I am continuously surprised at the subglacial speed at which Bethesda moves, even as someone who mainly likes Fallout (but not 76, I want a real Fallout game). I can't help but feel like they are kinda wasting the IPs at times
im on a discord server with one of the developers of fallout 4 and following games, and can probably answer this question pretty accurately: nothing. its just and empty hangar with a single guy in an office chair, spinning while funky town plays over the intercom system.
At this point, with how the show is traveling west and east easily, it would be amazing if instead of just one main world, there are a few different main cities that you can travel to. Would be pretty crazy but at the same time I’d be afraid of the areas being even more bland if they had to stretch their time making a bunch of different ones.
Bethesda leaves small ques in games to hint at locations for the next game.
Fallout 3 hinted at the commonwealth. Fallout 4 shows golden gate bridge in Kellogg's memories.
Plus obsidian wanted to include a lore point that eluded to san Francisco being nuked but Bethesda rejected it as they had "plans for that area"
All but confirms it for me. Mark this comment, we will be going to san Francisco in Fallout 5
Now instead of just sitting at a console or PC and playing on a monitor, you get full value for your money outside. Start saving those caps now already.
SF’s real life geography lends itself really well to an open world game setting too.
The city itself being squeezed onto a relatively small peninsula gives you natural boundaries without having to use You cannot go this way messages, while still fitting in large parks that can have sprawled into dangerous forests and there’s plenty of literally mountainous terrain.
You could also just cut the whole place off from the mainland (from the airport to Pacifica) and attribute it to a massive ‘Big One’ earthquake happening sometime in the centuries since the bombs dropped.
The entire city is smaller than Walt Disney World. Bethesda can fit the entire city on the map without compressing it and still have map space left over for other towns and rural areas
Horizon Forbidden West took place around Las Vegas and San Francisco and exploring San Fran was actually really cool. I would often stumble across things like a ruined stadium, then find myself pulling up real maps on Google to find out what it was and how accurately placed they were. For the most part, they got things fairly accurate!
Of course, HFW takes place like 1,000 years into the future, so it's a post-post Apocalyptic world, meaning it was almost unrecognizable due to nature reclaiming most of the city, and extensive flooding due to global warming meaning large parts the city were underwater and I think it had essentially become an island at that point too, but you could still find remnants of the old world like stadiums and the airport, and you could explore under water too so you'd find SF landmarks down there too. It was pretty cool.
Horizon is a neat post apocalyptic world for me since it’s almost as extreme as you can get since literally all organic life on Earth was wiped out and it was left completely sterile until revived by Gaia and Zero Dawn
"I have no idea where i am WAIT A MINUTE THE INSTITUTE IS UNDER THAT BUILDING"
Then im playing yesterday, and I get a mission to enter the library through the coply station entrance me and my buddy accidentally walked in (we wanted to go the other way)
Yeah, SF does make kind of a perfect open-world game map with a ton of strong landmarks, compact but diverse geography, and distinct neighborhood aesthetics that create excellent game locations with sense of place. I feel like Bethesda would mess it up though. I hope they do New Orleans instead
I always appreciate people pointing this out. A good use of queues would be “the queue to buy Fallout 5 will start forming when it is released in 2093.”
I think you may be onto something, but I would hate to see fallout go back to San Fran. It's a location we've already seen and I can't imagine it going any better than all the people up in arms about the show "ruining Vegas" right now.
Go somewhere new please for the love of god. I've seen great concepts for a Great Lakes, Tennessee, or Florida game. I'd love to see Canada too, Toronto is a great shout.
I would prefer New Orleans. I think the aesthetic is distinct and great for a Fallout game but also not too much that Bethesda would fuck it up (like I feel they would SF or NYC)
Lots to do around the central theme of (access to) water that’s underpinned the series.
With New Orleans it gives an opportunity to flip things around and have the primary focus be removing water from the landscape to try to make it habitable again. Give the player some agency around building dams & levees to protect/uncover settlement areas, and leave others to rot in the radioactive swamp-flood.
With how things are rolling surrounding california and the west coast with the show I would be amazed if fallout 5 isn't set California, but as an Illinois resident I would be pleasantly shocked to see it set in Chicago
I just wonder what kind of cult is living around The Bean.
Cali/Nevada has been fleshed out extensively. East Coast has a good bit of lore there too.
What's been mentioned of Chicago already makes it exciting. Nick Valentine Pre-War was stationed there. The Enclave has an outpost there. A rogue Brotherhood chapter is there.
You got plenty of famous irl places to draw from, Lake Michigan and plenty of DLC opportunities for neighboring areas.
Heck, the idea of going to St. Louis for a DLC, or up north into Michigan/Canada is pretty sweet.
They did chicago, and imo it was the best, fallout tactics is the midwest technically, not officially chicago as a city if thats what your referencing. But that game was an amazing actual progression of the game that just goes unnoticed since it was made after the compsny split originally
I feel like NYC and Chicago could be too aesthetically similar as settings to Fallout 3 and 4 and they wouldn’t nail the dense, high-rise city thing well enough.
I honestly want them to pick a city with a clear, distinct aesthetic but manageable scope - New Orleans stands out
I’ve got this craaazy idea that they’ll do alternate settings with the show and games. Games are currently east coast so show is west coast. Then they’ll switch. In twenty years when they announce fallout 5.
As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think chicago is geographically diverse enough to make for an interesting setting. Steady elevation, mostly urban, straight coastline with no islands.
The one I think could be absolutely AMAZING would be Seattle/Vancouver/Puget Sound with areas of the Alaskan Front tied in.
San Fran Would be interesting to see. Was a location in Fallout 2 you had to go to to get a freighter ship to the Enclave Oil Rig. Would be cool to go to the docks and maybe even see some ruins off in the distance in the ocean. Although tbf that was a massive explosion so there might not be anything left.
FO4 was a 2015 release. It's 2026 and games like Dying Light 2 and more exist with far more interiors. I get this is Bethesda, but FO4 doesn't justify that claim.
It feels like Starfield was all about updating their engine and pushing its limits with vehicles, procedural generation, etc. and almost no effort went into designing quests and locations.
