On Thursday April, 25th Bethesda released the long awaited “Next Gen” Update for Fallout 4, a whole four years after the release of “next gen” consoles, and in true Bethesda fashion, the
update caused far more issues than it fixed.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
Let’s start with the positive changes; the update allows the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 to run the game natively as opposed to using backwards compatibility features. This has led to a lot of performance improvements for console players.
The update also adds a bundle of Creation Club mods featuring new weapons, quests, and settlement items to the game for free, but the news isn’t all good, we’ll return to this point later. Bethesda even added the names of those who created these mods to the official credits of the game. Good job there, Bethesda!
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
Now onto the problems. Everything is broken. Well, almost everything. PC players are used to game updates breaking their mods, not just in Bethesda games but in most videogames. Being used to this eventuality, many PC players chose to opt out of the free update in order to maintain the extensive modlists. Unfortunately, many players were caught unaware and were in for a nasty surprise when they tried to load their games and found out that Steam autoupdated the game for them.
If you’re not in the know, you may wonder if PC players are making much ado about nothing. Sure they may not be able to play with their mods for a while but at least they have the original game, and a new free update to boot! Well, imagine you started a new playthrough of Fallout 4 months ago, with dozens if not hundreds of mods to spice things up and improve the game. If even one of those mods stops working, your entire saved game may no longer be able to be played. Imagine losing a hundred hours because of an update that you didn’t even know was coming, or that you didn’t want or need!
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
This has led to the new mod “Fallout 4 Downgrader” shooting to the top of popular modding website Nexus Mods. The Downgrader mod is able to revert an updated version of Fallout 4 to the previous version, which will restore players’ ability to use mods, and their ability to play their established saved games. However console players aren’t so lucky. For many of them, especially on Xbox, they found their modlists completely wiped clean, and worse yet, many of the mods they were using either no longer existed or weren’t able to be downloaded because of the update. So many console players just lost their save games, with no way to recover them. All that for a little bit of free Creation Club content.
For those who don’t know, the Creation Club is a paid store for players to buy mods in Bethesda games. The new weapons and items that were added with the update came from old mods that many players had already paid for and installed, now every Fallout 4 player gets them for free, well, if you don’t count the cost of thousands of lost saves. It’s pretty sad to see Bethesda continue to give the bare minimum effort to their games. The “Next Gen” update has been highly anticipated for years and what did Bethesda give us? A few new weapons that the modders made, and a couple bog standard, soulless new quests that introduce us to the new items. That all pales though to what else the update caused us to lose.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
Two days before the “Next Gen” update came out, was the release date to one of the most ambitious Fallout mods of all time: Fallout London. A completely new Fallout game which, according to the developers, is 1.5x the size of Fallout 4. Yes, two days before the update, on Saint George’s Day, a team of modders was going to release a mod that was bigger than the game itself. However, knowing that the update would break it, the developers decided earlier in the month that they would rather delay the release of their game until the mod scene had stabilized rather than let people experience it for two days and then be broken by decisions outside of their control.
The developers made a cheeky YouTube video to announce the mod’s delay and voice their displeasure with Bethesda. The timing of the “Next Gen” update has led to some irate players wondering if Bethesda purposefully chose April 25th to spite the modders and force them to delay.
So when will everything be fixed? That is anyone’s guess. Some mods, particularly on consoles, have already been fixed. Simpler mods may not have been affected at all, or not affected too badly, and could be fixed within days.
However, many mods, especially complex ones rely on a utility called the Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE) which was completely broken by the update. So the mod makers of those mods won’t even begin to fix their mods until the developers of the Script Extender fix it. Some mods were made so long ago that even when they are able to be worked on again in the future, the modder may have moved on! Some mods will surely never work again after the update.
The F4SE team posted the following update on their website:
“The 2024-04-25 Fallout 4 update (1.10.980 and later) has broken F4SE and the rest of the native code modding scene similarly to Skyrim’s “Anniversary Edition” patch. I am working on
an update and cannot currently offer a timeline for its availability, nor whether there will be any critical technical issues that would block an update. Do not email with questions.”
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
That certainly doesn’t sound good, it could be weeks or months before the majority of Fallout 4 PC mods work again. But even more worrying, the F4SE devs said this patch had broken the modding scene similarly to the Skyrim “Anniversary Edition” patch.
If you don’t know, that patch for Skyrim, another beloved Bethesda game, caused a schism in the modding community so great that it has still never recovered to this day. There are Skyrim modders who only make mods for the pre “Anniversary Edition” version of the game, and those who only make mods for the most recent version of the game, and many modders simply gave up on Skyrim because it took so long for the modding tools to become functional again. Comparing the “Next Gen” update to the “Anniversary Edition” update bodes extremely ill.
Fallout 4 may truly never be the same again. Which is a shame because Fallout 4, and the other Fallout games, are currently experiencing a huge surge of new and returning players due to the popularity of the new Fallout TV show.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda Game Studios
At the time of this writing Fallout 4, at nearly a decade old, had just under 200,000 active players today. A month ago the game barely had 20,000 people playing it. You can see why this interest would cause Bethesda to want to push an update out to capitalize on that popularity, but with the damaging state of this update we have to wonder if they did more harm than good to the game, and how players will react.
Hopefully the modding scene makes a swift recovery, Fallout London releases soon, and hundreds of thousands of players continue to have fun with this amazing game for a long time to come.
NEXT: Fallout TV Show Review: Finally a Winner in an Era of Otherwise Woke Adaptations
