Bethesda seems to be incredibly busy at the moment with Starfield, but that hasn't stopped Todd Howard from commenting on the developer's plans for the future. In an interview with IGN after the end of Xbox's Extended Showcase, Howard spoke a little bit about the challenges of making massive titles like Skyrim and Fallout and the time it takes to make them, reiterating that The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently in pre-production and that Fallout 5 won't launch until after that.
"The Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production and we're gonna be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate's pretty full going forward," explains Howard. "We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well, but they do take a while. I wish they came out faster, I really do, we're trying as hard as we can, but we want them to be as best as they can be for everybody."
While this is the first confirmation we have that Bethesda is planning on making Fallout 5, it would be surprising if the developer didn't go back to the series for another mainline entry. Howard is also pretty much confirming that we won't see any mainline Fallout titles before the launch of The Elder Scrolls 6, something which people more than likely assumed given how massive an undertaking the development of an Elder Scrolls title actually is.
With this nugget of information, we now have a pretty clear roadmap for Bethesda over what must be the next decade, or at least this console generation. Starfield will be the first game out of the blocks, launching at some point in the first half of 2023 following the recent delay. Then Bethesda will work on The Elder Scrolls 6 up until that game is finally ready to ship, and then will get to work on Fallout 5. As Todd Howard states, there may be the odd spinoff title here and there, but as for mainline entries, Bethesda is pretty full up for quite some time.