Game-sized Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London has been delayed indefinitely by Bethesda's incoming next-gen update

Fallout: London, the Fallout 4 mod set in a post-apocalyptic English capital that’s large enough to effectively be its own game, has been hit by an indefinite delay just two weeks from its planned release date. The reason? Fallout 4’s long-in-the-works next-gen update is now due to drop just two days after London’s planned launch date, which its fan devs say will “simply break” the ambitious project.

Fallout: London had finally been given a solid release date at the end of last year, after almost five years in the works from a team of over 50 core developers and 200-plus contributors. Having missed its planned release in 2023, London was announced to be arriving on April 23rd - both St. George’s Day and the day that the player character exits their tube in the game.

All seemed positive, until Bethesda announced last week that their own years-in-development ‘next-gen update’ for Fallout 4 - first mentioned all the way back in 2022 - would arrive on April 25th. With just two days between London’s arrival and the upheaval of a massive patch due to make significant changes to a number of internal systems affecting everything from dialogue and art assets to UI, Fallout: London’s team lead Dean Carter confirmed in a new update video that “the past four years of our work stand to just simply break” as a result of the update.

“It's simply not just the case of blocking the updates and hoping for the best,” Carter added, heading off the obvious question of running the mod without installing the next-gen patch. “If you don't do it properly, it'll also break, and we can't just ask you to drag things back in time.”

As a result, Fallout: London will no longer release next week, instead being delayed while its team can work on ensuring compatibility with Fallout 4 post-next-gen update. Carter said that “the unavoidable fact that it’s going to break our core systems” means that fixing everything “will take some time”. As such, no replacement launch date was given - “We might get lucky with a day-one fix, it’s unlikely, but it might be a month,” the developer said. “Soon as those fixes are done, we can put it back up again.”

Despite what must be a very frustrating situation, Carter remained ultimately positive about the official update from Bethesda, expressing excitement for seeing the mod with the new engine improvements and quality-of-life additions - including widescreen support - in place.

As for being able to offer the mod - said to be effectively as large as its own game, or at least a sizeable piece of DLC - as standalone, Carter said that “Bethesda has never reached out to us during our entire tenure” and that the studio’s support would be required to split the mod away from the base Fallout 4. Instead, expect a seriously hefty mod weighing in at up to 40GB - too large for popular mod site Nexus Mods to host, with the Folon team instead turning to GOG for help distributing the huge file. (It’ll also work for those who own Fallout 4 on Steam, and possibly Epic.)

Hopefully Fallout: London still arrives swiftly enough to capitalise on the current boom of players returning to Fallout 4 in the wake of Amazon’s recent Fallout TV show, with the nearly decade-old game more than doubling its number of active players last week.