Bethesda has big ambitions for the next Fallout game. While Fallout 5 could honestly be a decade away at this point, considering how long it has taken us to get Starfield and the ever-absent The Elder Scrolls VI, the team working on the game still has big plans for its eventual release. There's hope from Bethesda's studio design director Emil Pagliarulo that the game could take 600 hours of our time if we want it to.
"I would be happy with a game that is as successful as the previous Fallout games that continues to give fans what they love, you know," Pagliarulo told Game Informer in a recent interview. "And to give them a story that they can get into and systems that they love and really just an experience that they play not for 20 hours and not for 100 hours, but an experience they can play for 200, 300, you know, 600 hours, because that's the kind of games we make."
Pagliarulo also said that he wants to see Bethesda evolve, and not get stuck in the past. "Like, in the Oblivion remaster that came out, people forget in the original Oblivion, you couldn't sprint. So, of course we're going to add that in the Oblivion remaster. Things like that. The industry moved on, and so, we want to move on with it," he said.
With that said, we hope that the old Bethesda charm is still there. It might not take 600 hours or even 100 to beat Fallout 4 or Skyrim's story, but fans and players would still sink that amount of hours or more into those games in the past. Fallout 5 therefore could easily be a game we play for 600 hours, so long as it's as inviting as previous Bethesda ventures.