We spoke to Fallout: London’s project lead about how Team FOLON sees its future and the process of making massive mods.
“Don’t.”
That’s the first thing Fallout: London project manager Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter, through a cheeky grin and a chuckle, says when I ask him, aside from the obvious point of not being a modding novice, what advice he might give to someone who sees the massive Fallout 4 mod and decides to embark on a similar project of their own.
He’s obviously joking, but there’s a serious point to be made in there – don’t sign up for something like this unless you’ve got a good idea of what you’re in for and are sure you want to do it.
Having now come through the development of the massive mod, Team FOLON knows better than any other group of people on earth exactly what it takes to deliver a project this expansive and impressive while working on an amateur basis, but it took a lot of adapting and learning to get there.
Take the mod’s sheer scale, managing the balance between sticking to the plan feature-wise and allowing moments of creative inspiration to happen mid-development. “I guess in a weird way we didn’t [do that], which is why the scale got so big,” Carter says. “Content creep kills projects, that’s just a known fact. We definitely – because obviously the project was started during the pandemic – we had two years to just throw things at the wall and see what stuck and it got out of control, but we then conquered that Everest,” he continues, adding: Once we had sort of got to like the top of the peak, we were so sort of fatigued from all the other ideas that we put in, we were like, ‘Okay, by this point we’re now a bit more grounded’.”
Armed with the motivating factor of knowing that there wasn’t going to be another pandemic to give it another “two years worth of free time”, Team FOLON got a grip on its priorities and became used to asking tough but necessary questions – “‘Do we need this? No.’ ‘Do we have the time to put in this whole thing? No.’”
While projects of this nature are often seen as having different vibes to their cousins in the games industry itself, which are being developed by for-profit studios which don’t exist in the sort of grey area between work and hobby that modding does, Carter says that Team FOLON had to least partially adopt some of the same mindset as professionals do in terms of making Fallout: London a reality. Naturally, without a lot the team volunteering their own time without any kind of pay in order to work on the mod, a unique approach was needed by the project’s leads in terms of managing people.
“We’ve received a lot of feedback on this. I don’t want to say flak, but we have run this basically, as [though] we were a [professional] studio,” Carter admits, “I feel like in order to get things over the line, you have to.” “Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s an element of hobby to this, and that’s one of the things that we asked people when they joined,” he explains, “We literally said ‘What is your goal from this?’ Some people flat out said ‘I want to get involved in this because I want to get a job in the industry’. Some people have said they want to get involved because it’s a hobby, [saying things like] ‘I want to work weekends on something fun with other people’. We let them tell us what they want to do, or how they expect to work and obviously that can change in development, but that then tells me as the project manager, how I can manage that person.
