My bones have become separated from my body. It looks quite painful. Whenever I crouched down, I found myself looking directly at a piece of my own crimson gut. I think it was my ribcage that prevented me from seeing the prison guard I was trying to secretly kill from a first-person perspective. This is not the end of the world. I switched to third-person perspective, kept calm, and continued on an exciting adventure in post-apocalyptic London.
However, like the various other technical teething problems plaguing the release of Fallout: London, it’s real, and it’s annoying.
Of course, as you’d expect, the FOLON team is working hard to fix these issues as quickly as possible so people can play the mod as intended. As we’ve seen before, a game that starts in a shaky state on the wrong side of things can be completely remedied in this area with time and effort. But for now, these bugs are still there and persist.
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I found at least one mission – centered around an impressive battle sequence between the game’s mod-inspired Roundels faction and the skinhead Miller’s Men – that I simply couldn’t complete, at least not without using console commands to move the group around. Each member of the team can’t complete five or six key NPCs right where they need to be. Elsewhere, I had to rely on these same commands to enchant the business cards I needed to find in order to progress through the game’s main quests.
On top of that, there are the crashes, which are currently a constant Sword of Damocles hanging over your head from the get-go, forcing you to act like a madman every five minutes (or seconds, depending) (depending on how important what you are doing is important). Downloading the Buffout 4 mod and launching the game as administrator from the folder does allow you to play for more than the first 20 minutes, but as of now, you can never get rid of the instant crashing monsters.
To be clear, the root causes of many of these issues appear to be beyond the control of the FOLON team. For example, the skeleton bug I talked about in the introduction was not a Fallout: London bug, but a regular Fallout 4 bug that was transferred from Commonwealth to Blighty.
This isn’t to make excuses for the existence of these problems, or to say that they don’t need to be fixed, but that’s why I want to keep all of these bug discussions out of the way, because that’s everything that’s been in the room with the problem, and by now you Have basically heard it all, even if it does still deserve a mention.
The tragic thing about Fallout: London’s launch is that if you could stick around to iron out these issues, you’d find that the game would have been a huge achievement for a larger studio staffed by professionals , rather than being composed of professionals. It’s ambitious and broad in scope, but it doesn’t feel like it’s at the expense of the depth of a single-player RPG that’s over 50 or 60 hours long.
Fallout New Vegas is the most obvious source of inspiration, but it’s clear that the team spent a lot of time looking at all the other mainline Fallout games in the series, as well as the bottomless pit of British culture, for inspiration to add to their own In thought. Angel – the mysterious scientific organization around which the game’s plot revolves – clearly borrows some style from Fallout 4’s Institute in terms of its underground labs and secret influence on the surface world, but it feels very different thanks to Pitcher – The civil servant conduct and modus operandi of it and its overlord Mr. Smythe are abhorrent.
Smythe, in turn, clearly drew inspiration from New Vegas’ Mr. House, a mysterious and powerful figure with pre-war ties who hid behind images on towering screens, but if you look carefully If you observe, these two people will definitely not be easily confused.
Both the main questline and the Gang Wars questline are some of the richest content the mod has to offer, and offer hours’ worth of quests with many corresponding branching paths, both filled with this kind of love letter to the series itself, and us. A depressing tale of little people.
For every joke about the Tesco horsemeat scandal and John Bercow’s cameo, there’s a subtle moment, like walking past a mural commemorating the Battle of Cable Street and entering the BUF-style Fifth Column HQ, that sets the game in motion It takes a unique Fallout experience to deliver it.
From an actual gameplay standpoint, this mod is unique in that it’s generally harder to hack than modern entries in the Fallout series. It gives you two debuffing ailments right out of the gate and never stops threatening to kill you – through enemies or radiation spikes – if you’re not careful, no matter how much you get as you climb the level Be strong and go in wisely within the right specifications to build what you want.
As a sneaky sniper, I often felt very vulnerable, especially in combat where the surrounding environment made it more difficult or downright impossible to distance myself or sneak up on an enemy. Being able to blow the heads off weaker enemies with a well-timed VATS strike has the same thrill that I enjoyed when I carried the New Vegas-built anti-materiel rifle regularly, but never one The feeling of my absence.
While it may elicit a few sighs when the mission inevitably has you running a more dangerous errand to retrieve something when you’re down to your last stim and off the radar, it doesn’t hinder Your desire to do it.
If there’s one thing this mod has done for me, it’s helped me rediscover the simple joy that comes from wandering the wasteland and discovering points of interest in a Fallout game. Maybe this cool virtual tour impressed me because I’m already familiar with the rest of modern single-player Fallout’s wastelands. Maybe it’s because this time I’m walking around my hometown, patrolling a city I’ve actually been to, even if only briefly. It’s probably a mix of the two, while the mod’s array of very fitting and well-designed collectibles are also responsible.
The world space itself is well designed, taking the actual map of London you’re probably familiar with and mixing it with just enough nuclear damage to keep things more interesting. Walking around the beautifully preserved Westminster, you’ll feel like a real tourist, shuffling your feet and gawking at sights like Buckingham Palace, while areas like Croydon and Islington are famous for their Nuclear weapons flatten or kill small areas that are completely destroyed.
Some areas or boroughs are clearly more in-depth than others from a lore or quest perspective – especially with access to the wildcard quest lines that were cut before the game, which helps tie the events of Gang War into the main story The stories really start to come into play once you get to Westminster and are introduced to The Gentlemen, Camelot, and the aforementioned Fifth Column. At the moment, I wouldn’t say you feel like there’s too much missing from this link, but even before I knew it, it made me think of another option to support the main quest and offer more to do with it in the first few hours of the game Here, you must pass gang-style destinies like the Pistols, The Roundels, and The Vagabonds.
However, in my opinion, it would be better for the mod to forcefully introduce you to Camelot and the Fifth Column before they take part in the main quest, as they are going up against the Angels, which is part of the story from the beginning Key gear. Part of the reason I appreciate this is most likely because the game was designed to put the array of factions outside of Angels on a more equal footing and introduce them more slowly, rather than risking something like New Vega NCR, Legion and Mr House immediately became big players with exposition-filled risks.
The level of patience you have will be a huge factor in whether or not you enjoy what Fallout London has to offer right now. I’m usually more willing to forgive a flawed game (or mod, in this case) if I can see the developer trying to push the boundaries and create something ambitious.
Now, this is a pretty cool sand castle, but if you can stop it from falling into the CTD sea, you’ll enjoy it. Or if you put it on your backlog to play with once the fix arrives, you’ll end up doing that too.
Fallout London is available now through Fallout 4 and is playable on PC via GOG and Steam.
