Fallout London, despite being “held together with duct tape” according to the developer, is still an impressive machine. Our news editor Joshua Wolens has a lot of fun with the gigantic Fallout 4 mod when he’s not booting up his desktop, and I’m over the moon (I thought a British saying was fitting) that it sticks the landing as well as you could expect from a mod.
Due to the success of Fallout London, the developers have big plans for the future. As outlined in a follow-up interview with the BBC, Dean Carter of Team Folon has expressed interest in transforming the team that took it from enthusiastic modders to a proper indie studio.
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“As much as I love that it’s a free project… free can’t pay our bills. What was great for us was that a lot of the people who liked it gave us donations.” For legal reasons, you generally can’t ask for money for a mod unless you’re working through an official storefront – donations, on the other hand, are much easier to get through.
“We put that into Team Folon: we’ll continue there and then hopefully start our own indie game company.”
For me as an RPG fan (assuming Folon doesn’t pivot entirely to farming simulators) this is pretty exciting news. Another developer making good stuff for one of my favorite genres can only be a good thing. But that will probably take a while. Games take years to develop and moving from modding to pure game development is a massive project.
Carter is excited, however, telling the BBC that it allows the team to “come up with our own ideas, make our own games and really collaborate with the community without having to talk to anyone about us.”
This particular issue seems to be a source of frustration. As Carter reveals earlier in the interview, Team Folon hasn’t heard a peep from Bethesda: “We don’t expect anything from them, we’re just fans of the project and it’s just their intellectual property, but no, there’s been no communication. That’s weird, because we’ve received communication from other people in the industry… but Bethesda themselves haven’t spoken to us at all, no.”
While Bethesda was always obligated to warn them about the next-gen update, I’m surprised to hear that they haven’t given Fallout London a single shout-out – not even on the community side. It seems like a free win, but hey. When you have the former Speaker of the House on board, I think that’s recognition enough.
