Fallout London creator talks British humour and making ‘Fallout 4.5’
Fan project Fallout London is finally out, as lead developer Dean Carter explains where the idea came from and why Americans might be in for a ‘culture shock’.
Five years after the idea of making Fallout London popped into Dean Carter’s head, and after a string of ups, downs, and delays, the massive Fallout 4 mod has finally been released.
GameCentral already talked to Carter ahead of the launch, when the project lead revealed why Fallout London has to succeed, adding, ‘If it’s an awful launch we’ll probably all just go to sleep.’
Now Carter has gone into depth about why they call it Fallout 4.5, their decision to embrace British humour, and how it all started in 2019.
‘Now, this started off as a very small idea of what it would be like to say ‘let’s change the buses, let’s see what maybe the royal family would have looked like [in the game].
‘But the development scope has just got so much bigger. It’s now basically what we like to consider Fallout 4.5.’
Fallout London is a fan project that has become so big that the size of its map is roughly as big as Fallout 4 itself, including real, but condensed, areas of the English capital, like Westminster, Hackney, Camden Town, and more. But the team has also found lots of inspiration from another Fallout title.
‘It’s basically the love child between Fallout: New Vegas’ storytelling and the gameplay of Fallout 4. New Vegas’ gameplay and combat, and things like that, didn’t age very well. Whereas the storyline for Fallout 4 didn’t age very well, so we’ve sort of just mushed the two together,’ Carter says.
Despite being a mod, Fallout London became a huge operation, with almost 100 volunteer developers from the community working on it during its lifespan. That’s on top of the 100 to 130 voice actors, including Neil Newbon, who played Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3; and John Bercow, known for shouting ‘order!’ at politicians in the UK House of Commons.
The whole project started with a simple question, between Carter and a friend, during a time when the former was backpacking across the world.
‘We were just like, ‘How would this all start?’ And that really sort of set the seed, and every time I was at the airport, every time I was at the bus stop, I was waiting, and I would be sitting there thinking about it. Then I started drawing stuff down, and then obviously the pandemic hit, and we started putting pen to paper.’
While the idea was seeded in 2019, work didn’t begin until 2020, but the project did not get off to a good start at all, with a whole year being all but wasted.
‘It was very much a grassroots project. We had nothing to do during Covid, we were just basically sitting there and we were bumping our heads together like, ‘What are we going to do? We’re stuck in lockdown.
‘We refer to it as our crayon-eating year, which is when you don’t know how the systems work, you don’t know how anything operates, you’re working with people you’ve never met before.
‘And then you scrap it all and you start from scratch, because you realise you didn’t build a foundation, you didn’t really know what you were doing, and it was awful. And so, yeah, after we scrapped our year, the one that we have now is the one that we’ve worked on [since], so that was sort of [from] 2021 to now,’ Carter says.
Although dark humour was a big part of the early, pre-Bethesda, Fallout games it’s far less prevalent, or successful, in Fallout 3 and 4, but Fallout London is an intentionally funnier game.
Carter and co. made the decision to put a British spin on things, admitting that Americans could be in for a ‘culture shock’.
‘A lot of Americans were very much expecting… we’ve had many comments on this already that they’re like, ‘Can we get an Americanised version or subtitles?’ Because there’ll be a lot of jokes that maybe people don’t understand, but that’s because they’re very ingrained in British humour.
‘We definitely feel that we’ve hit the nail on the head with this caricature of British culture. Which is what the whole series is about. Normally, it’s Americana, now it’s Britishism,’ he says with a laugh.
Five years after the original idea for Fallout London, and three years after they scrapped what they call Fallout 1.0 and started on Fallout 2.0, their ‘love child’ has finally launched.
Fallout London fills the void for a non-American Fallout story, as Todd Howard, Bethesda boss and the director of the last two games, has said that the franchise will never be set anywhere else.
Carter can’t help but mention that the Bethesda debacle was a tough hurdle to overcome, when the developer released a next gen update to Fallout 4, just days before Fallout London’s planned launch, forcing the fan project to be delayed because it made the mod unplayable.
It’s been a bumpy ride for the community-driven project, but Carter doesn’t regret it, saying:
‘All of our contributors are volunteers who share a passion for Fallout and game development. Their dedication has been truly inspiring
‘Working on Fallout London has been an incredible journey of creativity, teamwork, and perseverance. It’s been a labour of love that brought together a community of talented individuals united by their passion for the Fallout universe.’