Having ‘urban sprawl’ on the level of even the Boston Common would have been twice the effort in location design as they put into the whole game. The UAC city is the size of my thumb and is one of what, 3 or 4 ‘cities’ in the game? They reused the main quest location 24x10 times with the temples, and for all their procedural generated worlds, they only made like 10 possible ‘camps’ that generate in them.
And even if they did design a big ole urban sprawl, they were never going to design a bunch of interesting quests to fill it out and make it worth exploring. I don’t get how they shipped a game that’s so fucking empty after playing all their previous titles
I won't argue there, but it's also a proprietary engine built and designed for their needs. It's what makes Bethesda games feel like Bethesda games.
Personally, I wouldn't want them to switch to ditch the Creation Engine. You'd be kissing the modding scene goodbye, and you'd have an even longer wait for the next game while they overhauled a new engine and retrained their devs.
The idea that the Creation Engine needs to be replaced is a bit of a fallacy. When you have a piece of software that works, you build it out and modernize it, you don't replace it. When software is totally thrown out and rewritten, you inevitably end up throwing out solutions to problems current developers have forgotten even exist, with missing features, new and unforeseen bugs or issues, and an extremely high development cost.
For example, Unreal Engine 5 has a lineage that traces directly back to 1995's Unreal Engine 1. Existing features have been updated and modernized, as well as new features integrated, but they haven't started from scratch since '95. I'm sure you could compare the two and find many lines of code in UE5 that were originally written 30 years ago and have been unchanged or only slightly altered since then.
Windows is another example. Even leaving aside unseen under-the-hood components, you can still find the occasional dialog box that still hasn't been updated from the Windows 3.11 era.
The issue here is more that the engine hasn't been updated enough. Bethesda seems to have an extremely slow development cycle, and hasn't dedicated enough resources to modernizing their engine. If they can't even do that well, a rewrite or heavily modifying another engine are pretty much out of the question.
Another issue: Reverse engineering Starfield's code belies a lack of talent in Bethesda, or at least code review. Some of the old devs like Jeff Lundin (smkviper) were legends, exactly who you would want working on an engine. But they have either been promoted or left.
In Starfield, you had intern-level talent inserting JSON inside fields in the TES4 database. If you don't understand what the means, it'd be like taping a hacksaw onto the side of a Skilsaw, because you never figured out how to use the safety trigger on the Skilsaw. TES4's plugin format can store anything JSON can; only it is also designed from the ground up to be mod friendly (allowing overrides and extensions), it is fast, and purpose-built for a game engine.
It is! I was heavily active on the RE Discords for months after its release. And it was frequently appalling. While the older code would generally be well thought out.
The TES4 plugin format is a thing of beauty, it could use some improvements but it was incredibly forward thinking when it comes to modability and speed. And for all of its flaws, the Papyrus VM is also extremely mod friendly and flexible; its API is just undercooked, and the VM should probably split out background tasks from time-sensitive gameplay ones. Code from the Skyrim and FO4 era is mostly impressive. But even if you had not reversed engineered those games, you could spot many of the additions during Starfield, just by whether or not it looked like an intern patched it in.
The rendering pipeline was a different story. It was solid. Sadly many of the additions to the renderer likely came from Microsoft Game Studios. Phil Spencer said they joined the dev team during the final 2 years.
All told, the code painted a picture of a lack of talent within Bethesda's Engine team, which has not historically been the case. Of course that is a fixable problem, so perhaps they hired seasoned new devs and implemented code review for the next version of their engine. But I am not getting my hopes up. I love the engine, I love modding it, and I want to see them provide the upkeep it deserves.
That depends on when its set, more than about a 150 years after the bombs should mean only rubble, no standing buildings.(unless some are intentionally maintained)
The biggest issue with setting games in cities is accounting for how players will interact with all the buildings. Go inside to explore, climb them, jump off, etc. It's much different than a city with the majority closed off and only a few interactable or a 'painted' background.
Can you imagine how pissy people would be if they couldn't interact with their favorite landmarks? Or do you only use those and the rest just be window dressing?
As for location somewhere interesting big city but not huge metropolis - New Orleans, Portland, St. Louis, Austin. There's alot of options out there.
I’m thinking that tertiary cities of around 100-200k people would likely survive compared to large centres and capitols. Rural lands that are marked for silos and military complex’s too. Leaving small/medium density cities and towns less likely to be targeted.
I'm honestly ambivalent. It'd be a great setting, absolutely, but I personally hope we get a setting that isn't simply "Major East Coast City #3". Chicago, Louisiana, Florida, or somewhere in the PNW are all higher on my personal list. With the direction the TV show is going, I also wouldn't complain about a return to California - we haven't actually been there since the pre-Bethesda days.
My issue with Fallout in NYC is simply that the tech isn't there yet. If it's set in a place with skyscrapers I want many, many floors that are fully accessible, not just 3-5 floors you have to take an elevator to get to.
There’s an argument to be made that every dungeon being a 100 story crawl to the top would be bad for pacing. I’m not looting 100 straight floors of abandoned office space with randomly placed ghoul jumpscares
Nah, 100 is too many. A solid 15 though? Yes please. Besides, you may be forgetting that we're talking about New York. If it's luxury apartments or businesses, yeah it'll be a slog. 15 floors of 500-700 square foot apartments, or 15 floors of micro-apartments (sub 400 square feet) though? We're talking - at most - the size of 3 Super Duper Marts with more walls.
Make rad-blizzards a thing. The player starts further south on the map, but the story eventually pushes you across the border into Canada where radioactive blizzards are far more common place. The player has to contend with blinding white-out conditions, radiation, and not freezing to death, probably in a land teeming with, I dunno, polar yao guai?
I'm hoping for Louisiana or Florida. They seem to always do well for swamp dlcs, so I'm hoping maybe making the main game will benefit from being in a swampy location.
Fallout games, at least since the 3-NV-4 series, have been set in and around mid-sized cities with a unique, under-explored character to them. DC, Vegas, Boston. New York is the biggest city in the country, and it's been explored to death. Much better to go with somewhere smaller; my pick is Detroit, but New Orleans, Seattle, El Paso, and St Louis would all be great choices too.
