With no sign of an official Fallout 5 on the horizon, the massive fan mod Fallout London has arrived to save fans from years of content drought. While Fallout London is an amazing experience on PC, the brilliant game-sized mod for Fallout 4 is a tough nut to crack on Steam Deck. With countless hours already spent in apocalyptic London on PC, it was only natural to want to play more of the game on Steam Deck.
Considering Valve’s handheld easily powers through Bethesda’s 2015 RPG, it should be an easy task. Unfortunately, getting the game to run perfectly on the portable-that-could is surprisingly annoying. On launch, Fallout London suffered from numerous technical issues , including long loading screens, frequent crashing, damage calculation issues and more.
Some players couldn’t get out of the game’s tutorial due to a particularly nasty crash following the game’s intense intro train section. On PC, a quick installation of the Buffout 4 mod fixes this. However, weeks after launch, running Fallout’s awesome mod on Steam Deck is still a rough time.
If you want to benefit from shader pre-loading, you’ll have to use the Fallout London Downgrader to even begin installing the game, then hope the mod’s installer doesn’t crash on execution. After that, you’ll also have to install Buffout 4 to get past the infamous train crash. Even after all of that, Fallout London is not stable on Steam Deck.
Not in the slightest. Of course, it’s a mod for a game that’s running under a translation layer—it was never guaranteed to run on Valve’s budget-friendly portable. With the mod pushing Bethesda’s near-decade-old engine to its breaking point combined with the Steam Deck’s unique nature of running games, it makes crashes ten times more frequent.
In the past two weeks, the experience on Steam Deck has rapidly improved, especially following the game’s first patch. Furthermore, some fans have created an auto-installer for the mod on Steam Deck that makes the initial installation process much easier. While helpful, it failed to fix the frequent crashing.
For a smoother experience, we’ll have to hope that Fallout London gets the same experience as other fan projects like Elder Scrolls: Enderal. These mods have dedicated Steam pages to quickly install with minor issues. Until then, Fallout London on Steam Deck will continue to be a fun game trapped behind some annoying issues.
Alongside future patches and fixes, the Fallout London mod team is also planning to introduce cut content to the already-massive expansion. Hopefully, the team can also focus on some Steam Deck specific fixes as well. For more Fallout London, check out our tips and tricks guides or our full companion locations walkthrough.
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