Today, April 23, was orginally supposed to be the release date of Fallout: London, with the massive mod being pencilled in for St Georges’s Day following a delay late last year. However, Fallout 4‘s long-awaited next-gen update ended up putting pay to that idea, given its potential to break several elements of the mod just two days after its planned release.
If you’re out of the loop, Fallout: London’s a full conversion mod for Fallout 4 that’s set to let us explore a post-apocalytic version of the English capital, complete with fresh factions and quests. We’ve been getting regular updates from the team behind it over the past couple of years, but its release date is now up in the air due to Fallout 4’s next-gen update being set to drop on April 25.
After outlining how the update would affect the mod’s release plans in a video just over a week ago, Fallout: London’s project lead, Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter, has now provided a bit more insight into the effects the changes the update’s neccessitated have affected things via an interview with the BBC. He also went a little bit more in-depth regarding Bethesda’s apparent lack of communication with the mod’s team regarding the update – something he touched on in that initial video.
Carter outlined that the only correspondence the team has had with Bethesda, even in the aftermath of the update’s announcement, has been via a community manager, suggesting that while CMs do play a valuable role, speaking to people at the company with more initimate knowledge of the what update entails would have been more useful.
“You would think that they would have at least had a conversation [with us] to just be like ‘look, you guys are clearly at least notable, you’re not official, but let’s make sure we don’t ruin this for the fans’,” Carter said. “This has now caused us to delay, which hurts a lot of our team and our hard work for the past four years, and it’s let down a lot of fans.”
“As a result,” he continued, “[what] we’ve seen from the sort of backlash from the [delay announcement] video, is that people are blaming Bethesda, even though I asked them not to, and I think that’s inevitable when there’s that lack of communication.”
Carter also said that no conversations have been had regarding Fallout: London possibly becoming part of something like the Creations initiative Bethesda announced via a Skyrim update late last year, He suggested that something like this – or the signing of an NDA between the two parties – could possibly have been ways to increase the collaboration between the mod’s team and Bethesda in a positive manner, as well as maybe leading to official support, if Bethesda was comfortable with the mod’s content.
We at VG247 have reached out to Bethesda about these comments, and will update this article ASAP if we recieve a response.
The Fallout: London team has also put out an announcement on is Discord server earlier today, acknowledging that this would have been its release date, and providing a bit of an update on the current state of play. Basically, the team hoping that the post-update fixes won’t take too long, and isn’t planning on just releasing the mod in its current form for an older version of Fallout 4, with the only possible exception seemigly being the unlikely event that the update “poses a significant risk” to the mod.