GOG has confirmed that Fallout London won’t be playable for gamers who picked up the game from Epic Game Store.
As reported by VG 24/7, GOG explained that they are not blocking it from being released on Epic Game Store, but that the issue is on Epic’s end. Epic Game Store is not set up to allow games to be rolled back to their earlier versions. And this is where we have to explain how Fallout London works.
Team FOLON’s Fallout London is a mod and not a separate retail or even standalone release. Fans who want to give this AU version of Fallout a try will need to have a copy of Fallout 4, but that’s not all.
Because of the technical issues brought about by Bethesda’s next-gen upgrade of Fallout 4, Team FOLON elected to not make Fallout London work with that update. So, out of necessity, they are bundling their mod with a program that will actually roll Fallout 4 back to an earlier version.
The rollback is a necessary evil, because the bugs and issues created by the next-gen upgrade would mean that Team FOLON would have to delay releasing Fallout London to compensate. And to complicate that further, of course, they expect that Bethesda would release bugfixes and updates.
Those new updates might mean even more reprogramming on their end. So Team FOLON will update Fallout London after they are certain Bethesda has addressed all of these, and hopefully, it could be played on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S someday.
As to why GOG is announcing this, Team FOLON opted to make GOG the distributor of Fallout London. They can’t bring it to the popular mods hosting website Nexus Mods because Nexus isn’t equipped to host Fallout London with its huge filesize.
As GOG explained, they are still in the middle of testing the mod themselves, but this would be one of the final steps before Fallout London gets to the public. Of course, if you own Fallout 4 on GOG, playing Fallout London with it will be painless.
GOG and Team FOLON have not said anything about Steam for now. In theory, it should be possible to download an offline installer for Fallout London, and then install it with someone who has the Steam version, to play the game there. That doesn’t account for how a Steam Deck owner might get to play it on their portable PC.
But perhaps Valve, GOG, and Team FOLON can work something out on that end, because it would certainly be a huge bonus to have Fallout London playing on their platform.
Ultimately, it’s a shame that Epic’s own inaction on making Epic Game Store fully featured has led to Fallout London being unplayable on their platform. Epic actually gave away Fallout 4 a few times, but those free players (including myself) are going to miss out on another freebie.
