Fallout London, the expansive fanmade Fallout 4 mod that shows us The Big Smoke's version of the nuclear post-apocalypse, is out now after a very lengthy development. But it's ballooned so much after the last few years, that it might as well be thought of as "Fallout 4.5" instead of your everyday RPG fan projects.
What originally started out as a thought experiment five years ago to see what Fallout 4's base game would feel like if you were staring at red buses, or "what maybe the royal family would have looked like" in the 2100s, quickly expanded into something more DLC-sized, or even game-sized, project lead Dean Carter says in an interview with Metro. "The development scope has just got so much bigger. It's now basically what we like to consider Fallout 4.5."
More than a simple paint job nowadays, Fallout London tells its very own story with a main quest that can stretch up to 20 hours - roughly the same amount of time you might spend becoming institutionalized in Fallout 4 - and that's without delving into the various side quests and gang quest lines.
The Fallout London team didn't just add a bunch of stuff, either. They've adjusted Fallout's signature satire to fit the English capital. "A lot of Americans" have apparently asked Carter if the mod would include Americanised subtitles "because there'll be a lot of jokes that maybe people don't understand." But that's only because the mod's humor is so "ingrained in British humor... Normally, it's Americana; now it's Britishism."
Hammering away at such a giant effort took almost 100 volunteer modders, on top of over 100 more voice actors, including Baldur's Gate 3's Neil Newbon and former Speaker of the House of the Commons John Bercow, AKA the "order!" man, who's reprising his old political job as a robot in the mod. That's not to mention the four hours of original music being added - Fallout London sounds genuinely massive.
You can download Fallout London for free as long as you own the base game. Just head on over to GOG - there's no console or NexusMods version since the mod was apparently way to big.
