“No.”
When I asked Fallout: London project manager Dean “Prilladog” Carter what advice he could offer to someone looking at the massive Fallout 4 mod and deciding to start a similar project, aside from the fact that he’s not new to modding himself, his first comment was a joking laugh.
He’s obviously joking, but there’s a serious point here: Don’t sign up for something like this unless you know exactly what you’re getting into and are sure you want to do it.
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Having gone through the development of this large model, the FOLON team knows better than any other team in the world what it takes to accomplish such a large and impressive project on an amateur basis, but achieving this goal requires a lot of adaptation and learning.
Taking the size of the mod as an example, we needed to find a balance between sticking to the planned features and allowing for creative inspiration during development. “I don’t think we’ve been [do that]which is why it scaled so well,” Carter said. “It’s a well-known fact that content sprawl kills projects. We certainly — because obviously this project was launched during a pandemic — we had two years to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, and then things got out of control, but we conquered Mount Everest,” he continued, adding: “By the time we got to the top of the mountain, we were so exhausted from all the other ideas that we thought, ‘Well, by now we’ve got our feet on the ground a lot more.’ ”
Knowing there wouldn’t be another pandemic, giving them “two years of free time,” was a motivating factor that pushed the FOLON team to stay on top of their priorities and get used to asking the hard but necessary questions — “‘Do we need this? No.’ ‘Do we have the time to devote to all this? No.’”
While these types of projects are often considered to have a different vibe than their counterparts in the gaming industry, which are developed by for-profit studios and don’t sit in the gray area between work and hobby like mods do, Carter says the FOLON team had to at least partially adopt the same mindset as professionals in bringing Fallout: London to life. Naturally, since the team isn’t volunteering their time pro bono to develop the mod, project leaders need to take a unique approach when it comes to managing people.
“We’ve received a lot of feedback about this. I don’t want to say criticism, but we’ve basically done this because [though] We are a [professional] studio,” Carter admitted, “I feel like in order to get things going, you have to do that.” “Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a hobby component to this and that’s one of the things we ask people when they join,” he explained, “We actually ask ‘What are your goals? ‘ Some people say outright ‘I want to be involved because I want to get a job in the industry’. Some people say they want to be involved because it’s a hobby, [saying things like] “I want to do something fun with this other person on the weekends.” We ask them to tell us what they want to do, or how they expect to work, and obviously that might change during development, but it tells me, as a project manager, how I should manage this person.
“It sounds strange, but if your goal is to work in this industry, you’re going to have a wake-up call, if you go from working at Sainsbury’s and suddenly you’re in a very fast-paced industry where you need to do this and that and then the company says, ‘We’re going to start working overtime’. That’s going to be a wake-up call and you’re going to be like ‘no, I can’t do that’ and then you burn out. Whereas if you work for free on one of these projects, you’re prepared, and we’ve noticed [is that] People do that and then they go to the studio or whatever and they start working right away. We’ve had several people go to Games Workshop now and in the time it takes us to finish the mod, they’ve been promoted and they’ve even said ‘You did a great job for us. ‘”
Leaders also have to figure out how to deal with two of the most difficult things any studio, professional or amateur, can face—the sudden departure of employees and maintaining good relations with potential players. In terms of the former, the FOLON team had to deal with the Russo-Ukrainian war, which forced developers involved in key quest lines to suddenly (and inevitably) abandon their positions, leaving the team with no choice but to figure out how to keep calm and keep moving forward.
“We’re not one of those big corporate entities where if we suddenly lose these people, we can pay for more people and they can come in and do the work quickly,” Carter told me. “We’re a small team, and there’s a human element, like, if—touch wood—but if something happens to me, then it’s going to have a huge impact on the team. If something happens to any of the department heads. All of us have experienced loss during development, and you know, it happens.
“It’s the human element, and you know what, I probably still wouldn’t change that. I don’t like the fact that we might be like, ‘Oh, I’ve known you for four years, man, I’ve got to find a replacement’. I really don’t like that when I hear about it, because obviously there’s this problem in the industry right now, so they’re starting to unionize, and there’s these new laws, and people are protesting now. So yeah, I don’t like the replaceability of people. I think it dehumanizes them, and I like close-knit families. [feel we have]”
Then there’s the latter, where Carter stressed that rather than letting developers say whatever they want on the mod’s public Discord without consequence, the FOLON team seeks to handle any mishandling in a fair way. “We’ll have meetings and say ‘for every 10 people who really like it, one will come to you,'” the modder said, adding that Reddit is particularly challenging in this regard.
“Sometimes, I don’t even deny it myself, when you’re trying to do PR, the facade breaks down,” he said. “We’re just human, and there are always people who, you know, they’re going to say something mean to you, and then you basically tell them to get off the server in a rude way. Just like we’re human, you know, this happens, we send messages. [team members] After that [saying] You could have done better.’ At the end of the day, that’s one of the reasons I enjoy running my own company so much, because I don’t think I would want to run it any differently. We demand humanity, and I don’t want us to go into this corporate space and be less than we are. One of our biggest strengths is that we’re human. [and] We as humans interact with other humans.”
Carter said he’s insisting that the FOLON team stick with this basic approach and emphasis on the human element as the team takes the next step, a goal that some members have been hinting at in various ways for some time – becoming a full-fledged independent game studio.
“Basically all I envision for our future endeavors is that we’re going to make a different game,” the modder told me. “The servers won’t necessarily change, the way we communicate with our players won’t change, and to be honest, if an investor came to us and said, ‘You have to do this, this, this,’ I would say ‘No, I’ll find someone who’s a better fit for us.’ I’d rather be happy in our development and enjoy what we do than be a soulless entity that’s only taking orders from shareholders.”
For now, though, as the group focuses on fixing and eventually adding back what had to be cut from Fallout: London, the group plans to try to help anyone who might be inspired to start a large-scale game modification project clearly understand what it means to do so. Carter believes there are a lot of aspects of this that people might not realize, from having to organize and pay to maintain basic project necessities like a website and even things like Discord that allow for team communication, to the fact that you’ll most likely not end up getting a “praise” from the company behind the game you’re modifying, even if it does allow you to modify its game.
“this [community] Really hopeful that we can make a video that explains all of this stuff in detail,” Carter said. “I hope from that video, because we’re going to do it, where we explain it, it won’t be out of a sense of entitlement or we know best because we’re just modders.”
He added: “The thing about inspiration is that it seems like a good idea, but you might not realise how much work it takes to make it happen. “If I could work like I do now, I don’t know, I’d probably be living in a bigger house right now. But, I don’t have a job, I’ve been using creator kits for free, unpaid, and my savings have been fucking wiped out, pardon the swearing, it’s like they’ve all disappeared.
“People don’t realise the sacrifice that these kinds of things require and that’s the most important thing, you can be inspired but understand the sacrifice. The most important advice is to research how long and how many man-hours it will take and if you can’t do it then look at how others do it, I would say.”
