Fallout: London will be destroying the next-gen update, in true Fallout style

Fallout London, as you may know, has been an ongoing mod development project since 2019, and it aims to bring the London setting into the post-apocalyptic wasteland. If you look at most of the United Kingdom, you’d realize that half of it is already there. However, just a few weeks before its scheduled April 23rd release date, Bethesda announced a surprise next-gen update to Fallout 4 that would be released on April 25th, delaying the mod indefinitely.

The problem is that whenever a game’s core files are changed, mods that work with those core files need to be updated, breaking the mods that rely on them. Since Fallout: London presumably relies on a lot of base game files to run properly, it seemed like the project was dead, or at the very least stuck in a major delay. But the developers at Team Folon now have other ideas.

Fallout 4 next-gen update considered ‘not stable enough’

A development update was shared on the Fallout: London Discord server by project lead Dean Carter (as reported by Ars Technica). The message read: “At the last minute we discovered that the next generation [version of Fallout 4]even after updates, is not stable enough and therefore we now assume the old version – hence the need for a downgrader.”

This followed a message Team Folon posted to X on July 6th, assuring folks that the game was in QA on GOG, the platform that will host the DLC-format mod. Sure enough, you can find the game on the site via the community wishlists.

It appears that the team over at Team Folon have decided to include a down-patch of the game in the mod, and it doesn’t appear that you’ll need to manually down-patch your game. Although that usually just involves rolling back an older .exe file. It seems like this is the best route to take, as the work to update the mod was further disrupted when Bethesda released another update for Fallout 4 on May 13th, presumably to fix half of what they had broken.

It’s not that the next-gen updater was revolutionary, it didn’t even give the nearly decade-old game a fresh coat of paint like many were expecting. All it did was adjust some settings, break some save files, and add some mod content that we could have added ourselves. Not to say that all of this isn’t difficult to do, and it’s nice that Bethesda is trying to keep the game up to date for us, but I personally won’t miss the update.

My save file also broke, like many other players, and half of the add-ons didn’t work. What was the point of this?

Bethesda could have taken more account of

In my eyes I liked Bethesda, there are some genuine stories online of fans who sadly passed away and ended up as characters in the game, and people who tried to pay for games with bottle caps and Bethesda honored them. It’s stories like this that really make me think that Bethesda cares about the community, which is why I’m so baffled that it all turned out this way.

Now, I didn’t and never would have expected Bethesda to put their schedule on hold for a mod, but I do wish Bethesda had reached out well ahead of time to at least give the team developing Fallout: London a heads up. It’s not like Fallout: London is a low-key project, I doubt anyone at Bethesda has heard of it before.

When is Fallout: London coming out?

Fallout: London was originally scheduled for release on April 23rd on Nexus Mods, the popular mod hosting site. However, both of those things have now changed, as the files are too large to host on Nexus, and Bethesda dropped a mini-nuke on their Team Fallon plans to release the game, as we just discussed.

Thankfully, GOG stepped up and provided a “light at the end of the tunnel,” Carter said, even going so far as to help with the QA process to ensure the mod and downgrader worked properly on all devices, a GOG spokesperson told TheGamer.