Jeremy Bentham, Doctor Who, and horse meat - our favourite things in Fallout London
There's also Post Boxers, Warmite, Wombles, and so much more to take in.
Fallout: London, the DLC-sized mod — which is a complete lie given how gargantuan this mod is — from Team FOLON launched on July 25. Now that the team at VG247 has had enough time to wet their appetites and see what this highly-anticipated mod is all about, we decided to discuss and share a few of our favorite things across post-apocalyptic London.
The mod is, unsurprisingly, full of neat Britishisms (not that there’s anything great about being British), and Easter eggs which are a real joy to experience. Sure, Fallout: London hasn’t been without its fair share of bugs and crashes (which is authentic to the Bethesda experience, if you ask me), but this hasn’t removed from the amazing amount of passion and detail that has gone into making Fallout: London a reality.
Without further ado, here are some of our favourite things in Fallout: London.
The Jeremy Bentham Protectron
Mark Warren: “What’s a Gentry?” my Fallout: London character, a mustachioed man built for sniping and not much else, asks the head in a jar. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, stares back at me. His cold, dead, preserved eyes glare into my soul. WHAT did you just say, they seem to enquire. His protectron body should probably be punching me in the face with a metal limb.
It doesn’t.
Because Jeremy Bentham — or rather his preserved corpse — is a gentleman. He believes in healthy debate, and that’s exactly what he was trying to have with me before I rudely defied the laws of stupidity. He slowly realises it’s not worth it. I don’t have any views on The Gentry, and even if I can cobble some together once he tells me what they are, they won’t be worth hearing.
He politely brings the debate to a close, and as we part he hands me a cookie. I stand on the steps leading up to University College London, trying to process what’s happened in the blur that was the last five minutes, after I spotted the robot and thought ‘No way, it can’t be’. Eventually, I bring up my inventory and have a munch on the cookie.
My dumb character might not be sure about the whole “the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” thing that the philosopher's dead body is peddling. But I sure got a kick out of this bit of Fallout: London.
Mysterious Scientists from Doctor Who
Jim Trinca: My favourite thing about Fallout London is a bold situational pun at the very opening: you. in a giant test tube, being examined by two doctors who are voiced by two Doctors. Specifically Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, the 6th and 7th titular stars of Doctor Who, most infamous for leading the show during its terminal decline in the late eighties.
Colin Baker's tenure was notoriously cack, and McCoy's, while a marked improvement, simply wasn't enough of a turnaround to save the show from its eventual cancellation in 1989. One of the main reasons cited for such was the unassailable quality of science fiction shows coming out of America at the time: particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Brits, thought the BBC, simply cannot compete with shows that have actual money behind them.
And there will never be an official installment of Fallout set in the UK, for it is an American story about how America sees itself. But the Brits have, somehow, knocked together something that holds up. Through endless hours of bedroom coding, the calling in of countless favours, and sheer tenacity, there is a British Fallout that's just as meaty as a real, mainline installment.
And so I think the fact that the first NPCs you meet in this remarkable project are ex-Doctor Whos. The very ones in fact that presided over the original show's demise. It's a statement of intent: this is a proper game project with proper access to proper talent that you've actually heard of. And like all good British science fiction, we made it with two yoghurt tubs and a bit of string, and still managed to blow everyone away with its bold vision and eccentricity.
Also I haven't played past the opening.
Post Boxers
Kelsey Raynor: Scrambling through post-apocalyptic London is pretty dangerous as it is. There’s Hooligans, Gatherers, Beefeaters and all manner of ghastly, mutated creatures for you to be cautious of in Fallout: London. There’s foxes with brutal bites, giant ladybugs that I felt awful killing, and scuttle crabs that square up to you.
An enemy I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the Royal Mail. One of the few trusted mail delivery services in the UK — that is actually reliable — is far from reliable in Fallout: London.
I walked past plenty of red post-boxes in my first few hours of the game without trouble. In fact, one of my earliest screenshots of the game is of a postbox. Nothing amazing, but I was certainly amazed to see one in Fallout for the first time. My amazement wore off when one of the things jump-scared me, however.
That’s right. Some of Fallout: London’s post-boxes aren’t defunct relics from a time when posties’ red vans were on every corner. No. Some of them have instead been turned into Post Boxers; post-boxes that’ll jump out when you least expect it, conjuring wheels from beneath them and saws for hands.
My previous obsession with looting post-boxes in the hopes they’d have some money inside was quickly put to bed, and I have been avoiding post-boxes ever since. Though, there is a friendly one in Westminster to look forward to.
Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett
Kelsey Raynor: Sweeney Todd is a tale from the 1800s, detailing the life of a barber who’d murder his clients using his razor-sharp tools. He’d dispose of the bodies by handing them over to downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, who would then use these victims as ingredients for ‘mystery meat pies’. It’s quite grim, really, but so is post-apocalyptic London.
If you explore the streets surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral during the day, you can find Fleet Street, which is where Sweeney Todd resided. Take a wander down the road, and you’ll actually see a barber shop led by a disheveled man called Ted. And would you look at that? His neighbor, Mrs. Miggins, happens to be a baker, and there’s a corpse-shaped bin bag just outside… I wonder what they’re both up to.
Explore a little further, and you'll find a bucket of human remains behind Mrs. Miggins counter.
The interaction sadly doesn’t consist of much more than Ted actually giving you a haircut and his baker neighbor being a trader, but it’s still quite neat to see the old, gruesome tale brought to life in Fallout: London.
Bercow Bot
Mark Warren: Yes, all of my bits are about Protectrons designed to mirror iconic Brits. Look, I’m a New Vegas fan, robot fetishism kinda comes with the territory.
Anyway, getting back on track, John Bercow’s cameo in Fallout: London is a little thing, but it’s a perfect example of the mod going that extra mile to deliver an experience that feels authentically English, complete with all of our bonkers traditions and bizarre sense of humour.
As you’ll see if you’re from another part of the world and you play the mod, we’re a nation - establishment-wise at any rate - committed above all else, in a frankly psychopathic fashion, to the notion of order. Of everyone doing what they’re told. At least in theory, those rules obviously often don’t apply to those at the top, at least in any terms beyond appearance.
So, having a man in there literally known for shouting ‘Order!’ at MPs during his time as speaker is just chef’s kiss. And it’s quite funny too.
Fesco’s Horse Meat
Kelsey Raynor: In case you hadn’t heard, the UK and other parts of Europe were at the center of quite the scandal in 2013. A scandal involving horse meat. That’s right. Folk across the country were buying 100% beef burgers and God knows what else only to later have it revealed that these food products did, in fact, have traces of horse DNA inside them. It also happened that Tesco was at the forefront of the scandal, while other stores such as Aldi and Lidl were also affected.
While consuming horse meat isn’t actually a health risk, this did cause a lot of understandable concern about how horse DNA ended up in our food. If that could happen, what else was ending up in our food that we didn’t know about?
Anyways, if you explore the aptly-named Fesco in Fallout: London, you can find ‘Meat Mix Burgers’ which have all manner of animals on the packaging. One of them, of course, is a horse, which is undeniably a gentle poke at the food-safety concerns of Brits during 2013 and the meme that the whole scandal later became.
Fallout: London has a lot of niche references like this, which is what makes the mod so brilliant. Take the random NPC’s in Westminster that talk about napping in Parliament, for example. That actually happened. If you explore every inch of Fesco, too, you'll also find some controversial Warmite.
For more on Fallout: London, take a look at what to expect from future updates to the mod, all of the Companions that you can recruit, and the easiest Settlement locations to get.