Also, I don't know if this has been addressed in the lore, but I feel like New York would've been hit by a bunch of bombs. It's probably a flat radioactive pile.
I know we just had DC and parts of Maryland in Fallout 3, but I think Baltimore would be an amazing location. You've got the Chesapeake, islands, underwater tunnels, a small subway system, bridges, the National Aquarium, moderately tall skyscrapers, plenty of open parks and smaller neighborhoods. It could add to the lore and plot from 3 directly. I don't know. Seems cool
I like Detroit because of the auto industry. In Starfield, Bethesda has started implementing vehicles, as well as the ship building menu. How goddamn rad would it be to be able to lug one of those old cars, motorcycles, trucks, vans, or tanks back to a mechanic shop, get it running, and then trick it out with armor, guns, treads, a new engine, whatever else!
Fallout: Motor City would be an exploration of the Mad Max style of post apocalypse, with a faction of motorcycle gangsters and hot-rodders, and I think it would be fucking awesome.
If you want a taste of this try the Fallout the Frontier mod, it's writing was bad or mediocre for the most part, but on a technical level it is a marvel. Drivable vehicles that feel like they're out of the source engine
I honestly feel the Dallas Ft Worth Metroplex would be perfect. Its not super dense, theres decent amounts of undeveloped areas and the bombs would hit Dallas and Ft Worth which woukd give you both a boneyard and glowing sea at each end of the map with literally everything in between. Suburbs, super duper marts, microcities with their own skylines, six flags, stadiums, lakes, military base etc.
I liked NV so much because most of the game is not Vegas or Freeside, it's exploring the desert. It's more exciting and engaging stumbling upon weird and interesting things in a wide open desolate space.
I would love Detroit because then you could bring in Canada and the lore behind the annexation and communist Chinese influence through espionage. I can't see another city other than maybe Seattle where you could naturally make the jump to Canada that isn't a DLC.
Oh, that reminds me; you could do this basically anywhere, but I would love to see a settlement or community in the next game where the people are all committed anti-communists, but everything they know about communism comes from pre-war propaganda tracts, so they think that communism is all about authoritarianism and corruption and stratification, and they end up structuring their community so that everyone is equal, everything is decided democratically, all the workers own the local factory together and benefit from it equally. Fierce anti-communists who essentially achieved communism by accident.
St Louis would be great, especially with a lot of flooded areas and buildings. It would be a nice break from the desertic tone of last few games, and would give people a reason to put power armor on to explore underwater.
If you've played Resistance 3 you know how cool the St Louis part was.
Nope, its just been stated so much that people assume its right. I don't blame you, I used to think so, as well. The sole mention of NYC in it is just the nuclear reactor meltdown and the ensuing crisis. I assume that the reactor meltdown has just evolved to "the city is a crater" over about 3 decades of telephone
I think someone from the Brotherhood in one of the games mentions flying over ny and says that every skyscraper is filled with super mutants, so it definitely still exists but is mostly filled with hostiles
It would be awesome, but Bethesda could never do it justice.
Remember the downtown Boston area in Fallout 4? The whole NYC game would be a buggy mess just like that. Also, couple that with the constant load screens of entering & exiting buildings, and you've got some very frustrating and boring gameplay.
I don't think anyone could do it justice, considering the actual size of it all. Honestly, Cyberpunk 2077 is the probably the best example of a videogame based primarily in a massive city as of 2026, and Night City is only a bit better than Boston was in FO4.
NOLA is the perfect place for a fallout game. Fallout settings are best when there's a distinct local culture they can build off of, like New Vegas. NOLA has a well know distinct culture, and irradiated swamps with mutated gators while there's a gang of Jazz musicians and Cannibalistic Cajuns stalking about is just perfect for a Fallout game.
It would be cool if civilization settled on the higher levels and on top of the skyscrapers with makeshift bridges connecting them, while the lower levels and the streets are a ghoul infested, irradiated hellhole.
Skyscrapers would work like underground dungeons while the populated cities and the factions would be on the surface.
Imagine the sheer terror of playing on Survival, it's the middle of the night, you're hungry, tired and injured, out of stims and chems with only a box of Blam Co Mac and Cheese to keep you going. When suddenly you hear a feral ghoul from down an alley yell out "I'M WALKIN' 'ERE" before charging you
I think it could work, but I think they’d have to get really creative with it, practically and visually
New York just destroyed would be boring in both instances I think, but could be very cool
I think what would be p cool is making a big section of the map basically a wasteland and use the buildings as the sorta environment, like fallen down skyscrapers creating mountains and verticality, but they’re super overgrown with plant life so they blend in nicely. Probably where you’d put your typical Fallout wasteland stuff
A section that was hit by the nuke ofc, so it’s absolutely fucked and dangerous, would be very cool to see this giant hole go into the Metro and maybe even deeper and that’s where they’d put all their super creepy shit in
Central Park ofc being an overgrown forest is essential I think, not sure what to put in there really, I guess just environmental variety. I think Fallout really ends up lacking in the biome variety department
Then a city area which is just classic Fallout “here’s the destroyed city to traverse through” maybe have the games mains cities somewhere around there, would be really cool to have connected rooftops form a city, like in Dying Light 2, but ya know, a bit cooler. Maybe the main hub somewhere, not sure where, I don’t really know NY’s layout
Liberty Island, idk, probably a Brotherhood base or something
Maybe something dynamic, like crashing waves against the coastline that change up the environment by flooding the area. Or maybe the opposite and have the waves settle sometimes and it reveals things that are underwater for a limited time, like a couple days of in game time or something, could make for some really interesting gameplay if they leaned into survival elements for it. Add some underwater exploration to the mix by having some of the city underwater constantly too
Lots of other stuff more creative minds could conjure
Question: In the canon, wasn't New York completely eradicated because it wasn't home to the largest fusion power plant in the United States, and the entire city was blown to bits?
