It’s been an especially great time to be a Fallout fan lately. The new Prime Video series is a smash hit. Fallout 76 picked up millions of extra players as a result. Then Bethesda announced that Fallout 4 would be getting a next-gen update! Unfortunately, the results … well, they won’t set your world on fire.
I have two game-related hobbies: Creating settlements in Fallout 4, and not knowing anything about the actual inner workings of video games. I don’t know what’s required to keep Fallout running, and I don’t know if a situation like this one is the sort of thing that can be easily avoided. I just know I am OBSESSED with settlement building. I’m taking all those nasty bits of wasteland and turning them lush and green again! But unfortunately, that requires mods. Lots and lots of mods. And well, the next-gen update has taken all my mods away. Taken all of everyone’s mods away, in fact.
As soon as I saw complaints coming in on Reddit, I jumped onto my Xbox and yep, my mods were gone. I thought I would be able to download them again from the “My Library” section but only a small handful of them seem to be there. When I try searching for my missing mods via the mod section, it does not present them to me. Some of them I just plain accidentally stumbled across while looking for something else.
I don’t think people are faring too well on PS4 or PC either. Some PlayStation Plus users actually might not even be able to download the update, according to Forbes. The outlet also notes that Steam Deck users found all their settings erased, PC users discovered their UI stretched out, Xbox Series X/S users have no Quality mode … and very few bugs were actually fixed in the update. Actually, some new ones seem to have appeared. Such is the magic of Bethesda, it seems.
I’m very disappointed because I put a lot of time and energy into building my settlements. I finished the game’s story long ago and simply stuck around for years afterward building higher and bigger than ever before. I was really pleased with what I’d been able to come up with, but now I will have to devote a lot of time and energy to putting everything back where it was … Or I could just leave it and finally start a new playthrough, but sunk-cost fallacy, y’know?
Fallout: London is now delayed
Lots of people were looking forward to the DLC-sized fan-made mod Fallout: London, but the new update had a severe effect on it. It was originally set to be released on April 23, but now its future is uncertain for the time being. (It will come out eventually, it’s just a question of when.)
“The past four years of our work stand to just simply break,” project lead Dean Carter said in a video, going over the disappointing news. He urged people not to take their frustrations out on Bethesda, and no one likes a toxic fandom, but it’s hard not to feel a little bit put out. I was one of those people looking forward to Fallout: London. From what I’ve seen, it looks fantastic. And it has TWO previous Doctor Who stars, Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker, in it!
Like I said, I don’t know if the erasure of mods, messed-up UI, and so forth is the sort of thing that can be avoided when updating a game. I don’t know anything about developing and programming! (Thank god the Fallout: London people do.) But, oh, Bethesda… It would be nice if something would just work, for once.
