Fallout London is one of the most publicised and highly anticipated mods in franchise history. An entire team has been working on creating this game-sized mod to Fallout 4 for several years, posting regular updates and expanding the horizons of the mod immeasurably. We’ve seen celebrities brought in to fill in voice roles, developers on the team hired by Bethesda Game Studios, and plenty of people chatter online about the expectations of this ambitious mod.
Recently, the team took to social media to reveal that Fallout London, due to be released next week, has been indefinitely delayed as the Fallout 4 next-gen update approaches.
‘The Past Four Years of Our Work…’
In a recent video, ‘Team FOLON’ explained that, because of the impending next-gen update, ‘the past four years of our work stand to just simply break.’
There are anticipations that the Fallout 4 next-gen update will knock out of control thousands of mods, mostly because of the impact that’ll undoubtedly land on the ‘F4SE’ mod, which is the ‘Fallout 4 Script Extender’. Many mods rely on it to run in the first place, and it’ll inevitably be struck down – at least temporarily – by Bethesda Game Studios’ ambitious overhaul to Fallout 4, which was released in 2015.
I’m of the standpoint that the Fallout London team should have anticipated this change, especially given the insider connections to Bethesda Game Studios. It was inevitable that it was going to be released, and since the end of 2023, we’ve known that the next-gen update will drop this year. Bethesda recently confirmed it’s being released on April 25. In the video recently uploaded, which you can see below, it was said that Bethesda has never ‘had a conversation’ with the Fallout London team, but some former team members are Bethesda Game Studios.
Not only that but it was confirmed that Nexus Mods, the number one repository for Fallout mods, cannot host Fallout London as the file size is simply too large. That too came as a surprise, as it should have been relatively obvious that this particular link-up would fail – and the team confirming this particular disappointment should have come way more than a week before the intended release date. Instead, the Fallout London mod will be hosted on GOG.
It’s not yet known whether it’ll be a day, a week, or a month-long delay – all that we do know is that we’re not getting Fallout London yet.
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Team FOLON were more than aware of the upcoming update, they clearly anticipated it. They spoke at length about it at length at their C3 Charity Panel, how it could throw a spanner in the works, it’s the *timing* of the release that has been the problem. They clearly hoped the update patch would drop before the 23rd so they’d have something to work with, but alas not. I also think that Bethesda not reaching out to them was, in context, actually about publishing Fallout: London as a standalone like Enderal, and not that Bethesda have never contacted them, period. Though we don’t actually know the nuances of how those ex-FOLON team members were hired by Bethesda – it could very well be that individuals were contacted directly, or that they applied for positions, and not that BGS approached the whole mod team at large. We don’t even know if the insider connections are still in touch – isn’t it a thing that, once you’re hired by Bethesda, you can no longer make or contribute to mods? It’s all muddy, and it’s frustrating, but ultimately FOLON are making the right decision to delay, weather the storm, and avoid inexperienced modders proclaiming it the next Fallout Frontier because they don’t know how to stop the breakage 2 days in. What’s another month or so after 4 years of development?