“I studied at University College London, and there was Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icons, and the whole concept was very strange,” Fallout: London project manager Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter told me.
“For those who don’t know, basically he mummified himself and called it Auto-Icon, and in that little box at UCL is his skeleton. His head wasn’t mummified properly, so it all melted off, so they gave him like a plastic wax head,” he continued. “To be honest, I really liked the idea because in the real world, there’s just this one bit – it’s there now – that looks very much like Fallout. I thought, let’s throw Futurama into this deal. We’re going to put that head in a glass thingy that sits on a Protectron, and yeah, the rest is what you see in the model.”
Manage Cookie Settings
Thus was born Fallout: London’s Jeremy Bentham robot, a mechanical marvel that lets you see how badly mummification gone awry affects a person’s hairline. Oh, and it lets you discuss the state of post-apocalyptic London society with the founder of modern utilitarian philosophy.
It’s just one of many little details that make Fallout: London feel like not just another Fallout game, but an unofficial entry in the series that uses its setting to create a truly unique Fallout experience that fearlessly and openly laughs at the strange society that lives on our tiny island of sadness and tea bags.
“I was born and raised in London, and a lot of the team are from the UK,” Carter explains. “We understand our culture. We are the biggest self-imitations and we don’t hold back. In fact, we get more feedback from non-British people. [saying],, “Oh, are you sure you can do that?”, “Can you say that?” Like, yeah, I’m from this country, we can say that, it’s totally fine.
“We do know that our class system is crazy and we certainly exploit that. We’ve taken it to the extreme. The gentlemen you meet, they’re what people imagine them to be like in Britain. So if you’re from the lower class, I hate that term, but if you’re from the lower class, and you see a gentleman or upper class, you say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s what I imagine them to be like’. And then if you’re from [other] Way [round, looking down]That’s it. So, we just took what I think is a very old class system and we just took it to the extreme. I don’t think anything should stop because of that, because we are a joke in this country.”
Naturally as a result, the game touches on a lot of the same themes and talking points you’ll hear when discussing British politics and current affairs – especially newsworthy times like the ones we’re currently experiencing.
“There are already people on Reddit saying we need to slow down our PR,” Carter joked. “They’re saying ‘Is this all orchestrated by Fallout: London?’ [was planning]”Obviously we’ve had the election and all the things that come with it and now we have the riots in the UK and they’re saying, ‘The aftermath: the PR in London was crazy’. No, it’s nothing to do with us. If people want to make their own comparisons, that’s their business.”
For those who live or grow up in a country as ancient and strange as England, it might not be too difficult to understand and emulate the ethos of a society that carries enough historical baggage and peculiarly entrenched traditions to fill the 20,000 or so BBC podcasts featuring Cambridge and Oxford professors. But what if you’re from somewhere else in the world and have never set foot in drizzly England?
“When we bring in new writers, at the beginning we actually have a must-read or must-see list of books. [There] For example, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. [we were] You need to watch these to understand a little bit the tone we’re going for, because a lot of the jokes and references are based on these kinds of films,” Carter told me. “So, people watch these, we had a Brazilian guy who’s a fantastic writer, who wrote one of the best companions in my opinion, and he watched it and said ‘now I get it’. Because he’s from a completely different culture, didn’t understand the British, and he watched these films and now I understand what you’re trying to say.”
“In addition, we use voice chat every day. We always sit [that]So we have a lot, as you [can] Imagine when you’ve worked here for five years and it’s like a giant water cooler and we sit around the water cooler and we talk and we tell personal jokes and you have a sense of community because these non-British people have to learn my jokes and other British jokes very quickly.
“We actually have a trial period where if you don’t know us within a month, then you probably don’t know us anymore and you might not be a good fit for us. And yet, within a week of joining, someone insulted me. It was weird because I would say, ‘Yeah, you’re mine. [kind of] People, welcome aboard’ type of deal. That’s how we work, that’s the feeling of family. I know it’s a cliché, but that family feeling is definitely something we feel we have [cultivated]and that has seeped into the game, which I really like.”
