Bethesda unceremoniously dropped a cache of news about its upcoming games today as the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 drags ever closer to 10 years. In a lengthy Twitter post, we learned that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters are in the works, and buried in the middle of the reveal blitz is the next Fallout 76 expansion, titled Raven Rock.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," reads Bethesda's announcement. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over.

"In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year: Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

Unironically, this is one of the most exciting new Bethesda announcements in a long while. The Fallout 76 team has proven itself capable of telling compelling stories at the scale of mainline Fallout games with substantial narrative expansions like Steel Dawn and Steel Reign, which together tell one of my favorite interpretations of the Brotherhood of any game in the series. I'm thrilled about the potential to see the same development team explore that faction even further in a Fallout 3 prequel story.

We also have a writeup on everything that was announced about the future of Fallout as well as The Elder Scrolls, which is all relatively exciting if you can get past the stink of Xbox's recent layoff bloodbath, which definitely impacted Bethesda proper as well as many other Xbox studios. For what it's worth, the labor union representing Bethesda Game Studios employees in the US and Canada suggested in the wake of the company's announcements that it was simply a distraction from the bad news, and that fans would do well not to "fall for it."

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day"