Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says that Black Isle Studios was never going to complete its second canceled Fallout 3 project in the timeframe that'd been given for it, saying it would have taken "at least" another two years with the team that was available.
Although Fallout 3 is, of course, a game that exists, two attempts at a third Fallout game were made by Black Isle Studios before that final version by Bethesda ever came to be. As revealed in an interview with IGN from 2017, the first actually ended up leading to the creation of the RPG Icewind Dale (on which Sawyer was a designer), but the second, and more widely known attempt was codenamed Van Buren, which was canceled in 2003.
