The year’s best Fallout experience came from Team FOLON, a 50-person volunteer development team, rather than Bethesda or another large gaming company. And now the team has greater ambitions beyond its impressive mod. The team would like to go independent, a wonderful development for fans impressed by Fallout: London.
Team FOLON Project Lead Dean Carter spoke to the BBC about the reception to Fallout: London since its release, as well as the future of both the game and the people behind it. For the first time, Carter let it be known that the team wants to work together again.
“There will obviously be a point where we’re like, that is now done,” Carter told the BBC about Fallout: London. “As much as I love the fact that this is a free project — we can offer this thing for free for all the community — free doesn’t pay our bills.”
While Team FOLON accepts donations on its website, what the volunteers have made from grateful fans willing to toss them a few bucks pales to what they’d make as a proper development team funded by a publisher.
“We are channeling that into Team FOLON, which is obviously what we’re going to be moving into,” Carter said. “And we should, hopefully, launch our own indie games company, which would allow us to completely be able to come up with our own ideas, create our own game, and just really work with the community without having to speak to anyone above us such as Bethesda or anything like that.”
For any group of volunteer developers working on a popular mod, getting hired by a big-name company has always been the best-case scenario. Developers like ID Software and Valve have always scouted talent in the mod scene to great results. Most recently, Rockstar Games hired the developers behind one of the most popular Grand Theft Auto Online mods, likely to assist with the next game in the series.
With Bethesda yet to acknowledge Fallout: London’s impact (aside from Todd Howard’s comments that the franchise will remain in America), Team FOLON should absolutely focus on making its own way into the industry. Fallout: London is a promising showcase for what this talented team is capable of, and the prospect of it working on something wholly original and maybe even less ambitious in scope is very exciting for those who’ve played their first effort.
“Fallout: London has been a great springboard for that because we’ve worked with people now, we know what the community seems to like, and we’ve got a great platform where we can just talk to them,” Carter said.
There’s also something to be said about the chemistry built through five years of developing Fallout: London. Team FOLON is a wonder team of creatives that seem to enjoy working together, according to Carter. A publisher would be wise to bet on them for future projects.
“The family element of the team that we’ve grown, I absolutely adore all of them,” he said. “The mod is one thing, but how we’ve grown as people in this team working together and how they’re interacting, that’s worth its weight in gold.”
While Fallout: London has the unfortunate hurdle of its complex install process, it’s easily one of the year’s best role-playing games. Not only does its futuristic, post-apocalyptic British metropolis feel fresh and fun to explore, but its gameplay smoothly combines the best elements of Fallout 4 and Fallout: New Vegas to create something Bethesda should replicate with future entries in the series.
Before Team FOLON decides what’s next, they plan to expand and stabilize Fallout: London. Carter says that in addition to performance patches, they plan to add another ending for the game’s main quest, as well as restore game content that was cut to hit their original April 2024 release date.
