A while back, Fallout TV series creator Jonathan Nolan (who's also directing the first three episodes) likened the upcoming Prime Video show to a non-interactive version of Fallout 5, mainly because it would be an entirely new story set after the events seen in the games.
As it turns out, there's another connection between the TV series and the next game installment in the post-apocalyptic RPG franchise. Speaking to Den of Geek, Bethesda's Todd Howard (an executive producer on the TV adaptation) explained he informed Nolan and his crew of some of the stuff that would be in Fallout 5 so they'd avoid including it.
Well, there were some things where I said, ‘Don’t do this because we are going to do that in Fallout 5'.
Of course, we'll have to wait a long time before we figure out exactly what he meant, given that Howard is still working on the Starfield DLC and on The Elder Scrolls VI before the next Fallout game. Anyway, Howard also said about the upcoming Fallout TV series:
It wasn’t the translation of an existing story. It was, what would the next thing be? It just happens to be a TV show.
The fact that the Fallout show wouldn't be a direct adaptation of a story from one of the games was a great relief for showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider, Captain Marvel) and (The Office, Portlandia, Silicon Valley). In a previous Den of Geek interview, they said:
Geneva Robertson-Dworet: It was almost liberating that it would be impossible to adapt any one of the games faithfully because these are open-world games. Your experience playing the game would have been different than mine. You would have made different choices and played in a different order. If we tried to do it faithfully, half the gamers would have been like, ‘Wait, this is not the order that I remember.’
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