Bethesda development chief Todd Howard has confirmed a few surprises for Fallout fans in the upcoming Season 3 of the TV show — including some things never seen before in the video games.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Howard said pre-production was underway on Season 3, which “is gonna start shooting soon.” Shooting in fact begins this month in Los Angeles.
Amazon has announced a number of actors joining the cast for Season 3, including Manny Jacinto from Star Wars show The Acolyte, Thomasin McKenzie from Jojo Rabbit, Emily Mortimer from The Newsroom, and Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul. Howard described Paul as “a Fallout fan from way back.”
Of most interest, though, is Howard’s tease about where Season 3 is going.
Warning! Spoilers for Fallout Season 2 finale follow…
The ending of Fallout Season 2 sets up Colorado as the location for Season 3, with The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins, already on his way.
In a February interview with IGN, co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet discussed where Season 3 was heading, at least initially. “We want to remind viewers that just because The Ghoul is heading to Colorado, of course this is the Wasteland where you always get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time,” she said. “So how long will it take him to get there, or will he get there in the first episode of the next season? We will have to wait to find out. It may not be as linear a journey as one would hope.”
Howard echoed Robertson-Dworet’s comment, adding: “Yeah, look, there’s a lot of surprises coming. We talk about it a lot. And so what I’d say is geography plays such a part into the world of Fallout, and seeing what’s there. And there’s a lot of land out there, there’s a lot of places to explore yet. It’s exciting for us to do that in games. And it’s really exciting to do it in a TV show where we can jump locations. I wouldn’t presume too much yet, I know we’re hinting at stuff, but there’s a lot of surprises to come.”
Howard doubled down on this sentiment while speaking to Entertainment Weekly, teasing that Season 3 will visit locations that have never been in the Fallout games.
“We talked about this at the end of Season 2, hinting we’re going to new places,” Howard said. “So one of the things that we all love about Fallout is the geography of the world and being able to show some new things in the Fallout world that I think will surprise people, that they’ve never seen before in the games.”
In February, Robertson-Dworet said the decision to head to a brand new location for Season 3 was inspired by the Fallout video games, which are typically each set in a different location. Fallout 3, for example, is set in the Capital Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic version of the city of Washington and the surrounding areas. Fallout: New Vegas is set in the Mojave Wasteland, which includes post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. Fallout 4 is set in the Commonwealth, which takes in the surrounding area of Boston, Massachusetts. And Fallout 76 is set in Appalachia, although updates have expanded its borders.
Indeed, one of the thrills of playing a new Fallout game is discovering and exploring a post-apocalyptic take on a brand new location, and getting to see how it’s doing hundreds of years after the bombs fell. This, Robertson-Dworet said, influenced the showrunners’ thinking.
“Well, it came out of many conversations about how the games are of course regional. One of the delights of finding out there’s going to be a new Fallout game is immediately the question of like, well, where is it going to be set? And of course, our first season being LA, second season being New Vegas, we were excited to go to fresh snow.”
The snowy peaks of post-apocalyptic Colorado have yet to be explored by the mainline Fallout video games (it was the setting of a canceled version of Fallout 3, codenamed “Van Buren”), so everything will feel brand new to an army of Fallout fans, and we can expect a significant expansion of the Fallout canon. The Fallout TV show is set after all the games, but are within the Fallout timeline and are canon. So everything we see in the show continues the overarching Fallout storyline.
We’ve got plenty more on Fallout, including our Fallout Season 2 finale review, and an explainer on how the post-credits scene at the end of Fallout Season 2 teases something huge from the games. Oh, and here’s what that Amazon Fallout countdown turned out to be.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
