For all its troubles at launch — and there still are plenty — the Fallout: London “total conversion” mod for Fallout 4 set a record on GOG.com with 500,000 downloads in its first day of release, the online marketplace announced over the weekend.
It helps that Fallout: London is totally free of course, but it still requires Fallout 4 (whose Game of the Year edition is, conveniently enough, marked down 60% at GOG.com). Fallout: London has also faced, let’s say, large headwinds in terms of stability, as well as other bugs that break the immersive experience Team FOLON has been going for over the past five years of development.
Team FOLON has kept a stiff upper lip, even cheerfully offering technical support one-on-one over the game’s Discord server (which has more than 82,000 members). But the fact remains, the launch version crashes a lot. Hopefully, it will crash a lot less with the batch of hotfixes that also rolled out this weekend.
It’s important to note that these are hotfixes; there’s an even larger patch promised soon, with more fixes. But the hotfix patch does include the Buffout 4 debug mod, which fixes some engine-level bugs and adds a crash logger for reporting.
“We decided to get key fixes into your hands as soon as possible,” the developers said, “so expect more quest and stability fixes very soon.”
What’s in the Fallout: London hotfix?
According to the changelog for version 1.01, fixes have been applied to 27 quests, with additional tweaks elsewhere in the larger gameplay structure. Of note, the aluminum tray scrap item now has the proper British spelling of aluminium; more importantly it gives, well, aluminium (as a crafting material), not steel.
Fallout: London’s launch was delayed partly because, in April, Bethesda Game Studios finally launched a current generation, native app for the game for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. That, plus a content update along with it, sort of sucked the oxygen out of the room, so Team FOLON waited until July to roll out their game.
The mod is so large that they turned to GOG to host the file. However, the team soon discovered that Fallout London was only playable on the PC version of Fallout 4 that preceded the April update. To address this, they added a launcher that reverted the game to an earlier version.
The result is that anyone who wants to go back and play the original Fallout 4 on their PC must uninstall everything and reinstall the game client in its present state.
Featured image: Team FOLON