The release of the second season of the Fallout adaptation on Prime Video has once again brought attention back around to the post-apocalyptic franchise, but from a video game perspective, it’s a bit of a bleak time. Fallout 5 has been greenlit, but with Bethesda’s focus largely on The Elder Scrolls VI for the time being, it’s likely still years away from being in players’ hands.

That being said, the developer’s parent company, Microsoft, has just installed Asha Sharma as the new head of Xbox, and she wants Fallout (as well as The Elder Scrolls and Halo) to be a “priority” moving forward. As part of that, Todd Howard has continued to field the occasional question on the next game, and fans are yet to be totally convinced of the plan for the future.

Over on Reddit, one user shared a quote from Howard via an interview with the BBC, in which he confirmed that, “‘Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening.’ The show is popular in and of itself, so that isn’t a particularly controversial take, but fans can’t decide on where the next game is going as a result, as well as how long it will be before they can play it.

“For me personally this adds more fuel to the fire that the location of 5 will likely be San Francisco. Regardless of if it is or isn’t, it’s going be many years until we see it. I’m curious if the show in some form or fashion will still be ongoing or not by then,” one comment read.

“I mean I’m not surprised. They’ve been treating the show as a canon story for a while. I am disappointed with how they’ve decided to treat the NCR though, all the while they continuously buff the Brotherhood of Steel,” another added.

Others are totally unconvinced, with one saying, “Honestly, it’s kinda terrifying that Bethesda went from releasing Fallout 3 and Skyrim within 3 years of each other to them taking ages to make new entries for these franchises. They probably won’t be as good as the aforementioned two either.

Whatever the future does hold for Fallout as a whole, there’s no getting around the fact that we won’t be playing a new game for a long time to come yet. The only potential silver lining is a remake being farmed out to another studio, so we’ll have to all keep our fingers crossed for that potential future to become a reality.