You might have read—on some website called PC Gamer dot com—that Fallout 4 megamod Fallout: London (FOLON) is a genuinely impressive modding achievement, cramming a "DLC-sized" Brit-Fallout expansion into Bethesda's 2015 RPG. It's also the biggest singleplayer Fallout release we've had in over a decade.
But there were moments during development that project lead Dean "Prilladog" Carter and his team worried FOLON might not make it out the door. In a chat in the latest Edge magazine, Carter recalled "moments of uncertainty" during FOLON's five-year development when the devs worried that Bethesda might not be all that happy with a humungo-mod like theirs using the Fallout setting and branding.
Luckily, those fears proved unfounded, and Carter gives "props to [Bethesda]" for being chill about FOLON. Then again, perhaps the company is just happy to have the Fallout name continuing to gin up hype—Carter notes that "I do feel that the publishers increasingly rely on user-generated content, because it keeps their games alive for longer."
It's not like Bethesda had a singleplayer Fallout of its own on the horizon that FOLON could suck up oxygen from—maybe it's useful that something is out there keeping people excited about the series, even if it's not from Bethesda.
I reckon that's part of the thinking going on at the studio, though by means all of it. After all, Bethesda was famously chummy with the devs of Skyblivion—the mod remaking Oblivion in the Skyrim engine—around the time of Oblivion Remastered's release, and those two projects are more-or-less direct competitors.
"Over the years we have had lots of contact with Bethesda," said Skyblivion lead K Rebel, in the same issue of Edge. "I was even invited to their office last year, and we are on good terms." I reckon Todd Howard's just as eager to see how the mod team fixes Oblivion's dungeons as the rest of us are.
