Bethesda Softworks doesn’t always ping investors’ radar, since it’s privately held, but the game publisher showed once again Sunday that it’s a leader in the industry—and that it plans to dominate sales charts for the next few years.
Fallout 76, the latest in the phenomenally popular franchise, will hit store shelves Nov. 14, much earlier than many fans were anticipating. The game—which was announced in late May—will deviate from the path of its predecessors, trading a single offline player for an open online world where every character a player encounters will be another live player.
“You’ll be in a world with dozens, not hundreds or thousands of other players, said Todd Howard, director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, who is overseeing Fallout 76. “It’s the apocalypse, not a party.”
Set before previous games in the franchise, Fallout 76 is the follow-up to 2015’s Fallout 4, the company’s best-selling game, which sold more than 20 million copies.
While Fallout 76 is imminent and most relevant to gamers, Bethesda also threw a bone to fans of the long-running role playing game The Elder Scrolls, acknowledging that development was underway on the title and offering a bare bones teaser trailer that provided nothing more than a logo reading The Elder Scrolls VI.
Of greater interest, perhaps, was Howard’s announcement that Bethesda was working on its first new original franchise in 25 years. Starfield, a science-fiction game, will hit shelves before The Elder Scrolls VI. The developer did not offer many details about the new franchise, however.
“Starfield is a game we have spent years thinking about and working on,” said Howard. “It’s something we feel uniquley positioned to pull off and we’re incredibly exited about.”
Release windows for both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI were not given.