The Fallout: London mod has been delayed by Fallout 4's planned next-gen update

YouTube

Fallout: London is an ambitious project, a Fallout 4 overhaul set it what probably isn't be a "green and pleasant land" in the post-apocalyptic times. I mean, it might still be green but only because it's glowing. It's a big project, one that will feature Baldur's Gate 3 voice actor Neil Newbon, but it's had to push its planned April 23 release date back due to Fallout 4's next-gen update, which is set to go live on April 25.

As players of Skyrim Special Edition will know, updates for Bethesda's RPGs inevitably break the mods many players rely on, meaning modders have to scramble to update their work to make it compatible with a new executable. "We've just been tweaking and testing to get things as stable as we can for you all in time for that release," says project lead Dean Carter, "But with the new update dropping just 48 hours later, the past four years of our work stand to just simply break."

Fallout: London, like many Fallout 4 mods, relies on the Fallout 4 script extender. That'll be what breaks when the next-gen update comes out, and every mod that relies on it will have to wait for the team of modders behind it to update that framework before they can finalize their own mod compatibility. Which is why Fallout: London no longer has a release date.

Another issue Fallout: London has faced is due to its size, which is "currently standing at around 30 to 40 GB." That makes it too big for the console version of Fallout 4, and too big for Nexus Mods. "We have tried to work with them to get it out," Carter says, "but unfortunately the mod's just too big. They can't host it on their website." Fortunately GOG stepped in and has apparently solved the problem. "We've had some conversations with the technical boffins over at GOG," Carter says, "and we now have a viable way to make the mod available for anyone who owns the mod on GOG, and Steam, and perhaps even Epic Games once this new update from Bethesda comes out."

It's not all bad news. "On the technical front, being able to play Fallout: London with the new potential engine improvements and the performance upgrades is fantastic," Carter says. "It's gonna mean that we can push the engine even harder than we've already pushed it, so we're gonna get these great quality-of-life improvements all in the mod."

Carter finishes by explaining that the team can no longer promise a specific release date for Fallout London. "As soon as we've fixed it, it'll drop," he says, before sighing, "but yeah, Bethesda. Bethesda never changes."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.