To say that Fallout: London's development has been tricky would be a bit of an understatement. Team Folon, the people behind this expansive mod that brings the retro-apocalyptic world of Fallout to the UK, had been working on Fallout: London for four years before they had to delay the release due to a disruptive Fallout 4 next-gen update from Bethesda.
In an interview with the BBC, the project lead at Fallout: London, Dean Carter, voiced his discontent with Bethesda's decision not to warn his team about the update that would inevitably break multiple mods, as it forced them back a few weeks so they could tweak issues that arose from it. "That has, for lack of a better term, screwed us over," Carter says. Some of his complaints weren't entirely reasonable, though, as Fallout: London is a fan mod and not part of Bethesda's verified creator program, and there's no precedent for big companies warning community-made mods about upcoming internal plans.
After almost three months of working through issues with the new update, we finally heard some good news: Team Folon confirmed that Fallout: London's release is just on the horizon. All that they are waiting on now is for the QA process over at GOG to be carried out in full: "Once they've completed the process of double-checking that Fallout: London and its installer work on all supported machines, we should be good to go," Team Folon says on Twitter.
But as the modders worked through issues with Bethesda's next-gen update they found that fixing Fallout: London wouldn't be as easy as they first thought. Despite Bethesda releasing a patch for the update, most of the biggest problems are still intact, VATS is still broken, and so is ultrawide. With that in mind, Team Folon is asking players to downgrade the game.
Replying to some fans in Team Folon's Discord, Carter assures players that "GOG has been amazing through all of this. What with us having things break due to the net-gen update. Then, waiting for them to be fixed only for the fact that at the 11th hour, we discovered that the next-gen [update], even after updates, isn't stable enough, and thus, we are now going out on the old version (thus the need for a downgrader)...[GOG's] commitment to helping and supporting is exemplary."
The choice to use a downgrader isn't shocking, as many players came to this conclusion by themselves, and the update is still broken for a lot of people. Some fans did query why Team Folon can't just downgrade it automatically as the mod will have a custom installer, but others pointed out the Team simply might not want to maintain multiple versions of the project.
Honestly, I'm sure most fans will just be happy to finally get their hands on Fallout: London after waiting over four years to explore this DLC-sized mod. Back in 2021, we called it the best announcement of E3, so expectations have been high for quite some time now.
