Obsidian Entertainment has only released one game in the Fallout series, although most fans would class it as the best in the series. Fallout New Vegas released in 2011 to mostly great reviews despite its technical issues, and fans have been craving a follow-up by the studio ever since.

While New Vegas devs have said it took around five years for fans to actually believe the game was the best entry in the series, the game has become the golden child of the Fallout franchise. In a recent interview, senior designer Chris Avellone explains that the studio assumed they would get the go-ahead to create a sequel with ideas for a New Orleans inspired game cooking up in the background.

Speaking to YouTuber TKs-Mantis, Avellone explained that Fallout New Vegas is written with the intention to canonise some of the events of the cancelled original Fallout 3: Van Buren. While not all of the events that would’ve taken place in that game were brought to fruition within the Obsidian spin-off, some events planned for the scrapped RPG made their way into the game.

“The way I’d say it is that there are certain things that were going to take place in Van Buren that do happen during the time of New Vegas,” he says. “So, for example, all of the Caravan Wars, that was going to be a big part of Van Buren… NCR in Van Buren was very much like it was in New Vegas in the sense it was trying to rebuild”.

Avellone explains that some of these ideas could have been expanded on in a sequel, which Obsidian thought it was going to do after the release of Fallout New Vegas, although it likely wouldn’t have taken players back to the Mojave. Avellone says “we still thought we’d be able to do New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be”, but that was not to be.

The senior designer explains that Obsidian were specifically told not to use San Francisco as a setting for any of their potential Fallout games which led others at the studio to dream up a future game set in New Orleans, Louisiana. “One of the designers, producers on one of our other projects suggested New Orleans as [a] location, and I was so stoked for that,” he says.

Avellone explains that there’s an “old comic franchise” called Grendel which was a major inspiration during the research period for Fallout New Vegas. “Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic,” he says. “And there was one that was written in New Orleans—it was called like Four Devils, One Hell—and it’s a fantastic story. But as soon as I read it, which [was] while I was doing Fallout research, ironically enough, I’m like: ‘Man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad.”

The veteran Fallout developer explains that “the vibe was so cool, the flavour was cool, and it’s still Fallout”, adding that “there’s a lot of potential there”. Unfortunately, with mainline Fallout games now coming every once-in-a-blue-moon with no sign of Fallout 5 anytime soon, we may never get to experience that region in a proper Fallout game.

Avellone explains that, as he understands it, Bethesda’s close collaboration with Amazon for the canonical Fallout TV show is designed to lay “all the groundwork for whatever, I guess, Fallout 5 is going to be”. The TV series has already made some major pushes on the series’ narrative including the destruction of Shady Sands, the decimation of the Mojave, the return of the ever-present Enclave, and the apparent destabilisation of the iconic Brotherhood of Steel across the United States.

Unfortunately, the only new Fallout video game content coming in the near future is “years” of additional updates to Fallout 76. While both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are reportedly on the remake conveyor belt for the near future, following the success of Oblivion Remastered, they will likely not be receiving any new content, which is a damn shame.