Fallout: London devs will “downgrade” Fallout 4 to save their massive mod

After years of work, the third-party modders at Team Folon announced over the weekend that their long-awaited (and recently delayed) "DLC-sized" unofficial fan mod, Fallout: London, is now in "QA testing" and awaiting the "final green light" from release partner GOG. But that release will apparently need to make use of a "downgrader" to work around a recent Bethesda "next-gen" update that upended all of the team's modding efforts.

In December, Team Folon announced that its work on the Fallout: London mod would culminate in a planned April 23 release, lining up with England's widely celebrated St. George's Day. Then, just weeks before the planned launch, Bethesda announced that its own planned "next-gen" update for the 2015 game would be coming out on April 25, two days after Fallout: London's launch target.

"That has, for lack of a better term, screwed us over," Team Folon Project Manager Dean Carter said in an interview with the BBC shortly after Bethesda's upgrade announcement. In a separate video, Carter said that the next-gen update "requires many of our internal systems to be updated," since the content they created in the Fallout 4 Script Extender likely wouldn't work under the updated code. That turned out to be a valid concern, as the next-gen update did end up breaking many Fallout 4 mods and saves after its release.