Bethesda has undoubtedly elevated the Fallout franchise. However, Todd Howard and his team have also ruined one of its core aspects.

Let’s be honest here, the Fallout franchise is one of Bethesda’s crown jewels, right alongside Elder Scrolls. With the arrival of Amazon’s live-action show, we’ve seen many fans, both old and new, flocking to the franchise and patiently waiting for what’s coming next.

The Fallout franchise completely revolutionized the RPG genre. (Image via Bethesda Game Studios)

Fallout titles, old and new ones, have managed to achieve critical acclaim thanks to their gameplay, story, and other aspects. However, one aspect where the franchise has clearly dropped the ball in recent entries is map sizes.

The shrinking wasteland of Fallout series

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One thing gamers love about the Fallout franchise is that it’s a huge open world. Seriously, one can spend ages exploring everything these games have to offer and still not see everything.

Generally, gaming developers always look to expand the scope of their games with every new entry. However, that’s not the case with Fallout. As with every title, Bethesda is taking a step backward and shrinking the post-apocalyptic world.

The biggest game map that we’ve ever witnessed in the entirety of the series was in Fallout Tactics. This game debuted all the way back in 2001. The developers pushed out a map with 304,585 square miles of land, with Wyoming in the northwest, Tennessee in the southeast, Michigan in the northeast, and New Mexico in the southwest. Seriously, what kind of game brings these many states?

One might think that Bethesda would have obviously expanded upon the scope of Fallout Tactics‘ map after taking over the franchise. However, that’s not been the case. Fallout 3 literally had the smallest map in the entire series, with just 8,462 square miles of area, despite the fact that it covered areas in and around Washington, D.C.

Then we had New Vegas. Sure, Bethesda wasn’t directly involved with the game’s development, but it did supervise it. The in-game map was just 8,502 square miles in size. With Fallout 4, Bethesda decided to increase the map to 9,473 square miles, but that was nowhere near what we had seen from the franchise in the past.

The only exception here is Fallout 76, with a map that’s about 24,038 square miles. Since it’s an online game, Bethesda has to constantly bring new additions and updates to the game, which increases the map size over time.

Many argue that Bethesda is probably shrinking the map sizes to focus on crafting more detailed environments. However, this is coming at a cost, and that’s exploration. It’s a core part of what makes a Fallout game, and when there’s less area to wander, the series suffers.

It’s time for Fallout 5 to reverse shrinking maps

The next-post apocalyptic game needs to return to the franchise’s roots. (Image via Bethesda Game Studios)

It’s been a decade since we’ve received a mainline post-apocalyptic game, and that wait might go on for even longer. Currently, Bethesda is working on Elder Scrolls 6, and it’s expected to hit the shelves sometime around 2026-2027.

It’s likely that Bethesda will pick up Fallout 5 after that, which means that the game won’t come out before 2030 at the earliest. It’s still not confirmed what the game might look like or how Bethesda is going to approach it, but one thing’s for certain: it needs a bigger map.

It’s not that Bethesda can’t craft a huge map. Starfield was a failure in many aspects, but one thing it managed to nail was its large-scale environment. However, it’s still unknown if Bethesda will continue with that philosophy when it comes to the post-apocalyptic franchise.

Over the years, one thing has become quite clear: games are tired of dense worlds, and they want to go back to the days of a vast and open one. If Bethesda continues to shrink map sizes, the franchise might lose its most crucial feature.

With that said, do you think Bethesda needs to return to bigger map sizes in future Fallout games? Let us know in the comments below.