decades "really personally very difficult." Sister studio id Software felt the need to put out its own "we are still here" statement. Read in that light, a lot of this note is Bethesda reassuring a nervous fanbase that the cuts did not gut it, wrapping four decades of history and nearly half a billion players around one message: its teams are being pulled closer together, not pulled apart.

So take the good news for what it is, because there is a real pile of it. Obsidian back on Fallout, remakes of two classics, a fifth mainline Fallout underway, Starfield still growing, and Elder Scrolls 6 further along than Bethesda has ever admitted. Just keep one hand on your wallet and the other on your patience. Bethesda is promising a lot of worlds. It's the timelines it still won't promise.