Recently, Jonathan Nolan said the upcoming Fallout TV series was “almost like” Fallout 5. But now he’s clarified those comments, telling Den of Geek that it would be “very presumptuous” to assume the show could reach the caliber of the game series.
Howard is quoted in the piece, too, and he confirms that he instructed the TV show crew to avoid certain topics because they would be covered in Fallout 5. For what it’s worth, Fallout 5 has not been officially announced, but Howard has been talking about it for years already.
“Well, there were some things where I said, ‘Don’t do this because we are going to do that in Fallout 5,'” Howard said.
The Fallout TV series doesn’t tell the story of any particular Fallout game, but instead it offers an original story. The open-world game series allows people to do whatever they want and become their own hero, so trying to adapt that into a show wouldn’t work very easily, showrunner Graham Wagner said.
“It’s more creatively interesting to be able to build our own story in the world that they’ve carved out for us,” Wagner said. “That’s historically been the trajectory of Fallout. It’s traded hands many times, with different creative teams taking it over. It’s kept it fresh, kept it relevant. We chose to just vainly look at this as our Fallout.”
The Fallout TV series debuts April 11 on Prime Video. As for Fallout 5, it’s coming after The Elder Scrolls VI, so it likely won’t be here for many, many years. The next title that Howard is involved with is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which comes out this year. Howard is an executive producer on the title from Wolfenstein studio Machine Games.