Bethesda may have big plans in store for the STALKER franchise after rumors surfaced that the Fallout publisher had picked up the rights to the Ukrainian post-apocalyptic series.

These rumors appear to have some meat to their bones with word from Russian blogger Sergey Galyonkin that Bethesda has picked up the rights to create and publish a STALKER game. Galyonkin previously made public the information about STALKER 2's demise and the financial problems faced by its developer, GSC.

Bethesda may not own the rights to STALKER, but Galyonkin says that they have the rights to develop a game based on the franchise with their own technology—which presumably includes both id Tech 5 and the highly modified version of the GameBryo engine which they used to develop Skyrim.

We have contacted Bethesda for comment.