Jokes , aside if they do it right , it could be very similar to the metro game , which I would actually be really on board with with the surface being stupid , dangerous and radioactive. Needing to use the subway tunnels and various underground networks to get through the city safely with brief and very dangerous surface expeditions to get into the actual buildings
The only issue is........ well, this is Bethesda we're talking about. And I remember the fo3 metro system very well, and how much I hate it, so... Think hard pass is what i'm gonna go with unless bethesda outsources it to something like obsidian , again , in which case then maybe just maybe I'd love to see it
One thing I was thinking recently, is since in the lore New York City is mostly one big crater, that they should call it "The Big Bite" or something in reference to the old "Big Apple" nickname.
All of the West Coast Fallout games have just been generic desert and considering how Fallout 4 is my favorite game in the franchise mostly due to it's setting, I'd love to explore an even grander city setting.
Plus, it'd be nice to see one of the bigger American cultural centers get some love too.
I think it’d kind of stink if you think about what it’d look like. New York City is not that big, so if it got nuked, which it definitely did, it’s just gonna be a hole.
"How would you feel about a fallout game in ________ ?"
Yes.
“Literally give me anything Toddy”
Here’s Preston, Idaho. Have fun.
Gimme a Napoleon Dynamite ghoul follower, and mutant potato monsters, and we're cruisin'.
Fallout game inside Todd Howard? You can build your own magic school bus and setup settlements inside him!
"How would you feel about a Fallout game?"
"Do they still make those?"
Could be worse. My main fandom is Elder Scrolls, so...
I am continuously surprised at the subglacial speed at which Bethesda moves, even as someone who mainly likes Fallout (but not 76, I want a real Fallout game). I can't help but feel like they are kinda wasting the IPs at times
What even goes on inside those studios...
im on a discord server with one of the developers of fallout 4 and following games, and can probably answer this question pretty accurately: nothing. its just and empty hangar with a single guy in an office chair, spinning while funky town plays over the intercom system.
Loving both Fallout and Elder Scrolls is a great life path if you're a stoic. Or just want to practice patience.
By "they" I mean Bethesda, and by "those" I mean games lol
How would you feel about a Fallout game set in Silent Hill?
Literally a mod for FO4 haha. It’s one of the best crossovers.
Love that mod. You can play it on Xbox too.
Ok, but best we can do is Bismarck, North Dakota
At this point, with how the show is traveling west and east easily, it would be amazing if instead of just one main world, there are a few different main cities that you can travel to. Would be pretty crazy but at the same time I’d be afraid of the areas being even more bland if they had to stretch their time making a bunch of different ones.
Fallout Houston? Eh...
Give me fallout in Alaska for all I care, I will be there!!!
Literally anywhere new
....Sydney Australia.
Something like this
https://www.theterminal.info/p/sydney-at-the-end-of-the-world
I want Total War: Fallout
In USA*
Would feel about a game outside of US !
Fallout 4 was originally going to be set in New York City, until Todd axed the idea because the tech wasn't there to do it right.
I'd be very surprised in Fallout 5 isn't either NYC, Chicago, or San Fran.
It's gonna be san Francisco.
Bethesda leaves small ques in games to hint at locations for the next game.
Fallout 3 hinted at the commonwealth. Fallout 4 shows golden gate bridge in Kellogg's memories. Plus obsidian wanted to include a lore point that eluded to san Francisco being nuked but Bethesda rejected it as they had "plans for that area"
All but confirms it for me. Mark this comment, we will be going to san Francisco in Fallout 5
!remindme 40 years
Is that so you can remind your grand son to set his own reminder?
precisely yes
No need, your grandsons gonna witness US annexing Canada, the Resource Wars and that thing on October 23, 2077
Sorry, Jonny, what happened in 2077? /j
My grandson will be V from CP :D
HAAAAAAAAANK
more like son if not you are going to witness it at this rate
Will Reddit reminders transfer to the 2046 ThoughtIt app?
Release date 2077 for maximum immersion.
Now instead of just sitting at a console or PC and playing on a monitor, you get full value for your money outside. Start saving those caps now already.
Even better, release a cola brand called ‘Newka-Cola’ and make bank off of people buying your drinks for their caps.
Fuck
Such an optimist
SF’s real life geography lends itself really well to an open world game setting too.
The city itself being squeezed onto a relatively small peninsula gives you natural boundaries without having to use You cannot go this way messages, while still fitting in large parks that can have sprawled into dangerous forests and there’s plenty of literally mountainous terrain.
You could also just cut the whole place off from the mainland (from the airport to Pacifica) and attribute it to a massive ‘Big One’ earthquake happening sometime in the centuries since the bombs dropped.
The entire city is smaller than Walt Disney World. Bethesda can fit the entire city on the map without compressing it and still have map space left over for other towns and rural areas
Horizon Forbidden West took place around Las Vegas and San Francisco and exploring San Fran was actually really cool. I would often stumble across things like a ruined stadium, then find myself pulling up real maps on Google to find out what it was and how accurately placed they were. For the most part, they got things fairly accurate!
Of course, HFW takes place like 1,000 years into the future, so it's a post-post Apocalyptic world, meaning it was almost unrecognizable due to nature reclaiming most of the city, and extensive flooding due to global warming meaning large parts the city were underwater and I think it had essentially become an island at that point too, but you could still find remnants of the old world like stadiums and the airport, and you could explore under water too so you'd find SF landmarks down there too. It was pretty cool.
Horizon is a neat post apocalyptic world for me since it’s almost as extreme as you can get since literally all organic life on Earth was wiped out and it was left completely sterile until revived by Gaia and Zero Dawn
In the same verin I was in boston last week
"I have no idea where i am WAIT A MINUTE THE INSTITUTE IS UNDER THAT BUILDING"
Then im playing yesterday, and I get a mission to enter the library through the coply station entrance me and my buddy accidentally walked in (we wanted to go the other way)
Yeah, SF does make kind of a perfect open-world game map with a ton of strong landmarks, compact but diverse geography, and distinct neighborhood aesthetics that create excellent game locations with sense of place. I feel like Bethesda would mess it up though. I hope they do New Orleans instead
Ooo, Golden Gate Park being an overgrown forest filled with mutated animals is something I hadn't even considered, but now REALLY want to see.
