On Fallout: London and PANPC news
This has been a rough year in the Bethesdaverse. Starfield has been more or less a disaster, and getting worse with each update. The "Next Gen" Fallout 4 update was a buggy mess and a similar disaster, wreaking havoc on the mod community and creating support headaches for everyone. Just about the only thing to go right in 2024 has been the Fallout TV series, and that didn't involve an actual game. All of this has left many of us ready to jump ship altogether, or at least looking forward to a long march across the future Fallout desert.
And then there was Fallout: London.
FOLON got righteously screwed by the NG drop. There's no other way to put it. They were set to release in April, and then two things happened almost simultaneously: the NG update dropped (completely breaking FOLON), and the TV series pumped Fallout interest into the stratosphere. So now suddenly we all were dealing with 500% our usual player counts, most of whom were completely new to Fallout and were installing the stuttering/crashing NG version.
Personally, I've been struggling all summer to stay motivated to finish PANPC 2.1. I've made slow progress, it's coming along, but I will admit that I've questioned a few times whether any of it was worth the effort. With no other Fallout title on the horizon, a lot of hopes were pinned on FOLON, when and if it ever ended up released.
Well, it released today. It took some effort to get installed, but I've now played through the intro and opening game sequences, prepared for another round of 2024 disappointment.
And I didn't find it.
I'm sure I'll find things to complain about as the game goes by - after all, if it's perfect there's no reason to mod it - but so far it appears that something has finally gone right in 2024. FOLON doesn't feel like a mod; it doesn't have any of the typical amateur jank of a mod. This feels like a professionally made Fallout game, built on the FO4 engine, similar to how New Vegas was done. It's that smooth, that well written (at least the opening anyway).
There's a beautiful attention to detail here. It subtly pokes fun at Bethesda and Fallout tropes, while at the same seamlessly incorporating Britishisms everywhere. Honestly, a lot of professional game studios with nine figure budgets do a lot worse than this.
Fallout: London is worth your time. Download it and let's get Fallout back on the road this year.
A PANPC patch is going to happen (so will PANPC 2.1), but not immediately. FOLON is a massive redesign project and it will take me some time to play it myself and figure out the best AI patterns for the enemy types. I also assume that I'll need to upgrade PANPC itself to accommodate FOLON's way of doing things. I hope to have a rough PANPC patch in test release in the next few days.
In the meantime, we have been expanding our coverage on GreslinGames to explore games and modding outside of the Bethesda world. At the moment, we're heavy into Shadows of Doubt (and Unity game modding in general), Underspace, X4, Factorio, and Besiege.
My hope right now is that Fallout: London proves itself to be a solid tentpole title that helps hold the community together for a few years. So far I'm encouraged, which is a major improvement to how I've been feeling all year. For today at least, it's nice to be a Fallout fan again.