Days after the Fallout television show earned universal praise from critics and fans of the role-playing game series, Bethesda Game Studios has finally announced a release date for the much-anticipated next-gen update for the most recent single-player offering in the series.
The free update for 2015’s Fallout 4 will drop on April 25, the studio announced. It will add both a Performance and Quality mode that will take advantage of new console hardware to boost the game’s resolution and framerate to 4K and 60 frames per second respectively. Players on newer and older consoles will also receive stability improvements and quest fixes in the update. Over on PC, the game will get ultra-widescreen support. Fallout 4 will be on the Epic Games Store and on the Steam Deck, according to a blog post.
An Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 version of Fallout 4 has been a long time coming. Bethesda first announced the upgrade in October 2022, but provided scarce details on when to expect it. The company was focused on finishing the 2023 space-exploration RPG Starfield before returning to the most recent single-player Fallout offering.
While the update comes at the perfect time for people watching the TV show, it isn’t so great for fans looking forward to an ambitious and highly-anticipated fan project.
Fallout: London is a fan-created single-player expansion for Fallout 4 that’s been in development for the last four years. The PC-only mod features new quests, creatures, perks, factions, weapons, animations, a revamped dialogue system, and voice acting, all set within a handcrafted post-apocalyptic version of the English capital. Team FOLON, the team behind the mod says the map is about the size of Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, and its DLC map Far Harbor, combined. The mod marks the first time fans will see a Fallout story set outside the continental U.S.
While Fallout: London was set to release on April 23, coinciding with the actual English holiday of St. George’s Day, project lead Dean Carter announced that the next-gen update scheduled to drop just two days after means an 11th-hour delay.
“With the new update dropping just 48 hours later, the past four years of our work stand to just simply break,” Carter explained.
Carter said he was disappointed about the delay, but told fans to refrain from grabbing their virtual pitchforks.
“The fact Bethesda is keeping what is an old game updated is honestly a great thing,” he said. “On the technical front, being able to play Fallout: London with the new potential engine improvements and the performance upgrades is fantastic. It’s going to mean that we can push the engine even harder than we already pushed it.”
Carter didn’t give a new timeline for its release “because it might be on the 25th of April [...] or it might be a month from now,” but reassured fans that it will drop as soon as it’s ready.
More than eight years after its release, Fallout 4 remains one of the more divisive entries in the series. It is noted for scaling back some of the more traditional role-playing elements expected from a Bethesda game in favor of a more action-oriented experience that prioritizes loot-collecting, item crafting, and base building. Still, Fallout 4 remains the best-selling game in the series.
Fallout 4 is a great game in its own right. But for vault-dwellers looking to jump into the series for the first time, I’d recommend Obsidian Entertainment’s 2010 cult-classic Fallout: New Vegas.
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