Fallout: London Devs Will ‘Downgrade’ Fallout 4 to Save Their Huge Mod

After years of work, third-party modders Team Folon announced this weekend that their long-awaited (and recently delayed) DLC-sized unofficial fan mod, Fallout: Londonis currently in “QA testing” and awaiting “final approval” from release partner GOG. But this version will apparently have to use a “downgrader” to work around a recent “next-gen” update from Bethesda that has upended all of the team’s modding efforts.

Last December, the Folon team announced that its work on the Fallout: London The mod is expected to culminate in a planned release on April 23, coinciding with St. George’s Day, which is widely celebrated in England. Then, a few weeks before the planned launch, Bethesda announcement that its own “next-gen” update planned for the 2015 game would be released on April 25, two days after Fallout: LondonLaunch target of .

“It has, for lack of a better term, put us in a bit of a pickle,” Folon project lead Dean Carter said in an interview with the BBC shortly after Bethesda announced the upgrade. In a separate video, Carter said the next-gen update “requires updating a lot of our internal systems,” because the content they created in the Fallout 4 Script Extender would likely not work with the updated code. This turned out to be a valid concern, as the next-gen update ended up breaking many Fallout 4 mods and saves after its release.

“With the new update coming out 48 hours later than planned, the last four years of work we’ve done is at risk of being doomed,” Carter said at the time. “We had the release candidate ready, but we had to put it aside for the fixes we know it will need.”

Go back to move forward

To implement these necessary fixes, Team Folon said in a social media update over the weekend that it would be using a “downgrader” to revert Bethesda’s updates that break mods. “At the last minute, we discovered that the new gen, even after updates, is not stable enough,” Carter wrote on Team Folon’s Discord. “So now we will be using the old version, hence the need for a downgrader.”

Folon’s release plans were further complicated when Bethesda released another update to the game on May 13, disrupting their work. “The most annoying thing for us is to have something. Then delay waiting for third-party patches for next-gen. Then have another update. And then have it still not work,” Carter wrote on Discord. “It’s a total frustration and every setback requires restarting the testing process. That’s why we decided to go the downgrade route and when ‘next-gen’ is fixed, update for that.”

The Folon team had initially planned to publish Fallout: London on Nexus Mods, but the files proved too large to be hosted on the popular mod distribution site. Fortunately, GOG provided a “light at the end of the tunnel” for the mod’s release, Carter said, and the platform is currently helping provide final quality assurance to ensure that “Fallout: London and its installer (and downgrader) works on all supported machines.”

“I think for us, and what sets GOG apart from Steam, is that we’re just a bunch of really enthusiastic guys,” a GOG spokesperson told TheGamer in a recent interview about the distribution. Fallout: London“There was just a project that we wanted to support, and we were like, ‘Hey guys, this is awesome. Let’s do it, it’s going to be fun.’ We’re already having a lot of fun in the process of planning this.”

Although the Folon team has not announced a new release date for Fallout: London For now, it seems that GOG’s QA is now the last hurdle to the long-awaited launch. When someone asks for the release date on Team Folon’s Discord, they’re greeted with a standard message: “As soon as we fix what the update breaks, it will be available.”