We could have some interesting raider factions too, assuming the Shi have somewhat lost control of the area.
Reminds me of how GTA IV opened up near areas with the bridges. You could expand outwards from SF over expansions/DLCs...
Granted I'm more a fan of how GTA V and most Bethesda games are, once you get through the tutorial the world is your oyster.
The word you want is “cues.” “Queues” is another word for a line that you wait in.
I always appreciate people pointing this out. A good use of queues would be “the queue to buy Fallout 5 will start forming when it is released in 2093.”
Also “alluded” not “eluded”.
I thought it was supposed to be clues
Yeh haha they're both wrong.
Fine... I'll do it... Gets in line, its fine, I'm a Brit, I got this.
Wait... Sorry I saw the word queue and immediately assumed.
But we have already seen San Francisco in FO2.
I think it'd be cool to revisit a location like what 50-100 years later?
Also with modern gameplay. Just like how GTA has revisited Liberty City, Los Santos and now Vice City.
Not with Bethesda's writers
We'd already seen the pitt but fallout 76 went back
To be fair, 76's Pitt was earlier in the timeline than 3's.
I think you may be onto something, but I would hate to see fallout go back to San Fran. It's a location we've already seen and I can't imagine it going any better than all the people up in arms about the show "ruining Vegas" right now.
Go somewhere new please for the love of god. I've seen great concepts for a Great Lakes, Tennessee, or Florida game. I'd love to see Canada too, Toronto is a great shout.
I would prefer New Orleans. I think the aesthetic is distinct and great for a Fallout game but also not too much that Bethesda would fuck it up (like I feel they would SF or NYC)
Lots to do around the central theme of (access to) water that’s underpinned the series.
With New Orleans it gives an opportunity to flip things around and have the primary focus be removing water from the landscape to try to make it habitable again. Give the player some agency around building dams & levees to protect/uncover settlement areas, and leave others to rot in the radioactive swamp-flood.
Not to mention hurricanes an mutated alligators
The feared deathjaws!
Where's Ricky from Vault 22 when you need him?
I'm so tired of California
Patroling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
Imagine being a wastelander
We haven't had a fallout game set in Cali in almost 30 years.
Did you mean clues?
I actually did.
my engrish woz very not good
With how things are rolling surrounding california and the west coast with the show I would be amazed if fallout 5 isn't set California, but as an Illinois resident I would be pleasantly shocked to see it set in Chicago
I just wonder what kind of cult is living around The Bean.
The next game will take place in san francisco and reference Lucy and the events of the games.
They already have fully voiced Cooper outside the starting vault in 76 to give you a quest.
Man it'd be crazy if they got Walton Goggins to voice his character in Fallout 5
They got him to voice his character in Fallout 76 tbf
I have not been playing '76, that's dope I didn't know that.
It may be 2077 before we get Fallout 5
We may very well be living in the wasteland by the time it’s released.
By which time it will just be The Cult Of Todd* wearing cardboard monitors acting out the game for weary travellers.
*I’m just putting this as a joke not as a comment on any particular meta-fandom nonsense.
Chicago would be the best imo.
Cali/Nevada has been fleshed out extensively. East Coast has a good bit of lore there too.
What's been mentioned of Chicago already makes it exciting. Nick Valentine Pre-War was stationed there. The Enclave has an outpost there. A rogue Brotherhood chapter is there.
You got plenty of famous irl places to draw from, Lake Michigan and plenty of DLC opportunities for neighboring areas.
Heck, the idea of going to St. Louis for a DLC, or up north into Michigan/Canada is pretty sweet.
They did chicago, and imo it was the best, fallout tactics is the midwest technically, not officially chicago as a city if thats what your referencing. But that game was an amazing actual progression of the game that just goes unnoticed since it was made after the compsny split originally
Sea/Tac/Vancouver or I am walkin'!
I agree, though I am dying for Fallout in New Orleans. The radio station would be so good!
Fallout New Orleans with a Memphis DLC involving a Pharaoh in the bass pro pyramid please
I need some of whatever you're smoking cause I love this shit
Wasn't there a house? What did they call it again?
I believe that would be the Rising Sun…
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
Dear God, I know I was one
This is said in one of the top comments every time the discussion comes up and I fully agree.
I don’t think any game can do ny properly without a huge leap forward in technology and professing power
Huge lifeless rectangle buildings just ain’t it. You need to be able to go inside them - and then camera and gameplay become an issue
I feel like NYC and Chicago could be too aesthetically similar as settings to Fallout 3 and 4 and they wouldn’t nail the dense, high-rise city thing well enough.
I honestly want them to pick a city with a clear, distinct aesthetic but manageable scope - New Orleans stands out
I’ve got this craaazy idea that they’ll do alternate settings with the show and games. Games are currently east coast so show is west coast. Then they’ll switch. In twenty years when they announce fallout 5.
I'm from New York, I love playing games set in New York, I miss New York every day
I would much rather a San Francisco set game than east coast again
Honestly man, we need either a solid Midwest fallout set in the rockies or like a Texas one.
It's gonna be Chicago because we still have the mid west brotherhood
As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think chicago is geographically diverse enough to make for an interesting setting. Steady elevation, mostly urban, straight coastline with no islands.
The one I think could be absolutely AMAZING would be Seattle/Vancouver/Puget Sound with areas of the Alaskan Front tied in.
Gonna keep saying it, but if 76 is anything to go off, Bethesda's gonna cook with the map if it's set in SF or Chicago.
All good choices imo
San Fran Would be interesting to see. Was a location in Fallout 2 you had to go to to get a freighter ship to the Enclave Oil Rig. Would be cool to go to the docks and maybe even see some ruins off in the distance in the ocean. Although tbf that was a massive explosion so there might not be anything left.
