Fallout London, as you may know, has been an ongoing mod development project since 2019 and aims to bring the setting of London to the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Looking at most of the UK, you’ll realize that half of it is already there. Regardless, just weeks before the scheduled April 23rd release date, Bethesda announced a surprise Fallout 4 next-gen update to be released on April 25th, which delayed the mod indefinitely.
The issue is that whenever a game’s core files are changed, mods that work with those core files must be updated, breaking mods that rely on them, since Fallout: London apparently needs a lot of core game files to work properly. as if the project was dead in the water, or at the very least, tied up in a major delay. But the developers at Team Folon now have other ideas.
Fallout 4 next-gen update deemed ‘not stable enough’
A development update was shared on the Fallout: London Discord server by project lead Dean Carter, (says Ars Technica) The message was: “At the 11th hour we have discovered that the next generation [version of Fallout 4]even after the updates, it is not stable enough and so we are now running on the old version – hence the need for a reducer.”
This followed a message posted on X by Team Folon from July 6 assuring people that the game was in the QA stages on GOG, the platform that will host the DLC-sized mod. And of course, you can find the game listed on the site through community wishlists.
It looks like the team at Team Folon has decided to include a mod part of the game, and it doesn’t look like you have to adjust your game manually either. Although this usually just involves using an older .exe file. It looks like this is the best route to take, as work on the mod update was further interrupted when Bethesda released another update for Fallout 4 on May 13, apparently to fix half of that that broke.
It’s not like the next-gen update was revolutionary at all, it didn’t even give the nearly 10-year-old game a fresh coat of paint like many expected. All it did was include some settings changes, break some save files, and add some mod content that we could have added ourselves. Not that we’re trying to say that any of this isn’t hard to do, and it’s great that Bethesda is trying to keep the game up to date for us, but I personally won’t miss an update.
It also crashed my wait, as it did with many other players, and half the addons didn’t work, so what was the point of it all?
Bethesda could have been more considerate
In my eyes, I loved Bethesda, there are some heartfelt stories online of fans who sadly died playing as characters, and people trying to pay for bottle cap games and Bethesda honoring it. It’s stories like this that really make me think that Bethesda cares about the community, which is why I’m so confused that it all played out this way.
Now, I didn’t and never did expect Bethesda to put their agenda on hold for the sake of a mod, but I would have loved to have seen Bethesda stretch out a lot of time to at least give the Fallout development team: London a heads up. It’s not like Fallout: London is a low-key project, I doubt anyone at Bethesda has heard of it before.
When is Fallout: London coming out?
Fallout: London was originally set to release on April 23rd on Nexus mods, the popular mod hosting site. However, both of those points have now changed, because the files are too big to keep on the Nexus, and Bethesda threw a mini-nuke into Team Fallon’s plans to release the game, as we just discussed.
Thankfully, GOG stepped up and provided a “light at the end of the tunnel,” Carter said, even going so far as to help with the QA process, helping to make sure the mod and degrader work well on all devices. A GOG spokesperson told TheGamer.
Fallout: London’s release could technically hit us any day now, with no word on how long the mod will take during the QA process. I can’t wait to grab the mode and jump into post-apocalyptic London and discover what horrors the UK’s post-war capital holds. One thing is certain though, is that war, war never changes.