Fallout 5 Rumors: 5 True And 5 False

It's been years since Bethesda Softworks released the multi-award-winning post-apocalyptic action RPG Fallout 4, years since the sole survivor of Vault 111 ventured into the Commonwealth in search of answers, ammo, and a reason to build a better gun. Much to our chagrin, it will be longer still before we see another installment in this hallowed franchise of record-breaking role-playing games from director Todd Howard & company.

With more than 50 Game of the Year awards under its belt — and the titles of "top-played game on Steam" (that was not published by Valve) and "most viewed video game launch of 2015" — Fallout 4 is poised for major (nay, atomic) sequel potential. And just as war never changes, the video game rumor mill grinds on and on. As we wait for official news from the front, let's take a look at five Fallout 5 rumors that will most likely come to fruition — along with five speculations that are more suspicious than a face-changing synth sidekick.

It started with an innocuous reply to a tweet from Obsidian Entertainment Senior Designer Eric Fenstermaker and picked up momentum when Fraghero ran a far-reaching article with a suspicious headline: "Rumor: Fallout: New Vegas 2 details leaked and reveal planned." Fenstermaker's response to a curious fan was humble enough: "I'm always up for working on a Fallout. I think most of us generally are. Really fun property to work with." But twitter user @Skyook_Rider posted the response to Reddit and a rumor was born. Before you knew it, talk of Obsidian returning to the Fallout franchise to continue the work they'd done on New Vegas was all over the front page of the r/games subreddit.

While not a direct sequel to Bethesda's Fallout 3, the Obsidian-helmed Fallout: New Vegas hit the marketplace in October 2010 and was met with generally positive but mixed reviews, primarily due to the extensive amount of bugs plaguing the game at launch. Despite these early issues, the game was a financial success, with more than five million copies shipping during the first month of the game's release. No wonder hopes were high for a follow up. But Obsidian's Mikey Dowling would blast these hopes to smithereens with an email response to an inquiry by Kotaku's Jason Schreier: "We've said plenty of times that we'd love to work on a Fallout again if Bethesda wanted us to, we just aren't at this time ... Whenever a new Fallout comes around though, whoever is doing it, we all look forward to playing it!"

According to the now-defunct UK-based news outlet Gamer Problems, "Fallout 5 may not actually be based in the United States." Any further origin of this rumor is unclear, but it has certainly garnered our attention. Their December 2017 info dump introduced this speculation before cautiously asserting the surprising and (as they admit) "very unlikely" rumor that "there are many other interesting places where [Bethesda] could take the location of Fallout 5 to Russia, China, and North Korea even." And while the idea of crossing continental lines — or even the US border — sounds somewhat appealing, it's at odds with some core Fallout themes and aesthetics.

Ever since the sole survivor of Vault 13 ventured out into the Southern California wasteland looking for a new water supply, the narrative of this sci-fi series has taken place squarely in (or above) the United States. Remote locations like the ones featured in Fallout 3's Operation: Anchorage and Mothership Zeta add-ons push the limits of this maxim with their own extreme sandbox environments, but they manage to maintain it. Arguably, Fallout's portrayal of post-war Americana kitsch is part of its DNA; and Bethesda's additions to the franchise venture boldly (and consistently) into the realm of American satire as often as they keenly exploit the traditional narrative tropes of the action-adventure and science-fiction genres.

Could the protagonist of Fallout 5 be making a trip to the American South? A surreptitious trademark filing for "Fallout: New Orleans" from August 2016 certainly seemed to suggest so — for a short time, at least. The filing in question, registered with the European Intellectual Property Office (sans Owner Name or ID), tendered a "Figurative" type of trademark featuring the traditional Fallout logo paired with a "NEW ORLEANS" subtitle. Naturally, this prompted a flood of speculation from game outlets who sought to lend credence to rumors of a possible return to the series by Obsidian. And it may be worth noting that the logo for the Obsidian-helmed Fallout: New Vegas features a left-slanting frame, compared to the traditional right-slanting frame of all other Fallout releases from Bethesda and Interplay — presumably an informal delineation of the two creative teams. The suspicious trademark filing has since been scrubbed from the EUIPO's database, which supports the theory that a major Fallout release set in a New Orleans wasteland was never more than a pipe dream.

And from a content perspective, Bethesda's contributions to the Fallout universe typically exploit the contrast of an urban metropolis with the sprawling post-war wasteland. While there's no doubt that Vault-Tec facilities dot the greater landscape of a post-war United States in the diegesis of the series, the emphasis on a more rural setting could be seen as a departure from Bethesda's trend of metropolitan worldbuilding.

Hold onto your Sugar Bombs, as recent assertions suggest our next sole survivor could actually be a different species of man. Tech website News4c has speculated that the protagonist of Fallout 5 might be not be human after all, but could be one of the mutant races of the wasteland — such as a ghoul or super mutant – or even a synthetic humanoid (aka synth). In their March 2018 rundown, News4c supposes, "How cool would it be to have the option to play as a synth or as a mutant? Bethesda probably won't stray away from the classic recipe, but because of all the advanced tech in Fallout 4, like teleportation, they might be able to explain time skips to more civilization and the fast rebuilding of society." Unfortunately, this conjecture is relatively threadbare and no supporting evidence can be found regarding this radical departure from the franchise roots.

If there's one thing Bethesda Softworks games do well, it's their brutally honest and insightful portrayal of the human condition – what PC Gamer's Phil Savage calls a "cool, emergent intersection of player-driven decisions." Fallout's super mutants, ghouls, and synths are themselves reductive representations of mankind's baser instincts: to kill, to survive, to transcend. And although it's fun to imagine playing a character that's "more human than human" in the Fallout 5 sandbox, this is one rumor that we can't imagine coming true any time soon.

It's hard to say goodbye to yesterday, and a handful of Fallout fans are having the hardest time of all. According to some outlets, Fallout 2 designer, New Vegas writer, and industry favorite Chris Avellone is potentially working on a future installment of the series like Fallout 5. Well known for his cartoon musings, Avellone himself is partly responsible for this unlikely spark of hope: an image posted to Facebook of Vault Boy and Avellone's hallmark stick figure began to fuel intense speculation about the RPG titan's possible return to the Fallout franchise.

With renewed interest following the announcement of Fallout 76, a certain nostalgic sector of the community seems content with dipping back into the creative well of yesteryear. But this short-lived rumor was seemingly put to rest in May of 2018. In a candid response to a curious Twitter user, when asked about his potential involvement with Fallout 76, Avellone replied: "Alas, it is not to be. (I'm not working on 76, but am very interested in seeing more about it)." After the fan expressed hope of Avellone's future involvement in the Fallout series, the creator let the trail run cold. With so very little to hang our hopes on — not to mention Avellone's continued trolling of the ill-fated Van Buren project — we don't see this beloved creator of the Mojave Wasteland contributing to the development of Fallout 5 any time soon.