Still, not all of Fallout London’s nods to British culture were planned or conceived early on. Specifically, the inclusion of the much-loved former Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, as the voice of the robot that rules the same chamber in the mod, and all the efforts made to make the mod’s depiction of Britain more authentic, are in line with the FOLON team’s efforts to just make Fallout: London the Fallout game they wanted it to be.
“I think that’s one of the reasons we went back and dug into the old games,” Carter said. “In my opinion, I love what Bethesda has done with the series, but it has really sugarcoated some of the details and obscured some of the darker elements that were really there in the original game. We wanted to bring that back to some extent, and I think the humour in the original game fits in really well with our dark humour in the UK. So we can be serious when we want to be serious, but at the same time, we’re also going to tell some of the darkest jokes.”
“You have to compensate because if you make it too dark then it’s just a depressing game and it doesn’t feel like Fallout, and if you put too many jokes in it then it doesn’t feel like Fallout. There’s a fine line there. Personally, I think, and I’m obviously biased, I feel like we nailed that, but from some of the feedback I feel like people have understood what we wanted, and that’s good.”
Speaking of doing things the way they did in classic Fallout, Carter did point out some of the things the team plans to add to cater to players who prefer the modern Fallout approach. “The biggest criticism we’ve gotten is that some people have said we don’t explain a lot of the later stuff, like when you come to Thameshaven or Swan and Mitre, you ask ‘Who are these people?’ Now you can find out by talking, but I think a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten is because people are expecting a game that’s more like Fallout 4, where the first person you meet is pretty much sitting there explaining A, B, and C. We don’t want that. We want it to be like Fallout 1 and 2. Maybe we think people are still playing Fallout 1 and 2, and some people just need explanations.”
“So one of our updates might be a smaller update [will be] Those people will come along and do that for them. Let the lore monkeys actually go get the lore that they want, they can get all the in-depth stuff that they’re really looking for without having to search through 10 different dialogues, and for people who need a more detailed look, they can go get that, too. So, we’re just trying to cater to everybody’s needs, and it’ll be a smaller update where we’ll reach out to the voice actors and ask them, ‘Can you help do this stuff? ‘ and then do that.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to finding lore and interesting characters in the world of Fallout: London, Carter mentioned that the Gang Wars questline, at least partially inspired by Peaky Blinders, is something players shouldn’t ignore, even if it’s “prematurely discontinued at the moment” due to the lack of a Wild Card questline, but the team plans to add it back in later. “I don’t know why we decided to do the Gang Wars questline because it’s not been done in any other game that I know of, you just have your main questline and then you’re done.
“I mean, people don’t realise that there are basically two main questlines in Fallout: London. Obviously, you have the main questline where you’re going to meet the Fifth Column, Camelot and so on, or you go with the Rangers to do what we call the Gang Wars questline, but it’s still a three-part quest. It’s not as fleshed out as the other one, but, you still have a full game.
“If you just did Nomadland and stopped there, it would be as long as some of the previous games, but you had another route. I don’t know why we chose to do this, and I’m glad we did. It allowed us to further develop these characters and put more information into them, and I personally think it just adds to the world.”
Carter also said he’d love to see other modders try to add their own twists to the game, such as gang warfare, saying: “I’d like to see an ending that I don’t know about, [Sebastian] Gaunt becomes King of England. Of course, it can be modified with our consent, just don’t use artificial intelligence.”
Modders don’t have to add birth control pills to Fallout: London, however. Yes, interestingly, Carter confirmed to me that the condoms you might find while exploring London (called Jimmies) aren’t British slang, as you might not know, but are the product of the FOLON team’s effort to bring in a lot of ideas from the original Fallout and the canceled Van Buren. He couldn’t tell me exactly why they provide 20 radiation resistance, though.
“I think the stats are something like that, or just an idea to get them to do that since they’re not the most common thing,” the modder said. “I know there’s been discussions on Reddit about [with] People imagined how they would function. Some people said, would you wear it as a swim cap? Is it a full-body swimsuit? Whatever you want it to be.”
So, you see, there’s no clear answer to Fallout: London’s condom dilemma. At least not until someone somehow asks the Jeremy Bentham robot which way of wearing a Jimmie hat will give the most radiation resistance to the most travelers.
