Bethesda Keeps Hiring The Fans Creating Fallout: London

Fallout: London looks great! It honestly could pass as a real, official expansion if you showed it to someone who had no idea it was a fan-created mod. And apparently the company behind Fallout, Bethesda, agrees that London looks marvelous because it keeps hiring up the ambitious mod’s developers.

Word of the latest hire came yesterday, on the official Fallout: London Twitter account, when the people behind the project revealed that its lead technical adviser, Ryan Johnson, was leaving the much-hyped Fallout 4 mod’s team to start working for Bethesda. By itself this news is impressive and cool. That Bethesda has come knocking for talent is a testament to how promising the mod’s looking.

The mod team said they were all “excited to see the worlds he can build” for Bethesda as he starts his new job with the company.

We have a few very special and bittersweet announcements for you all today.

Please read: pic.twitter.com/nZihjqSifH

— Team FOLON (@TeamFOLON) June 30, 2022

So that’s one thing. But what’s wilder about all this is that this isn’t the first time this exact thing has happened. Around this time last year, Stephanie Zachariadis, who was then Fallout: London’s head writer, left the development team after also being hired by Bethesda Game Studios as a quest designer.

And in the update announcing this latest departure, the team announced that another one of its members was also offered a role at Bethesda. This time it was the mod’s very own project manager Dean Carter, who was apparently offered a position to work on Fallout 76 at Bethesda’s UK office. However, Carter declined the job after some “very hard soul searching,” and will stick around to see Fallout: London through to completion. 

The London team suggested that some modders use large, well-known projects for “pure CV padding,” while others do it for the community, the team, and the fans. It “isn’t easy to turn down your life dream” to instead work on a fan mod for free, they wrote, and suggested that Carter’s choice to stay was a sign of his “selflessness” and “dedication” to the mod and its team.

As for Fallout: London, a large-scale PC mod that will add a brand-new London-themed world to Fallout 4 complete with new quests and weapons, the devs behind the project said Johnson’s departure won’t cause any delays in development. Apparently his departure has been known for some time and he helped ensure the team could properly move on before he left.