I would just hope that a majority of the buildings are explorable, even if they lack good loot. Would suck if half the city is blocked off with boards
thats exactly what would happen
FO4 boston performance is terrible as it is
FO4 was a 2015 release. It's 2026 and games like Dying Light 2 and more exist with far more interiors. I get this is Bethesda, but FO4 doesn't justify that claim.
starfield showed they still don't get what urban sprawl sort of means or should look like.
It feels like Starfield was all about updating their engine and pushing its limits with vehicles, procedural generation, etc. and almost no effort went into designing quests and locations.
Having ‘urban sprawl’ on the level of even the Boston Common would have been twice the effort in location design as they put into the whole game. The UAC city is the size of my thumb and is one of what, 3 or 4 ‘cities’ in the game? They reused the main quest location 24x10 times with the temples, and for all their procedural generated worlds, they only made like 10 possible ‘camps’ that generate in them.
And even if they did design a big ole urban sprawl, they were never going to design a bunch of interesting quests to fill it out and make it worth exploring. I don’t get how they shipped a game that’s so fucking empty after playing all their previous titles
Starfield wasn't exactly focused on urban sprawl.
FO5 would have a more traditional map design.
Too bad Bethesda's engine is held together by bubblegum and Todd's hopes and dreams
I won't argue there, but it's also a proprietary engine built and designed for their needs. It's what makes Bethesda games feel like Bethesda games.
Personally, I wouldn't want them to switch to ditch the Creation Engine. You'd be kissing the modding scene goodbye, and you'd have an even longer wait for the next game while they overhauled a new engine and retrained their devs.
The 20 year old creation engine theyve shown no signs of replacing does justify that claim though.
The idea that the Creation Engine needs to be replaced is a bit of a fallacy. When you have a piece of software that works, you build it out and modernize it, you don't replace it. When software is totally thrown out and rewritten, you inevitably end up throwing out solutions to problems current developers have forgotten even exist, with missing features, new and unforeseen bugs or issues, and an extremely high development cost.
For example, Unreal Engine 5 has a lineage that traces directly back to 1995's Unreal Engine 1. Existing features have been updated and modernized, as well as new features integrated, but they haven't started from scratch since '95. I'm sure you could compare the two and find many lines of code in UE5 that were originally written 30 years ago and have been unchanged or only slightly altered since then.
Windows is another example. Even leaving aside unseen under-the-hood components, you can still find the occasional dialog box that still hasn't been updated from the Windows 3.11 era.
The issue here is more that the engine hasn't been updated enough. Bethesda seems to have an extremely slow development cycle, and hasn't dedicated enough resources to modernizing their engine. If they can't even do that well, a rewrite or heavily modifying another engine are pretty much out of the question.
Another issue: Reverse engineering Starfield's code belies a lack of talent in Bethesda, or at least code review. Some of the old devs like Jeff Lundin (smkviper) were legends, exactly who you would want working on an engine. But they have either been promoted or left.
In Starfield, you had intern-level talent inserting JSON inside fields in the TES4 database. If you don't understand what the means, it'd be like taping a hacksaw onto the side of a Skilsaw, because you never figured out how to use the safety trigger on the Skilsaw. TES4's plugin format can store anything JSON can; only it is also designed from the ground up to be mod friendly (allowing overrides and extensions), it is fast, and purpose-built for a game engine.
I didn't know this, this is actually kind of appalling.
It is! I was heavily active on the RE Discords for months after its release. And it was frequently appalling. While the older code would generally be well thought out.
The TES4 plugin format is a thing of beauty, it could use some improvements but it was incredibly forward thinking when it comes to modability and speed. And for all of its flaws, the Papyrus VM is also extremely mod friendly and flexible; its API is just undercooked, and the VM should probably split out background tasks from time-sensitive gameplay ones. Code from the Skyrim and FO4 era is mostly impressive. But even if you had not reversed engineered those games, you could spot many of the additions during Starfield, just by whether or not it looked like an intern patched it in.
The rendering pipeline was a different story. It was solid. Sadly many of the additions to the renderer likely came from Microsoft Game Studios. Phil Spencer said they joined the dev team during the final 2 years.
All told, the code painted a picture of a lack of talent within Bethesda's Engine team, which has not historically been the case. Of course that is a fixable problem, so perhaps they hired seasoned new devs and implemented code review for the next version of their engine. But I am not getting my hopes up. I love the engine, I love modding it, and I want to see them provide the upkeep it deserves.
It’s 2026 where GPU companies rely on fake frame generation to get good frame rates.
The year it comes out in means nothing if it’s poorly optimised. Fallout 4 had community fixes within weeks of coming out.
starfield justifies that claim
To dense with buildings other than maybe Central Park a city with that many real life interiors and buildings would absolutely be 80% boarded up.
That depends on when its set, more than about a 150 years after the bombs should mean only rubble, no standing buildings.(unless some are intentionally maintained)
I’d take a Fallout game set in an abandoned Chic Fil A at this point.
Waffle house would be better
One combat skill-unarmed
Note the Waffle House isn’t abandoned, it’s running like nothing happened and the bombs never fell
Every dialogue options ends in my pleasure
The biggest issue with setting games in cities is accounting for how players will interact with all the buildings. Go inside to explore, climb them, jump off, etc. It's much different than a city with the majority closed off and only a few interactable or a 'painted' background.
Can you imagine how pissy people would be if they couldn't interact with their favorite landmarks? Or do you only use those and the rest just be window dressing?
As for location somewhere interesting big city but not huge metropolis - New Orleans, Portland, St. Louis, Austin. There's alot of options out there.
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I’m thinking that tertiary cities of around 100-200k people would likely survive compared to large centres and capitols. Rural lands that are marked for silos and military complex’s too. Leaving small/medium density cities and towns less likely to be targeted.
I'm honestly ambivalent. It'd be a great setting, absolutely, but I personally hope we get a setting that isn't simply "Major East Coast City #3". Chicago, Louisiana, Florida, or somewhere in the PNW are all higher on my personal list. With the direction the TV show is going, I also wouldn't complain about a return to California - we haven't actually been there since the pre-Bethesda days.
My issue with Fallout in NYC is simply that the tech isn't there yet. If it's set in a place with skyscrapers I want many, many floors that are fully accessible, not just 3-5 floors you have to take an elevator to get to.
