Fallout: London, PC [Part 2 – Avoiding the Bugs]

Before proceeding with the review, I want to bring up the “elephant in the room” with Fallout: London. Something that bothered me throughout my first two playthroughs, and also something that can be mostly avoided with some careful planning and insight. And that is: avoiding the many bugs in the game…

I encountered random crash bugs; loading bugs; all kinds of visual bugs; quest bugs; companion bugs; environment bugs; bugs with settlements and settlers wandering off; bugs with monsters; clipping bugs, and item bugs. And it meant (for me), lots of re-loading of glitched scenes and having to use the console to fix broken quests. During my two playthroughs the game was updated three or four times, but none of these updates seemed to make much difference to the rate at which I encountered these bugs, and that I later discovered it was ALL MY OWN FAULT!

What I should have done (and didn’t do), and what EVERYONE SHOULD DO, BEFORE PLAYING this remarkable mod, is to run Fallout 4, BEFORE installing Fallout: London. Yes: RUN THE BASE GAME FIRST, so that all the respective ini files are created, AND ONLY THEN should you install Fallout: London. Doing this should ensure that the majority of the bugs in the game are avoided. You, of course, need to install Fallout: London correctly afterwards, but that is easy enough to do either via GOG Galaxy or the provided install executable.

The mistake I made was: my original playthrough of Fallout 4 was done through Steam, which was already installed on my PC. When Fallout: London was released, I decided to buy the GOTY Edition of Fallout 4 again, through GOG.com. So I did that, and then installed it. BUT… I didn’t run Fallout 4 before installing Fallout: London. Which was a big mistake. I think the problems arise from having different installs of Fallout 4 on the same PC.

The Creation Engine is also known for being twitchy by itself, so you have to expect Fallout: London to crash every once in a while. Careful saving should prevent long re-plays after a crash.

One other important thing to note: Fallout: London is a total conversion, so you can’t play the Fallout 4 base game at the same time. You have to uninstall both Fallout: London and Fallout 4, and re-install Fallout 4 again – clean – to play through the base game again.

If you prepare and install Fallout: London properly, you shouldn’t experience [m]any of the bugs I encountered.

More: Fallout: London on GOG.com
More: Fallout: London on Wikipedia
More: Official Fallout: London website