Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic hit has kicked off production on its third season, with the cast and crew heading into a new corner of the Fallout map: Colorado.
Fallout star Walton Goggins confirmed the news himself back on July 7. The actor, who plays The Ghoul/Cooper Howard, posted a set photo to Instagram with the caption “Back in the saddle.” Principal photography is now underway in Los Angeles, following a shoot that was originally expected to start closer to summer but slipped slightly on the calendar. The season was actually greenlit well over a year ago. Amazon MGM Studios locked in the renewal in May 2025, months before Season 2 had even premiered.
Season 2 ended with the show’s central group scattered, and Season 3 looks to be picking up every thread at once. The Ghoul is heading east toward Colorado in search of Barb and Janey, marking new territory for the franchise. Notably, no mainline Fallout game has been set there before, so the show looks to be headed into virgin creative territory. Meanwhile, Lucy and Maximus stay put in the New Vegas region, where a three-way civil war is brewing between the Brotherhood of Steel, Caesar’s Legion, and the New California Republic. That geographic split gives the show room to run two very different stories in parallel: a road-trip mystery for the Ghoul, and a full-blown wasteland war for Lucy and Maximus.
Returning leads Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Goggins are expected back, joined by a notable round of new additions including Manny Jacinto, Emily Mortimer, Thomasin McKenzie, and Aaron Paul. None of their roles have been detailed publicly yet, so expect character breakdowns to trickle out as filming continues.
I can’t finish an article about the show without a mention of that Season 2 finale ending, and a moment that’s still in the consciousness of Fallout fans. I am of course talking about Season 2’s end-credits reference to “Liberty Prime Alpha,” which was widely read as pointing toward an earlier or unstable prototype of the giant robot that looms large in Fallout lore. When Elder Quintus unearths the blueprints for Liberty Prime Alpha, it signals that the Brotherhood of Steel is prepping a colossal weapon to shift the balance of power. With the Enclave and the NCR also vying for control, these schematics will likely set the stage for total warfare in Season 3. Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Todd Howard have been cagey about how directly the new season will draw on that thread, but it lines up with the Colorado setting, a region with ties to Cold War-era military history in the show’s version of the wasteland.
No release date has been set, and given the scope of the production, a 2027 debut looks likely. In the meantime, expect steady casting news as Season 3 fills out its expanded, two-front story.
Meanwhile, on the games front, the Fallout franchise just had one of its biggest weekends in years , although it came wrapped in some genuinely messy corporate news. On July 17, Bethesda Game Studios published a lengthy roadmap letter confirming that Fallout 5 is officially in pre-production, running on Creation Engine 3 (which is the same tech base being built for The Elder Scrolls VI). The studio also confirmed remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, a new Fallout 76 expansion called Raven Rock that serves as a prequel to Fallout 3, and (perhaps most surprising and exciting to longtime fans) a new mainline collaboration with Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind New Vegas, marking its first return to the series since 2010.
That flurry of good news doesn’t come from nowhere, though. It follows a rough few weeks at Xbox, where new CEO Asha Sharma has been overseeing what she’s called the most significant restructuring in the Microsoft-owned division’s history: as many as 3,200 job cuts across the gaming business over the next year, with roughly 1,600 already gone. Obsidian was hit particularly hard, losing about a quarter of its staff, and the fallout (parson the pun) from that reorganization claimed an unexpected casualty. A planned sequel to last year’s colorful RPG Avowed has been nixed. According to reporting from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Microsoft steered Obsidian away from the Avowed follow-up so the studio could redirect its resources toward the new Fallout project, reportedly to be led by Josh Sawyer, the original director of Fallout: New Vegas. Interestingly, later reporting suggests a small team at Obsidian is still quietly working on Avowed 2 in the hopes of one day getting the generous, old-school adventure “uncancelled,” even though it’s technically off the books for now.
Taken together, it’s a lot of whiplash for one franchise in a single week. More fallout as it happens.
