3 things I want in Fallout 5 after watching Amazon’s Fallout series

Fallout has been the watercooler TV show this month, an impressive feat for a video game adaptation. Although Bethesda doesn’t have any new Fallout games to release alongside it, the Amazon Prime series has reinvigorated interest in Fallout, with all its titles seeing notable player count increases. For now, we’ll have to be content with a Fallout 4 current-gen upgrade, but I’ll admit that my mind is drifting to thinking about Fallout 5.

Bethesda’s Todd Howard has teased that Fallout 5 will be the next project Bethesda Game Studios works on after Elder Scrolls 6. While that likely means its release is at least a decade away unless Bethesda fast-tracks it, I still find it fun to theorize about where a true single-player Fallout 5 could go next. These three particular things are what I want to see the most.

Set it somewhere new

Obviously, the most immediately eye-catching aspect of every new Fallout game is its setting. We’ve seen California, Nevada, Boston, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all explored in Fallout games, and the world is Bethesda’s oyster for wherever they want to go next. If they are staying in America, I’d like to see them explore the Midwest, possibly setting Fallout 5 around cities like Chicago and Milwaukee.

• Amazon’s Fallout success reveals a big problem with the video game business
• Amazon’s Fallout TV series is even more impressive than The Last of Us
• Fallout 4 is finally getting free Xbox Series X and PS5 upgrades

That setting could give Bethesda ample fodder to critique Midwestern middle-class Americana and contains plenty of iconic landmarks to reimagine in a post-apocalyptic setting. I might be a bit biased about that setting because I’ve lived in Chicago, but excluding that, I’d love to see Bethesda take a risk and leave America.

Modders are doing this with Fallout: London, an ambitious Fallout 4 mod that had to be delayed because of the current-gen update the 2015 RPG just received. I’d love to see