It could be four or five years before ES6 is shipped and Bethesda can shift focus to full production of Fallout 5, and then another five years. So, even expecting Bethesda to have a greater, more singular focus on Elder Scrolls 6 after Starfield’s 2023 release, modern games are taking longer to produce and require more resources to create. Now, they could pass the project on to another developer – Fallout: New Vegas is one of the best loved games in the series and was developed by fellow Xbox company Obsidian Entertainment – but they don’t want to do that. “I wish they came out faster, I really do, we’re trying as hard as we can, but we want them to be as best as they can be for everybody.” Even so, Howard acknowledged that games are taking Bethesda Game Studios longer to produce. “They do take a while,” he said. Work on Starfield started in late 2015, Howard has confirmed, but it’s never as simple as saying that it’s been in development for 7 years, given how production swells, grows and changes over time. Obviously there is significant overlap between games as they go from pre-production to full production, as games are supported with major expansions or require dramatic crash courses of bug fixes and improvements in Fallout 76’s, and as they are overhauled for VR ( Skyrim and Fallout 4). Since releasing Skyrim in 2011 (and 2016, and 20), Bethesda released Fallout 4 in late 2015, the multiplayer offshoot Fallout 76 in 2018, and has now had Starfield as the main focus for the last few years. The rate at which Bethesda has been able to produce games has lengthened significantly over the last generation. So, that’s nice to have such lofty aspirations, and maybe we’ll see the game released within our lifetimes. It makes explicit what people generally assumed would be the case for the studio, considering that Howard said in late 2021 that they have “a one-pager on Fallout 5, what we want to do.”
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