I guess it's my turn to write my thoughts on Fallout London:
I finished Fallout 2 and decided to give this one a go, since I was graciously gifted a copy on Steam by a user here. I always get this warm and fuzzy feeling when I finish the classic games and this time I managed to 1 vs 10 Frank with my posse and Granite squad(taking out the OP 1 hit kill turrets with EMP grenades beforehand) so I was in a particularly good mood. Thank goodness for that, because the process of just getting the game to work was a pain in the ass:
First of all, just getting a download of the mod was a trip in it's own right since the raw files weren't uploaded by the devs. I won't get doxed by their official installer and I didn't feel like making a GOG account so I had to actually pirate the repack of the game and I probably have another bitcoin miner that came with it for free. The game worked fine when I fired it up, but the game I was gifted is now a digital paperweight since I have no use for it, the repack came with the game itself(all you have to do after install is just press play). That's what you get for trying to do things "the intended way".
The game itself is...fine. It has quite a bit of technical issues and is obviously not complete, rushed out the door like New California, but it's a proper RPG set in a Fallout 4 engine. I am hoping that London walks so that Miami can actually run, or at least jog. I only got as far as doing the first quest for fish people(who are obnoxious and unnecessary, just like the woke elements of the mod, but the technical issues are far more glaring and annoying) and did some quests for Vagabounds as well and I am genuinely excited and intrigued to explore the rest of the world, so I guess the mod is doing something right. I haven't gotten far enough to confirm what
@Pikanic said about the game, or these issues simply don't bother me as I am having a blast...whenever the game works, that is. My biggest issue so far is the lack of optimization that causes low frame rates and I can confirm this is happening to quite a few people. Problem behind this is broken precombines, which anyone who knows the Fallout 4 engine should know about. The FOLON team clearly doesn't, and build upon a broken foundation, completely fucking up performance in some areas(particularly those with lots of moving objects like grass or plants, the starting dungeon that leads to fish people is borderline unplayable and so is the path to Swan & Mithe bar where Vagabounds reside). I also had a few save related bugs, like the infamous infinite loading screen bug or crash on loading bug that never happen to me in the base game. As I said, whenever the game works, it's fine, the characters are believable and I do get the sensation I am actually in post apocalyptic Great Britain. Something that this mod does that Frontier doesn't is actually fitting in with the rest of the Fallout universe, you can actually believe this is what Europe looked like before and after the bombs without any immersion breaking or bad bits of lore that don't fit in. Hell, since this game takes place before Fallout 3 and that game has two characters from UK(which I heard are actually in this mod), it's a nice little sidegame like Nevada that passes so well for a proper Fallout game that you might as well just consider it canon. My opinion might change as I play the game and find something so retarded and repulsive that it will make me turn in off, but I am optimistic I will finish and enjoy it at this time.
So, in summary, if you can actually get it to work and are lusting for a proper Fallout RPG, you can't really go wrong with London. This comes with a big caveat that you're still playing Fallout 4, pretty much everything that was in that game is still in London in some form or another, the good and bad. It will take a bit more than re-introduction of proper dialogue choices and traits to mask that, but if you can stomach the basic gameplay loop of Fallout 4 and want a more hardcore RPG experience from it, then I can't think of a better mod than FOLON at the minute. Like I said, I hope Miami is even better, maybe Vault 13 and Project Arroyo will even reintroduce proper skills and skillchecks into the game. One step at a time, Fallout 4 might actually resemble a proper game someday. This is the first major step in this long journey, nothing more, but it still runs circles around Fallout 76(it's newest update actually made MATN, one of Bethesda's bootlickers, rage quit in disgust as to how bad it was) and Starfield.
