Fallout London interview: ‘If it’s an awful launch we’ll probably all just go to sleep’

Fallout London project lead Dean Carter talks to GameCentral ahead of the mod’s release, about what to expect, the drama with Bethesda, and why the fan project has to succeed.

The upcoming Fallout London mod is finally close to being released, after the next gen update debacle earlier this year, when the fan project was forced to delay its launch because Bethesda shipped an update to Fallout 4 that made the mod unplayable.

After trying to fix the resulting issues, which the mod’s lead developer Dean Carter calls a ‘nightmare’, they’ve decided to move forward by asking fans to downgrade their Fallout 4 copies instead, so that they can play the mod as intended.

The Fallout London team is now waiting to see what countless hours of volunteering work gets them or, as Carter puts it: ‘If it’s an awful launch then we’ll probably all just go to sleep, and vanish from society.’

Last week, Carter released a progress update saying that they have sent the mod to GOG for testing and that all the team is waiting for now, before they can launch, is the thumbs up from them.

Prying a launch date out of Carter is impossible though, as he says that they couldn’t reveal the release date even if they wanted to, because they’ve all signed non-disclosure agreements.

Still, Carter has implied that Fallout London will come out in the next couple of weeks, so it’s not going to be long whenever it is.

The lead dev is, however, happy to talk in depth about what exactly happened with Bethesda during the next gen update release, what’s next for the team, and why Fallout London has to succeed.

The idea of making a Fallout 4 mod, set in a post-apocalyptic London in 2237, was conceived by Carter and a friend in 2019, but it only really took off in 2021.

The team has seen almost 100 developers work on the mod in total, although Carter suggests that some were credit chasers, who disappeared after doing a bare minimum of work.

On top of that, there have been between 100-130 voice actors involved, including the actor for Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 and, more recently, former Speaker of the House John Bercow. But the core team that has been pushing the project forward consists of 20 to 30 people.

It’s a huge operation, considering it’s just a mod, but that’s why Fallout London can’t fail, as so many people have put blood, sweat, and tears into the project, resulting in a map that is roughly the size of Fallout 4 itself.

Carter and co. are now crossing their fingers ahead of the release, but they’re also already planning for a future together, possibly as an indie studio, if Fallout London is received well.

‘I think we’ve worked too hard to not try to do something afterwards. And we have got a couple of very exciting members of our team that are trying to do elevator pitches for new projects.

‘We’re looking at maybe going the indie developer route, which is something that we’ve tried to make sure that we’ve got our foundation in place for, if we do want to go that route. Or maybe we’ll do something more social media based on YouTube and the like.’

‘Where we’ll go really depends on how things go here, but I can see a logical next step being something together. Because we all enjoy working together and I think doing something that brings in an income for us all, that isn’t just a mod, would be great.’

While Carter and the Fallout London team are excited to finally release their mod, the project has been far from an easy ride.

Bethesda’s next gen update would have come out just two days after Fallout London’s planned release date on April 23, but it made the mod unplayable to anyone who installed the update.

‘If we released when we said we were going to release, within two days it would have just broken. And that’s not like a little bit, functionally it wouldn’t load. Everything to do with it you might as well have just uninstalled it at that point,’ Carter says.

The Fallout London team tried to make it work with Bethesda’s next gen update, but eventually realised that the task was ‘insurmountable’.

‘Some of the core functionality that they’ve [Bethesda] brought to the table is still broken, so now we’ve had to revert back to the other version that we said we were going to release. So yeah, it’s been a bit of a nightmare in terms of trying to release,’ says Carter.

In the end the they decided to simply add a ‘downgrader’ with the mod, which let’s fans remove the next gen update with ‘just a click of a button’.

It was still a ‘frustrating’ experience, according to Carter, whose contact at Bethesda was a ‘clearly overworked’ community manager.

‘What we want is to speak to a decision-maker, because if we could make it a standalone thing with their [Bethesda’s] permission, that means that people on gaming consoles could use it, which they currently can’t.’

As such, Fallout London will be released solely on PC, and available to those who own a copy of Fallout 4 and all its downloadable content (except for fans who bought it via the Epic Games store, as it doesn’t support update rollbacks).

To all Fallout fans who are eagerly anticipating the Fallout London mod, Carter had the following message, doing his very best not to spoil anything:

‘You wake up in a lab and you have to try to figure out what is going on, who are the people involved in the situation that you’re in, and you have to escape your situation.

‘Once you have escaped, you then see what is going on in London, and then you have to deal with the consequences of what is happening in London at that time.’

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