The creators of the long-awaited Fallout London mod have delayed it indefinitely out of fear that the Fallout 4 next-gen update will break it.
Last week, Bethesda announced an April 25 release date for the long-awaited next-gen update for Fallout 4, upon which the ambitious, DLC-sized Fallout London is based. That’s just two days after Fallout London’s already announced April 23 release date.
As modders have experienced in the past, Bethesda game updates have a tendency to break existing mods, and it’s exactly that fear that sparked an announcement from a clearly exacerbated Fallout London mod team.
"We've just been tweaking and testing non-stop in order to get things as stable as we can for you all in time for that release," said Team FOLON project lead Dean Carter in an announcement video. "But with the new update dropping just 48 hours later, the past four years of our work stand to just simply break."
The expectation is the Fallout 4 update will break the Fallout 4 script extender, upon which Fallout London and many other Fallout 4 mods rely. And so Team FOLON must wait for the creators of the Fallout 4 script extender to issue compatability fixes of their own before it can hit the go button on Fallout London. But without knowing when those modders, who are all volunteers, will have the time to deal with the problem, a new Fallout London release date is impossible to announce.
Carter is clearly disappointed with the delay ("this pains us, honestly, it really, really hurts us"). April 23 is St. George's Day, the celebration of England's patron saint, and Fallout London would have enjoyed a nice tie-in if it had hit its announced release date. Similarly, April 23 is the day Fallout London begins in-game, so players who jumped in on St. George's Day in real-life would have been aligned with the game.
Carter also claimed that Team FOLON does not have a line of communication with Bethesda, which perhaps explains how the Fallout 4 next-gen update release date blindsided the modders. "Bethesda has never reached out to us during our entire tenure," Carter said. "We've never had an in-depth conversation with them. Ever."
Ultimately, Carter sounded philosophical about what’s happened to Fallout London. He said any potential engine improvements and performance upgrades will benefit the mod, letting the team “push the engine even harder than we've already pushed it, so we're gonna get these great quality-of-life improvements all in the mod." One example Carter provided is widescreen compatability, which was previously up in the air (the Fallout 4 update for PC adds widescreen and ultra-widescreen support).
Carter concluded the announcement with a reference to that classic Fallout line: “War. War never changes.” "As soon as we've fixed it, it'll drop," Carter said, "but yeah, Bethesda. Bethesda never changes."
Fallout London is, as you’d expect, not set in America but in London, and as such explores a new setting for the series as well as pre-war European history, and the effects the Resource Wars had on the class structured society of pre-war Britain. Players will engage with everything from “stuffy parliamentary aristocrats to a resurrection of the Knights of the Round Table to an uncompromising cult of revolutionaries.” Neil Newbon, the actor behind Baldur's Gate 3's much-loved vampire companion Astarion, plays an unannounced role, as does Anna Demetriou, who voiced Sophia in A Plague Tale: Requiem and Dorys in Final Fantasy 16.
When the creators of Fallout London say it’s a DLC-sized mod, they mean it. It currently weighs in at around 30 to 40 GB, which makes it too big for Fallout 4 on console and even Nexus Mods itself. GOG, which specializes in selling DRM-free PC games, has apparently stepped in to make Fallout London available to Fallout 4 owners across GOG, Steam, and potentially the Epic Games Store, after the next-gen update goes live.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
