Even by the usual fantastic standards seen by coding camps and Minecraft modding courses, this summer has been particularly fascinating and amazing when it comes to video game modification, with one particularly popular giving us a crash course in the doors it can open.

The talk of the modding world over the entire summer of 2024 has been the huge launch of Fallout: London, a total conversion mod for Fallout 4 that was of a scale largely unprecedented in the modding world.

The mod, which takes the typical open-world post-apocalyptic RPG setting and gameplay from Fallout 4 and transplants it to Great Britain, initially started relatively small, but in the early 2020s increased vastly in scope as more volunteers worked on the game during a time when other work was disrupted.

This turned a relatively small project into a total conversion that featured a map the same size as The Commonwealth in the base game, with voice acting provided by a mix of volunteers, professional voice actors and, most notably, two of the leads from Doctor Who (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy).

The scale of the game led to issues with hosting, as most mod hosting websites have strict size limits, which led to a partnership with GOG (Good Old Games), a storefront operated by mod-friendly game developer CDProjekt Red.

There was a delay to the mod to the summer caused by an unexpected next-generation update to Fallout 4 which affected compatibility with the mod. GOG got around this by not updating the version of the game available to buy on their platform, whilst the mods provided instructions to downgrade the Steam version of the game.