Bethesda is not exactly on a hot streak with the Fallout series, given the amount of controversy surrounding their most recent releases. Bethesda is a wildly popular studio responsible for some of the most well-liked franchises around. Naturally, it made sense that Bethesda would use the popularity and success of those games to try some new things. And while things have mostly worked out for The Elder Scrolls Online, the same cannot be said about Fallout 76.
When Fallout 76 was first announced, the game was immediately met with skepticism from fans. After Fallout 4 received criticism for minimizing RPG elements, Bethesda suddenly announced a multiplayer Fallout game that was devoid of even more RPG elements. It felt at the time like Bethesda was just trying to capitalize on the early access survival game market and that became further cemented with the implementation of microtransactions and a premium subscription service. Bethesda is generally known for releasing games with issues, crashes, and glitches, but the laundry list of problems with Fallout 76 was so long that most players couldn't even possibly remember them all.
With the news that Xbox has acquired ZeniMax Media, the question now becomes whether or not Xbox can get Fallout back on the rails. Fortunately for Xbox, the series has a hardcore fanbase that will support it, and Bethesda is currently focused on The Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield, which are both still quite some time away. This gives Xbox and Bethesda plenty of breathing room to take a step back, evaluate the franchise, and determine how they should move forward. Xbox now has the luxury of effectively hitting the reset button on the franchise, which it desperately needed.
Another key element in Xbox's ability to fix Fallout is that Obsidian Entertainment is one of the studios under the Xbox Games Studios umbrella. Obsidian has experience working directly with Bethesda and the Fallout series, having developed Fallout: New Vegas a decade ago. Now that Xbox has them both within the same studio umbrella, there is room for the two teams to potentially collaborate and give the series an influx of new ideas. Whether or not something like that happens remains to be seen, but Xbox does have potential avenues to correct the issues that come with the Fallout series as well as the ability to easily inject some fresh thoughts and mindsets into the process.
The acquisition of Bethesda is only the first step of a long term plan. If Xbox is serious about ramping up its first party library and going head-to-head with PlayStation, the studios acquired in the ZeniMax purchase is a great starting point. Fallout is a gigantic franchise and could be a massive exclusive for Xbox, but it has to be done right. Given the absurd amount of success of PlayStation's exclusive titles in recent years, Xbox cannot afford to release a major game like Fallout 5 and have it fall on its face. Given how much care Xbox has given to correcting its platform and winning back consumers in the years since the Xbox One's poor reception, it's practically guaranteed that they will do everything in their power to ensure that Fallout does not release surrounded by a whirlwind of controversy once again.
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