Fallout: London as it appeared in December when its planned April 23 release was announced.
After years of work, third-party modders at Team Folon announced over the weekend that their long-awaited (and recently delayed) DLC-sized unofficial fan mod, Fallout: London, is now in “QA testing” and awaiting a “final green light” from launch partner GOG. But this version will apparently have to use a “downgrade” to bypass a recent Bethesda “next-gen” update that overturned all of the modding team’s efforts.
In December, Team Folon announced that it was working on Fallout: London the mod will end with a planned release on April 23rd, coinciding with England’s widely celebrated St. George’s Day. Then, just weeks before the scheduled launch, Bethesda announced that its own planned “next-gen” update for the 2015 game will be released on April 25, two days after Fallout: Londonlaunch target.
“It, for lack of a better term, screwed us over,” Team Folon project manager Dean Carter said in an interview with the BBC shortly after Bethesda’s update was announced. In a separate video, Carter said the next-gen update “requires a lot of our internal systems to be updated” because content created by them in Negative impact 4 Script Extender will likely not work under the updated code. This turned out to be a valid concern, as the next-gen update ended up breaking a lot Negative impact 4 mods and saves after launching it.
“With the new update dropping just 48 hours later [than our planned launch]the last four years of our work just broke,” Carter said at the time. “We had a release candidate ready to go, but we had to leave it for the fixes we know it would need.”
Move backward to move forward
To implement these necessary fixes, Team Folon said in a social media update over the weekend that it will use a “downgrade” to roll back Bethesda’s mod-breaking updates. “At the 11th hour we discovered that the next generation, even after updates, was not stable enough,” Carter wrote on the Team Folon Discord. “Thus now we are coming out on the old version, therefore there is a need for a downgrade.”
Carter discusses the reason behind the original Fallout: London delay.
Team Folon’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 to have something. Then let’s hold off to wait for next-gen third-party fixes. Then let’s have another update. Then it doesn’t work,” Carter wrote on Discord. “It was a total disappointment and any failure requires restarting the testing process.” That’s why we’ve decided to go the downgrade route, and when the ‘next gen’ is sorted, update it for that.”
Team Folon originally planned to release Fallout: London on Nexus Mods, but the files turned out to be too large to be hosted 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 is currently helping to provide the 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 one project we wanted to support and we were like, ‘Hey guys, this is great. Let’s do it, it’s going to be fun.”We’re already having a lot of fun preparing for it. “
Although Team Folon has not announced a new release date for Fallout: London it still looks like GOG’s quality assurance review is now the last thing preventing the long-awaited launch. When someone asks for a release date on the Team Folon Discord, they are met with a standard message: “As soon as we fix what the update broke, it will be out.”
