Fallout New Vegas studio Obsidian Entertainment is reportedly working on a brand-new Fallout game. While the studio was working on a number of titles, including Avowed 2, the studio has reportedly been shifted towards the Fallout IP as a result of Xbox’s massive restructuring.
This restructuring has seen the loss of talent from DOOM developer Id Software, major cuts to Elder Scrolls Online team Zenimax Online Studios, losses from Obsidian itself, and even losses from The Elder Scrolls 6 developer Bethesda Game Studios.
At the time of writing, Obsidian Entertainment has not confirmed that it’s working on a new game in the Fallout series. However, a report from trusted games journalist Jason Schreier at Bloomberg claims the upcoming Fallout game will be led by Josh Sawyer, the lead behind Fallout New Vegas.
Interestingly, just days before Microsoft’s plan, Sawyer was asked about returning to the Fallout series. In an interview with The 41st Precinct, Sawyer was asked if they envision a future where Obsidian “has the opportunity make a sequel or a remake or be involved with Fallout ever again”.
“I don’t know,” Sawyer explained. “These are things that take place above my head, right? Like, I’m just a director. Like, I’m the studio design director, which is kind of an advisory position to the teams, and then I’m a game director.”
Sawyer told the interviewer that “there are titans above me who decide what happens with IPs and things like that”, adding “it’s not up to me”. Essentially, Sawyer posits that one day, Obsidian will find out that it’s working on a new Fallout game, which appears to be exactly what’s happened just days after this interview was released. “Well, it’s how it happened with New Vegas, so yeah, who knows?” the developer said.
In another recent interview, Sawyer discussed that exact story as Obsidian was pulled from an Aliens-themed RPG, since discovered as Aliens Crucible, to work on Fallout New Vegas, which was famously developed in just 18 months.
“I wasn’t a part of any of those early conversations,” Sawyer told The Examined Game just weeks ago. “I had been a lead designer on an Aliens project that went very badly. It was the owners that had been talking to Bethesda. I had no idea any of this stuff was going on.
“But back then, Fergus [Urquhart], the studio head of Obsidian, he came to me and said, ‘hey, we’re talking to Bethesda about making a Fallout game. I think it was called Fallout 3: New Vegas or Fallout 3: Sin City, but it was a proposal that I believe Chris Avellone had written, and I was completely unaware that they were doing this, really.”
It would appear that history is repeating itself with Obsidian Entertainment and Fallout. Just like how New Vegas rose from the flames of Sawyer’s cancelled Aliens project, the studio’s next Fallout game comes from the flames of Avowed 2 and potentially other scrapped titles we won’t hear about properly for years to come.
