Fallout: London as looked back in December when it was announced its scheduled release on April 23rd.
After years of work, third-party modders from Team Folon announced over the weekend that their long-awaited (and recently delayed) DLC-sized unofficial fan mod, Fallout: London, is now in “quality testing” and awaiting the “final green light” from partner GOG. But this release will apparently have to use a “downgrader” to address Bethesda’s recent “next-gen” update that broke all of the team’s modding efforts.
In December, Team Folon announced that its work on Fallout: London the mod would culminate in a planned release on April 23rd, which would follow the widely celebrated St. George’s Day in England. Then, just weeks before the scheduled launch, Bethesda he announced that its own planned “next-gen” update for the game in 2015 will be released on April 25, two days after Fallout: Londonstart target.
“That, for lack of a better term, screwed us over,” said Folon team project manager Dean Carter in an interview with the BBC shortly after Bethesda announced the update. In a separate video, Carter said the next-gen update “requires updating a lot of our internal systems” because the content they created in Fallout 4 Script Extender would probably not work under the updated code. This turned out to be a valid concern as the next-gen update ended up breaking many Fallout 4 modifies and saves after its release.
“With the new update, it will only drop 48 hours later [than our planned launch]the last four years of our work is just going to break,” Carter said at the time.
Move back to move forward
To implement the needed fixes, Team Folon said in a social media update over the weekend that they will use a “downgrader” to roll back Bethesda updates that break mods. “We found out at the 11th hour that the next generation, even after updates, is not stable enough,” Carter wrote on the Team Folon Discord. “So now we’re running an old version, so we need a downgrader.”
Carter discusses the reason behind the original Fallout: London delay.
The Folon team’s release plans were further complicated when Bethesda released another game update on May 13 that disrupted their work. “The most annoying thing for us is having something. Then putting it off waiting for next-gen 3rd party fixes. Then having another update. Then it still doesn’t work,” Carter wrote on Discord. “It was a complete frustration and every failure requires a restart of the testing process. So we decided to go down the downgrade route and update when the ‘next generation’ is sorted.”
Team Folon originally planned the release Fallout: London on Nexus Mods, but the files ended up being too large to host on the popular mod distribution site. Fortunately, GOG provided “light at the end of the tunnel” for the mod’s release, Carter said, and the platform currently helps provide final quality assurance to ensure that “Fallout: London and its installer [and downgrader] work on all supported machines.”
“I think for us and what sets GOG apart from Steam is that we’re just a bunch of very enthusiastic guys,” a GOG spokesperson told TheGamer in a recent interview about the distribution. Fallout: London. “There was just a project we wanted to support and we were like, ‘Hey guys, this is cool. Let’s do it, it’s going to be fun.’ We’re going to have a lot of fun getting ready for it.”
While Team Folon has not announced a new release date Fallout: London so far, it sounds like GOG’s quality control is now the last thing standing in the way of the long-awaited launch. When anyone asks about the release date on the Team Folon Discord, they’re greeted with a message from the warehouse: “Once we fix what the update breaks, it’ll be out.”