Now, I want to talk about something else: Modding. Getting this to work was just as much of a pain in the ass as just getting the game to work, or perhaps even more so. First of all, just getting the GECK itself is a pain, since Bethesda now took it down from their own site...you can only get it from Steam now. I tried downloading versions of the GECK from some shady sites, but sadly those were outdated and would not run version 1.1.063 that is required to run London. Downloading the GECK from Steam didn't work as there was a steam64 mismatch, which forced me to download the entire Fallout 4 from Steam again just for that one file...but my own steam64 won't work with the repack version of the game, so I have to keep two versions of the same file and switch between them depending on if I want to play the game or edit. Oh wait, it gets even better, now let's get to the actual modding now that we fired up the GECK:
Loading the main London ESM won't work, it will always crash the program. How do you create mods for London, then? Simple: You download a stripped version of Fallout 4.esm, which is required to run as a bare minimal anytime you open the GECK, and then load London ESM along with it. Why not just your own Fallout 4 ESM that everyone has, you ask? Simple: If you combine Fallout 4 vanilla and London ESMs, between the two there is too many entities and entries than the GECK can handle, so it crashes. This is why the only way the modders could make London working in GECK is to lobotomize the base Fallout 4 ESM so there were just enough entries from it to start the actual program up but not enough so it would crash the game. Before you ask, if you actually run this braindead ESM yourself, the game will not start up and you will be stuck with a vegetable Fallout until you reinstall the game. You need to backup the original Fallout 4 ESM and keep switching between the two whenever you play/mod it, just like with my steam64 file. Did I mention that the stripped Fallout 4 ESM makes the whole thing unstable, and some cells like US Embassy cannot be opened up at all?
I think we reached our limit with the GECK. Modders will need to make a new editing program if FOLON team already pushed it beyond it's limit just to make this unfinished build of the game. No wonder it took so long to complete. The future is looking bleak if they can't create an easier workaround that gives us more options, the mod will die out quickly if it becomes too much of a pain in the ass to make content for the it, and you bet your ass people will try as literally any weapon, armor or other item or NPC will work in London when ported over and placed in the world. It is the same game after, I already saw some guy even making a mod that lets you travel back and forth between Boston and London like TTW does with DC and Mojave, altho I don't know how feasible/stable it is at this time. Oh, and I was using the souped up custom GECK overhaul program that upgrades and updates it the entire time, I can only shudder how the experience of modding London with the basic GECK looks(reminder, the program will not even let you edit an ESP with more than one ESM loaded and Fallout 4 is always loaded by default, without editing the ini file).
Speaking of which, I made a little mod myself when I was trying out the new GECK and what I could even do with London at this time with a lobotomized Fallout 4:
It is a very simple mod and a London variation of a mod I made for my base Fallout 4 a long time ago. Here is the highlights:
*Aid item weight overhaul, most food items now have a weight of 1 like in 3/NV and so do items like Radaway and various syringes. Lighter items like pillboxes still weight 0.5-0.25.
*Overhaul of various recipes for meds and chems: Added some, removed some, made sure that each of them is gated by either Chemist or Medic. Chemist has more options and only requires the base rank of 1 for everything, but Medic lets you craft more powerful items(they do require higher ranks of the perk, however). Some items like Stimpacks have alternatives, for example Medic simply requires Blood Packs(now renamed "Medical Supplies") where as Chemists can use plants like Doktor Leaves, Bloodleaves and Hubflowers as substitutes instead.
*Some chems are changed completely or been renamed. Items like Hypo, Morphine(Morph-X) and Painkillers now restore crippled limbs. I use a mod that prevents Stimpacks from healing crippled limbs and prevents auto heal of crippled limbs for a more proper Fallout experience, so without Doctor Bags I had to get creative. Stimpacks themselves have not been touched by this mod.
*Refreshing Drink now overhauled to not be a magic healing potion but a simple carbonated drink.
*Some recipes give you batches of items instead of just one, Refreshing Drink that requires several bottles of other drinks for example will give you a total number of bottles as you used to make it. Some recipes have different ingredients as well to make more sense, most chems are just reskins of base game items and sometimes they haven't even changed the recipes(for example, what is now clearly a syringe is a reskinned Jet item and requires plastic and fertilizer to make in base London. Changed that to Aluminium and Antiseptic instead).
*Misc item overhaul: Some have added components or new components to make them more viable or have them make more sense. Petrol Canister/Gas Tank in particular has been changed to be worth 1000 tickets and give 10 Steel and 10 Oil, making it worthwhile to trade in rather than keep around as a junk item. Little respect for the resource that started the Great War, after all!
It's a relatively simple mod that has no new assets and probably could have been done in Fallout 4 Edit but I wanted to try out the new GECK. Outside of my relatively lightweight module, on my own time I have also added in some weapons from other Fallout 4 mod into the game world and can confirm they are all working, as do the recipes added to the Chemistry Workbench. I will push the mod and the new GECK/Stripped Fallout 4 ESM further to see what I am capable of doing with it, but like I said unless FOLON team gives us better ways to create content for their mod I am not optimistic for it's long-term future beyond very simple mods. I am looking to more simple mods, however, like ones that fix the awful performance issues and bugs.
