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A 40ft giant robot killing in the name of democracy, a 200 year old billionaire who rules over a city from the comfort of a pod, a hyper-isolationist gang of murderous boomers - it doesn’t get much more American than Fallout.
With McCarthyism and venture capitalism so intrinsic to Fallout’s identity, it’s hard to know how you🌳 could set the series in another country. However, Fallout: London’s project lead Dean Carter, AKA Prilladog views this as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
“The whole point of Fallout is to be like a caricature of the democratic capitalist side of America”, he says. “You look at England, like everything about us, you know - pip pip, cheerio, the Queen, tea, you know, all that sort of stuff - the whole country is a caricature. It's bountiful. There's definitely a story here.”
Fallout: London takes place in the UK capital, recreated in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout 4’s engine. As described , it features ‘stuffy parliamentary aristocrats, a resurrection of the Knights of the Round Table, and an uncompromising cult of revolutionaries🎀 - Fallout: London embodies the history and aesthetics of London and puts an unmistakably nuclear spin on the beloved city’.
That new nuclear spin demands taking r🔯isks. With Vault Tec and the Brotherhood being wholly American institutions, Prilladog has had to create their British equivalents. Thankfully, we have more than enough questionable history to draw inspir💜ation from.
“The way we describe it on the team is ‘imagine Vault Tec, but crap’,” he says, taking me through the mod’s replacements for Fallout series-staples. “So you know, rather than having this underground Mega Vault, you've got this breezeblock-type basement with government officials all squashed in”. This is all based on reality - during the Cold War, the UK government was preparing to help the politicians bunker down, whereas the rest of us got questionable advice - a public information campaign called Protect and Survive.
“If you check out Protect and Survive, they are some of the most depressing things ever,” Prilladog days. ”The government even pulled them because they were making a nuclear war sound unsurvivable. Like, the government literally put out a video saying how if your grandma dies in your room, put her outside in a polythene bag. So we are definitely jumping all over that sort of stuff, like this outlook of - to excuse my language - ‘yeah, we're fucked’”.
Existing Fallout lore regarding ไwhat the Brits were getting up to doesn’t paint a cheery picture, and Prilladog and the team are just expanding on that. “So they immediately went from the resource wars directly into the European Commonwealth civil wars into the Great War. So everything was bad. The whole thing about this point is everyone is up shit creek without a paddle. You know, everyone is starving, everyone is literally trying to stay alive.”
This different approach shows in the trailer. We’re not greeted by a happy-go-lucky Vault Boy, or a 1950s nuclear family casually preparing for nuclear annihilatiཧon. Instead we get a cockney guy telling us everything has gone tits up.
Of course, we can’t talk about British attitudes 💙without talking about class. Here, there’s no mask of an American dream to distract from how bad it can get. It is simply bad, and you’re expected to know your place.
“I feel like as someone that's from England, we are very much ingrained in that we know where we are in terms of status,” he says “I was definitely born in a middle class family, that I will always remain there. And it's weird. That is definitely something that I had this conversation with Americans before my travels, and they weren't really aware of this. They just knew it as you have money or you don't.
“I think in America, I mean, you could be out, you could live out in the sticks, win the lottery, and then you can then start going to high class events, and you're just be seen as another rich person. But over here, you know, if I was to ever go to - I don't know - Ascot, people would know that I'm not a normal goer. I'd stand out like a sore thumb.”
Despite all of the destruction caused by the Great War, the Fallout: London team envision a world where these rigid divides still exist - just as the citizens of New Vegas hold on to the American dream. And just like New Vegas, this clinging on to the olds w🅠ays is told through the factions.
“The overall theme is the haves and the haves not you know, you have the Gentry, [the] elite members that are in much nicer houses. And yet you literally then have like the slums in 🔜our game around like Trafalgar Square where people are literally living in almost like a favela.”
There are seven factions confirmed for Fallout London. On top of the Gentry, you have the Tommies, 5th Column, Camelot, the Isle of Dogs Syndicate, 🐷the Vagabonds, and Angel. Not one is taken from the existing lore (Prilladog actually wants Bethesda to mix it up in that department too), 🐭which is helped by the fact that London is such a wonderfully diverse place.
“You're gonna have people from Wales, from Scotland, and some people from some of the neighbouring European countries, because that also plays with the fact that London is such a multicultural place.” Prilladog is also very eager to move away from the main series’ belief that all communication would break down when the bombs fall. Within reason, travel still exists between regions, so you won’t just be stuck hearing cockney accents the whole time.
Thankfully, it isn’t just the NPCs that get to be diverse. Fallout: London will see us roam the streets as a new and completely roleplay-able protagonist - and a silent one at tha🎉t, for the classic fans. “A big point of contention with the Fallout 4 crowd is that you are given this backstory of this straight man. What if you wanted to play as a gay person?”, Prilladog explains.
“We want to go back more to the Courier style where it is, as soon as you wake in, you can be whoever y🗹ou want, there is nothing on paper, you can roleplay it exactly as you want. That is also why we went with the idea of a non-speaking protagonist, so that you can imagine them as whatever voice you want.”
While the team is busy coming up with all of this new lore and story, they have been able to bring a few things in from the games, it’s just a matter of making it realistic. Fallout: London is set right in the middle of the first two, so we can expect some callbacks. “It’s allowed us to play with things such as the younger Tenpenny, who I think in our timeframe will be, I think, 30 years old”, he says. “It's not major to the plotline. But it would be interesting to see a younger version of Tenpenny. You might actually be able to understand why he's become this Garrity old man prepared to just blow up Megaton.”
Full to the brim with ideas, one question still remains: why go to all this effort? The simple answer is that Priladog really likes London, living so close to it: “Who isn't gonna want to have a settlement on the London Eye? That's just gonna be cool.”
But even with that passion, big Fallout mods don’t have the best reputation right now after many were left disappointed by The Frontier. Having worked on other mods in the past, Prilladog has his own theories on why they haven’t worked out. “It's because of their project leads, they're not level designers. So it's very good to sit on a pedestal and say, ‘I have an idea’. But you don't understand the work that goes in for that idea”. Indeed, for all of the criticism The Frontier faced, it at least managed to launch - albeit after seven years.
“We don't want to be working on our projects in seven years. So I can assure you, it'll be out before then in any shape or form.”
I do joke that I won’t push for a release date - “Good, because you won’t get one!” - but it sounds cautiously optimistic “With all projects, they tend to have a, say, a year-long grace period where they will sort of fumble around in the dark, not knowing what they're doing and end up scrapping all their work for the year. For us, that was 2019 And then we've been actually working on what we currently have and where we're at since 2020. But we already seemed to have surpassed most of our competitors in progress.”
But that just brings us ba🌸ck to the question - why? Aside from the fact that it’s apparently made for a hell of a lockdown pass time, it’s actually about proving that Fallout doesn’t need America to work.
“[Bethesda] can watch to see how we’re received,” Prilladog says. “You know, fingers crossed we don't sink, but if it sinks, they know that they can never go out of America. But if we're swimming and everyone loves it, they might actually be like, okay, let's maybe go to Mexico or let's maybe go to Canada. It might also mean that not even us, if one of the other ones come out, they might go, aha, maybe we don't have to rely on the Brotherhood of Steel anymore.”
Bethesda is actually already aware of the project - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it even rece🍰ntly hired one of its writers - so it’s not a stre♏tch to beli൩eve this could all happen.
“I never expect them to do something in London. But if they turned around and said, ‘Okay, that was a cool idea, this faction is going to appear in an Americanized form’. And then we get a little credit, I'll be all over that, you know. They've already poached my head writer so they can at least credit us!”