There’s an argument to be made that every dungeon being a 100 story crawl to the top would be bad for pacing. I’m not looting 100 straight floors of abandoned office space with randomly placed ghoul jumpscares
Nah, 100 is too many. A solid 15 though? Yes please. Besides, you may be forgetting that we're talking about New York. If it's luxury apartments or businesses, yeah it'll be a slog. 15 floors of 500-700 square foot apartments, or 15 floors of micro-apartments (sub 400 square feet) though? We're talking - at most - the size of 3 Super Duper Marts with more walls.
Re. The PNW, a map that includes both Seattle and Vancouver has great potential for a storyline set around them as 2 warring City States.
Can use the in-game history of Canada having been annexed as something to build on too.
Make rad-blizzards a thing. The player starts further south on the map, but the story eventually pushes you across the border into Canada where radioactive blizzards are far more common place. The player has to contend with blinding white-out conditions, radiation, and not freezing to death, probably in a land teeming with, I dunno, polar yao guai?
I'm hoping for Louisiana or Florida. They seem to always do well for swamp dlcs, so I'm hoping maybe making the main game will benefit from being in a swampy location.
I’ve been wanting a Texas setting for the longest time, with DLCs going to Louisiana or Arkansas
well luckily the BEST fallout game takes place in texas
I think it would be a mistake.
Fallout games, at least since the 3-NV-4 series, have been set in and around mid-sized cities with a unique, under-explored character to them. DC, Vegas, Boston. New York is the biggest city in the country, and it's been explored to death. Much better to go with somewhere smaller; my pick is Detroit, but New Orleans, Seattle, El Paso, and St Louis would all be great choices too.
Also, I don't know if this has been addressed in the lore, but I feel like New York would've been hit by a bunch of bombs. It's probably a flat radioactive pile.
I know we just had DC and parts of Maryland in Fallout 3, but I think Baltimore would be an amazing location. You've got the Chesapeake, islands, underwater tunnels, a small subway system, bridges, the National Aquarium, moderately tall skyscrapers, plenty of open parks and smaller neighborhoods. It could add to the lore and plot from 3 directly. I don't know. Seems cool
That's a cool idea too!
I like Detroit because of the auto industry. In Starfield, Bethesda has started implementing vehicles, as well as the ship building menu. How goddamn rad would it be to be able to lug one of those old cars, motorcycles, trucks, vans, or tanks back to a mechanic shop, get it running, and then trick it out with armor, guns, treads, a new engine, whatever else!
Fallout: Motor City would be an exploration of the Mad Max style of post apocalypse, with a faction of motorcycle gangsters and hot-rodders, and I think it would be fucking awesome.
If you want a taste of this try the Fallout the Frontier mod, it's writing was bad or mediocre for the most part, but on a technical level it is a marvel. Drivable vehicles that feel like they're out of the source engine
Settlement inside Fort McHenry anyone?
Slightly ripping off Diamond City but you could do a "Birdland" city that encompasses the entire Camden Yards/M&T Bank Stadium precinct.
Post apocalyptic Omar as a Companion?
I'm sold.
As long as they include a few references to The Wire
I honestly feel the Dallas Ft Worth Metroplex would be perfect. Its not super dense, theres decent amounts of undeveloped areas and the bombs would hit Dallas and Ft Worth which woukd give you both a boneyard and glowing sea at each end of the map with literally everything in between. Suburbs, super duper marts, microcities with their own skylines, six flags, stadiums, lakes, military base etc.
The whole area would make a rife fallout game.
"discover what a nuclear war does to a city made of parking lots"
That would be cool too! I like El Paso as a way of exploring what happens to a borderland in the apocalypse, but I'd take DFW too!
I liked NV so much because most of the game is not Vegas or Freeside, it's exploring the desert. It's more exciting and engaging stumbling upon weird and interesting things in a wide open desolate space.
To each their own! Personally I find the desert a baffling place to put a game like this, because 85% of it looks exactly the same as it does now lol
But if you only got an 18-month development cycle it makes things hell of a lot easier
I would love Detroit because then you could bring in Canada and the lore behind the annexation and communist Chinese influence through espionage. I can't see another city other than maybe Seattle where you could naturally make the jump to Canada that isn't a DLC.
Oh, that reminds me; you could do this basically anywhere, but I would love to see a settlement or community in the next game where the people are all committed anti-communists, but everything they know about communism comes from pre-war propaganda tracts, so they think that communism is all about authoritarianism and corruption and stratification, and they end up structuring their community so that everyone is equal, everything is decided democratically, all the workers own the local factory together and benefit from it equally. Fierce anti-communists who essentially achieved communism by accident.
St Louis would be great, especially with a lot of flooded areas and buildings. It would be a nice break from the desertic tone of last few games, and would give people a reason to put power armor on to explore underwater.
If you've played Resistance 3 you know how cool the St Louis part was.
I would love it. It would probably be very urban, a lot of buildings squashed together with an extensive underground - very much like Fallout 3
G I A N T R A T S
Replace Death Claws with Death Rats
I thought NYC was completely decimated by the nukes? Isn't that what lore says?
nah that was just the fallout bible which isn't canon anymore
Fallout Bible only mentions NYC having a reactor meltdown pre-war. It doesn't even mention anything about the post-war city.
I swore that was where the NYC is a crater thing is
Nope, its just been stated so much that people assume its right. I don't blame you, I used to think so, as well. The sole mention of NYC in it is just the nuclear reactor meltdown and the ensuing crisis. I assume that the reactor meltdown has just evolved to "the city is a crater" over about 3 decades of telephone
When I think about this I think about Wolfenstein: The New Colossus and how fucked NY was in that game.
I think someone from the Brotherhood in one of the games mentions flying over ny and says that every skyscraper is filled with super mutants, so it definitely still exists but is mostly filled with hostiles
It can hardly be worse than Washington. People forget that nukes typically aren't enough to turn a city as large as NYC into a giant crater.
