This Year’s Most Interesting Fallout Experience Didn't Come From Bethesda
Team FOLON’s debut was the Fallout we all were itching to play.
In 2024, few genres thrived as well as the role-playing game. From Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Metaphor: Refantazio to big franchise returns in Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Dragon’s Dogma 2, there were no shortages of meaty experiences to get lost in over the last 12 months.
But as 2024 comes to a close, it’s worth remembering that one of the year’s best role-playing games wasn’t from one of the well-established masters of the craft. Instead, it was created by ambitious fans looking to add a creative local spin to a beloved series. Fallout: London was far more than the average fan mod. This total conversion is a brand-new game built with the sturdy, fun-to-play bones of Fallout 4. The result wasn’t just one of the year’s finest, but easily the best game in the series in over a decade.
Fallout: London is set in the English city a few hundred years after the global nuclear war befell humanity (it’s between Fallout and Fallout 2 on the broader timeline). While it seems that the U.K. wasn’t directly involved in the international conflict between China and the U.S. that destroyed America, it seems that the country was destabilized enough for the established government to lose control. When players wake up from a mysterious underground lab without any memories, they find that a handful of factions are now vying to take over the country and mold it in their image.
The game’s post-apocalyptic version of London was built from the ground up.
London plays a lot like Fallout 4. Gunplay and action are still snappy. There are hundreds of locations to discover, NPCs to meet, and loot to find. But this beefy mod avoids stumbling where the last mainline Fallout game did. Unlike Bethesda’s 2015 game, Fallout: London’s player character is a silent protagonist, allowing for player choice to take center stage once more. Perks like Sleepwalker, in which players will occasionally wake up in random parts of the map after using a bed, are built to create emergent moments that will vary from player to player. In other words, Fallout: London refocuses on the RPG elements, making it a fun amalgamation of Fallout 4’s playability and Fallout: New Vegas’ emphasis on player choice.
Despite 2024 being a great year for Fallout as a whole (on the TV front at least), Fallout: London fought an uphill battle from the start. Just days before its initial launch date, Bethesda announced its disastrous next-gen update for Fallout 4. The update not only broke a ton of mods the broader Fallout community relied on to stabilize the game, but it would essentially break this London-based spinoff just days after its release. Bethesda’s decision delayed Fallout: London three months.
When it was released, the tedious install process didn’t help matters. Not only did players have to go through the process of downgrading the game to a pre-next-gen update version, they had to follow a series of steps to get the game running properly. Much like a proper Bethesda release, the game’s launch was rife with bugs, including one that crashed the game right after the tutorial.
There are a handful of factions vying for control of London.
Its rough launch didn’t impact interest in the mod, however. By all accounts, it seems that Fallout: London was a success. On GOG, Fallout: London became the fastest-redeemed game in the digital storefront’s history. Fans and critics alike seemed impressed with the scale of this RPG and what this ragtag team of roughly 50 independent developers accomplished with five years of development. Team FOLON has since released several updates stabilizing the game and adding new features left on the cutting room floor. The team has also expressed interest in spinning off into its own indie studio.
As a mod, however, it's easy to forget just how much of an accomplishment Fallout: London is. Its success is one of the feel-good stories of 2024 and one of the finest RPGs one can get lost in.
In a year when Bethesda should have capitalized on the success of the Fallout television show more than it did, Fallout: London was the perfect antidote. It captured the spirit of the series while also showing fans something entirely new within its fiction. It’s well worth jumping through the necessary hoops to experience one the the year’s best games.
