In July 2024, Fallout: London was released after years of development. The game-sized mod represented one of the most ambitious and long-awaited conversion projects in the history of the Fallout franchise, and it was very well received by fans worldwide. Owing to the size and stature of Fallout: London, it garnered quite a cult following over the years.
However, one of the people who perhaps should have been interested in it but wasn’t was Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard. In a recent interview, Howard revealed that he hasn’t played and never really followed Fallout: London, arguably the biggest Fallout 4 mod ever created and a transformative, mighty project.
Todd Howard Plays it Safe with Fallout: London
The driving theory behind Todd Howard’s apparent disinterest in Fallout: London is that he was hampered from praising the project by legal conditions. It’s no big secret that mods walk a grey area when it comes to legitimacy and IP infringement, but they’re part and parcel of the Bethesda landscape regardless.
If Todd Howard started gushing over Fallout: London, he’d have netizens taking to social media the world over to declare the mod canon, or something.
In a recent interview hosted to celebrate the launch of Fallout’s second season, Todd Howard was asked about his interest in the Fallout: London mod, but the recognizable developer played coy:
Only some videos that I’ve seen online; I have not played it.
Only a little bit. I would say we look at a lot of the modding that’s going on, and when you have those total conversions – I just want to say how hard that is.
And so, the fact that it came out, first of all, because most of those never come out, and the fact that it came out… It seems a lot of fans love it.
It’s just – I need to express to everybody out there how difficult and what a journey that is for some of these big mod teams to do stuff like that.
It also doesn’t help that he’s probably so busy he’s lucky ever to scrape a few hours playing any Fallout game, modded or otherwise.
Fallout: London represents what’s possible when a team of dozens pours resources, time, money, and effort into creating a passion project and turning it into something tangible and wholly accepted by a community. It’s one of the single-biggest mods in the gaming space, and it takes Fallout 4 and manipulates it into something otherworldly.
Team FOLON, the folks behind the mod, did such a good job that one or two of them were ultimately hired by Bethesda Game Studios.
When it launched, it was hosted on GOG and was downloaded a whopping 500,000 times in 24 hours, and in 2025, a VR version of the mod surfaced. If that wasn’t enough, more than a year after release, an expansion called Rabbit and Pork dropped, fuelling more interest in the mod.
Have you ever played Fallout: London? Let us know what you thought about the game-sized mod on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that an AAA John Wick game is in development
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Fire him too along with Phil, Aaron, Sarah, and Matt
Once I realized that all these game-sized mods were taking ideas off the table from future publishers, I stopped following them. I mean how many other games have the fandom designing entire storylines using modding tools? Yes, impressive, but it means there will never be an official Fallout: London nor Miami etc etc
Weird take Zach as it will be 15 years at the least between Bethesda’s releases of Fallout games. You think they have all these games in a pipeline? Maybe your grandkids can play it. FOLON runs better and has few bugs than the last 2 RERELEASES of Fallout 4 (aka money grabs). Why should it mater that if its “official”? To update Todd’s own catchphrase “Its just better”.
These game-sized mods are terrible fanfics and reminds me of OCs by amateur artists. Mods are only good for bypassing copyrights and implementing cool gameplay mechanics, not for even worse than millenial writing.
My thought on this is that after seeing how much backlash mods such as fallout the frontier got online for its uhhh…. “””fan service””” they opted to keep a wide berth from large unofficial mod releases featuring new storys factions settings etc, as well as the developers of these mods. Its just a safe way to avoid any actual backlash.
Actually instead of quiet praise or feigned indifference, Bethesda has stated before that no official fallout game will take place outside the US. Fallout London is just fan fiction that doesn’t get the premise of what the fallout universe was supposed to be about.
Don’t care much for Todd but I agree with his disinterest in this. Fallout is based heavily on American post war nostalgia and while the entire world would obviously suffer in a nuclear war, it just doesn’t work in other countries. If people are enjoying FOLO that’s great but it’s not fallout.
“Story mods” mostly just remind me that fan projects have even worse writing than the games themselves.
It’s understandable, since modding takes skills distinct from story writing and there likely aren’t resources enough to hire experienced writers, but it doesn’t mean I want to spend my time groaning my way through more hack plots and embarrassing dialogue.
Anyone that even remotely sides with Todd and his terrible views here, is a part of the problem. All of these mods do 110% the effort of any of these so called “triple A studios” and bethesda has released skyrim what, 10+ times? Fire todd, get his trash ideas out of here and stop being so god damn lazy bethesda, you are a joke.
Honestly though, who cares what Todd Howard thinks, Fallout isnt his thing. He didnt come up with it, and so far we’ve had a search for you dad adventure, and a search for you kid adventure. Which smacks of Todd’s first official project, Red Guard, aka. search for your sister adventure.
All Todd does is ‘play it safe’, well, apart from 76, which is messing with the lore!
The TV series was considered safe by some people because Todd was involved…..really? 3 main characters and at least 2 are on search for your family members adventures.
Let’s all be honest, the best official fallout game to come out in 3D has been New Vegas, and guess who wasn’t involved in that?
Imagine that, I actually agree with Todd on something. This mod was such a random waste of time and resources whilst we can’t even get mods to remake 1 and 2 in the current engine.