It probably wouldnt be worse than DC, i cant think of any possible NY targets
It would be awesome, but Bethesda could never do it justice.
Remember the downtown Boston area in Fallout 4? The whole NYC game would be a buggy mess just like that. Also, couple that with the constant load screens of entering & exiting buildings, and you've got some very frustrating and boring gameplay.
I don't think anyone could do it justice, considering the actual size of it all. Honestly, Cyberpunk 2077 is the probably the best example of a videogame based primarily in a massive city as of 2026, and Night City is only a bit better than Boston was in FO4.
Id feel great, but we all know what happened the last time bethesda tried to introduce a big city into the game
I have vivid memories of crashing every time i entered boston to the point i had to actually avoid looking towards it's direction
Idk man, I'm tired of the East Coast. I'd love to see a game set in the deep south, like Louisiana. That would be really interesting.
NEW ORLEANS!!!!!
NOLA is the perfect place for a fallout game. Fallout settings are best when there's a distinct local culture they can build off of, like New Vegas. NOLA has a well know distinct culture, and irradiated swamps with mutated gators while there's a gang of Jazz musicians and Cannibalistic Cajuns stalking about is just perfect for a Fallout game.
also the radio would go incredibly hard
Skyscrapers get boring and confusing to explore, I wouldn’t like it
It would be cool if civilization settled on the higher levels and on top of the skyscrapers with makeshift bridges connecting them, while the lower levels and the streets are a ghoul infested, irradiated hellhole.
Skyscrapers would work like underground dungeons while the populated cities and the factions would be on the surface.
retro futuristic new york would be amazing
Imagine the sheer terror of playing on Survival, it's the middle of the night, you're hungry, tired and injured, out of stims and chems with only a box of Blam Co Mac and Cheese to keep you going. When suddenly you hear a feral ghoul from down an alley yell out "I'M WALKIN' 'ERE" before charging you
I’ll take a fallout game set anywhere
Conceptually I think it's cool (though I'd love to see New Orleans personally) but with how dense NY is, it probably wouldn't do well performance wise
I’d really enjoy a Fallout game where I came run about downtown Boston without needing a dozen mods to make it at least marginally stable.
I think it could work, but I think they’d have to get really creative with it, practically and visually
New York just destroyed would be boring in both instances I think, but could be very cool
I think what would be p cool is making a big section of the map basically a wasteland and use the buildings as the sorta environment, like fallen down skyscrapers creating mountains and verticality, but they’re super overgrown with plant life so they blend in nicely. Probably where you’d put your typical Fallout wasteland stuff
A section that was hit by the nuke ofc, so it’s absolutely fucked and dangerous, would be very cool to see this giant hole go into the Metro and maybe even deeper and that’s where they’d put all their super creepy shit in
Central Park ofc being an overgrown forest is essential I think, not sure what to put in there really, I guess just environmental variety. I think Fallout really ends up lacking in the biome variety department
Then a city area which is just classic Fallout “here’s the destroyed city to traverse through” maybe have the games mains cities somewhere around there, would be really cool to have connected rooftops form a city, like in Dying Light 2, but ya know, a bit cooler. Maybe the main hub somewhere, not sure where, I don’t really know NY’s layout
Liberty Island, idk, probably a Brotherhood base or something
Maybe something dynamic, like crashing waves against the coastline that change up the environment by flooding the area. Or maybe the opposite and have the waves settle sometimes and it reveals things that are underwater for a limited time, like a couple days of in game time or something, could make for some really interesting gameplay if they leaned into survival elements for it. Add some underwater exploration to the mix by having some of the city underwater constantly too
Lots of other stuff more creative minds could conjure
Question: In the canon, wasn't New York completely eradicated because it wasn't home to the largest fusion power plant in the United States, and the entire city was blown to bits?
There Would be soooooo many loading screens
Nah I want like texas or smth
Nah, make it New Orleans and then we're talking.
I SO badly want one in the Niagara Falls area.
Canada/US border right there, big old Buffalo, I mean come on. It would be so cool
Idk endless city blocks seems boring to me
I'd prefer one set in the Mississippi Delta or the Midwest.
I can already imagine how many crashes are going to happen
I've been asking for 5 to be in NY for years.
Reminded a bit of the first Division game. Loved the atmospheric approach to NYC after a pandemic.
GIVE US FALLOUT NY
I dont live in the us and ive never been there so... idrc im up for anything as long as its a new city/area
fallout 3 ptsd
Jokes , aside if they do it right , it could be very similar to the metro game , which I would actually be really on board with with the surface being stupid , dangerous and radioactive. Needing to use the subway tunnels and various underground networks to get through the city safely with brief and very dangerous surface expeditions to get into the actual buildings
The only issue is........ well, this is Bethesda we're talking about. And I remember the fo3 metro system very well, and how much I hate it, so... Think hard pass is what i'm gonna go with unless bethesda outsources it to something like obsidian , again , in which case then maybe just maybe I'd love to see it
One thing I was thinking recently, is since in the lore New York City is mostly one big crater, that they should call it "The Big Bite" or something in reference to the old "Big Apple" nickname.
-- insert joke here about dystopia hell scape and how they wouldnt have to change a thing from the real city --
New York was hit harder then DC. So it would basically be FO3 with a different story. Could be cool, I loved FO3.
Personally id like for them to go back to their roots, back to Cali.
I've been wanting it for a long time.
All of the West Coast Fallout games have just been generic desert and considering how Fallout 4 is my favorite game in the franchise mostly due to it's setting, I'd love to explore an even grander city setting.
Plus, it'd be nice to see one of the bigger American cultural centers get some love too.
I think it’d kind of stink if you think about what it’d look like. New York City is not that big, so if it got nuked, which it definitely did, it’s just gonna be a hole.
No, large city landscapes without the coolness of fallout 3 DC mixed in with subways, my least favorite part of 3 and 4. So nah
NYC would be a nightmare of inner-city closeness.
Fallout in Puerto Rico with a raider gang called the Bad Bunnies running the place🤣🤣
New York is a crater atm
Dream come tru 👍
I think a Florida set one would be cooler, giant mutated gators and snakes