'The end is in sight'—Fallout: London, a DLC-sized mod plagued by delays, will arrive soon with its own installer to help slim the chances of Bethesda breaking it a 2nd time
Fallout: London is one of the more ambitious mods I've seen—a complete conversion mod of Fallout 4 which is brave enough to ask the question: what if British people could also blow themselves up?
After repeatedly rejected expense requests for nuclear bombs to test this hypothesis (apparently they're "out of budget"), I'm pretty excited to see how Fallout: London shakes the series up, even if it's in an unofficial capacity—despite its ambitions, though, Fallout: London has yet to see the light of day after a "next gen" Fallout 4 update (which didn't look very next-gen at all) went ahead and nuked its development timeline.
The mod's development team has put years of work into the dang thing, so to miss a release date for reasons beyond their control is frustrating—and project lead Dean Carter was sure to let the BBC know when it happened, lamenting a lack of communication I'm not sure Bethesda was obligated to give.
Still, Fallout: London's almost here, according to the game's official Twitter account and Discord server: "There has been a lot of speculation regarding our upcoming release, and we wanted to open up and clear the air for our core supporters."
Fallout: London is, the announcement reads, simply "waiting for the final green light" while working with GOG to distribute the mod. "Once they've completed the process of double-checking that Fallout: London and its installer work on all supported machines, we should be good to go."
That installer is key, since it'll also be accompanied by a "downgrader", which should future-proof Fallout: London against any more of Bethesda's meddling. "It is in all of our interests that this final QA process is carried out in full, and we are very thankful that GOG is assisting … The end is in sight."
Honestly, I'm quite excited to see Fallout: London in action. While Todd Howard maintains that the faded sheen of Americana is a huge part of the series' identity, I can't help but wonder if that's been holding it back.
After all, while the Cold War is seared into American history, it's not like they invented glitzy capitalism, bombs, war, and secret government facilities. Us Brits can get just paranoid, and we basically invented the whole empire thing, which is—not something to be proud of, actually, nevermind. Forget I said anything. Go put a hat on Daniel, instead.