The much-anticipated Fallout London has been delayed indefinitely, in order to avoid a potential clash with the imminent Fallout 4 next-gen update for the post-apocalyptic open-world RPG. One of the most ambitious and exciting fan projects ever, I and many others have been eagerly anticipating this vast Fallout 4 mod that’s essentially the closest we’ll get to a Fallout 5 any time soon. Previously pushed back to avoid the Starfield launch and set to release on Tuesday April 23, Team FOLON says that Fallout London will now come out “as soon as we’ve fixed it” following the Bethesda update.
“Many of you have been awaiting an update from us in regards to what’s going to happen with Fallout London and the next-gen update.” Project lead Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter from Team FOLON, the creators of Fallout London, delivers the bad news. He notes that the previous date of April 23 is “a special day for us London fans” – it’s both St George’s Day (the patron saint of England) and also the day that the mod’s story begins in the RPG game.
“Everything has been set to go since our last update,” Carter says, explaining that the team has simply been “tweaking and testing” as it prepared for the special day when one of the biggest Fallout 4 mods was set to arrive. Unfortunately, that all changed when Bethesda announced the Fallout 4 next-gen update would be arriving just two days later, on Thursday April 25.
“With the new update dropping just 48 hours later, the past four years of our work stand to just simply break,” Carter says. “Before you grab the pitchforks to go after Bethesda or tell us that we’re idiots and you know how to stop the update – remember, that’s you know how to do it, not the collective. This is a collective project; we want everyone to have the past four years of work to come out and be the best mod possible for all of our followers. We want to incorporate this special mod that we’ve created for everyone.”
The upshot, then, is that there isn’t a simple answer to when the mod will arrive. “We can say this with certainty,” Carter explains, “systems based on F4SE [the mod framework behind Fallout London’s dialogue system and many of the other leading Fallout 4 mods] will break. Our updated UI with many of the cool new features, the quests, the perk systems, that will all break. All of the amazing 2D art that you guys love, that will break.”
“These will all require fixing as soon as that update drops – that goes without saying, that’s not a question.” Carter says that the team also spent a lot of time carefully tweaking and honing the massive world of Fallout London to run smoothly, and that “while we’ve largely achieved this in our current system, we know that those breaks are coming and that will make it run like blancmange, and we don’t want you to be running around like that.”
The teams behind those modding systems aren’t part of Team FOLON, Carter explains, and “while we’ve reached out to them, they need to find that time to fix it. We’re all volunteers, everyone in the community is, so they have to fix this in their own free time – we can’t rush them.” It’s an agonizing but understandable problem. “It really, really pains me and the team because we have to twiddle our thumbs and see when we can get this out to you guys.”
Despite the delay, Carter has a lot of hope for the potential this could unlock. “The fact that Bethesda is keeping what is an old game updated is honestly a great thing – many members of the team are very excited to see this,” he notes. “On the technical front, being able to play Fallout London with the new potential engine improvements and the performance upgrades is fantastic. It’s going to mean that we can push the engine even harder than we’ve already pushed it. This is all going to be a boon.”
There’s also good news on the distribution of Fallout London. Carter says “the mod is just too big” to be hosted on standard mod sites despite support from the team at Nexus Mods. Fortunately, distribution platform GOG (owned by Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher studio CD Projekt) has stepped in to provide “A viable way to make the mod available for anyone who owns the game on GOG, and Steam, and perhaps even Epic Games, once this new update comes out. GOG has honestly been our saving grace and we cannot recommend them more highly.”
“We’ve had no help to make the mod standalone – Bethesda has never reached out to us during our entire tenure,” Carter continues, explaining that the only crossovers that have come (social media posts and a load screen appearance) “were only done through communication with the community manager. We’ve never had an in-depth conversation with them.” The option for Fallout London to be launched fully standalone like Skyrim total conversion Enderal “could only be achieved if Bethesda gets on board and allows us to do it.”
“We won’t give you a fancy release date this time,” Carter explains, “because it might be on April 25 – we might get lucky with a day one fix; it’s unlikely but it could happen – or it might be a month from now. But please know that it’s sitting there, ready to go, just awaiting those fixes. As soon as we’ve fixed it, it’ll drop, but yeah – Bethesda. Bethesda never changes,” he concludes with a smile.
It’s certainly a shame that Fallout London won’t make it for its special day of April 23, although it’ll still arrive a long, long way ahead of any potential Fallout 5 release date. If you just can’t get by without something a little post-apocalypse flavored in the coming weeks, the best games like Fallout should keep you busy enough.
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