Awooga, awooga, the bomb’s about to be dropped. Well, the anniversary edition update for Fallout 4’s about to arrive at any rate. As with its next-gen predecessor, the question is how it might affect whatever established mod load order you’ve got in place. Helpfully, Bethesda have now specified any mods which change the game’s home screen as ones you’ll certainly want to disable ahead of the update’s arrival.
That’s right, time to kiss farewell to the image of Paladin Danse in a risque pose you’ve had lurking behind the start new game button. At least temporarily.
Ahead of the update launching and bringing with it a revamp of Fallout 4’s creation club menu, Bethesda have announced that their official in-game modding structure via Bethesda.net “will undergo maintenance from November 6th through 10th”.
“During this time, Fallout 4 Mods and Creation Club will be offline. And while you won’t be able to download or upload any new content, you will still have access to change your mod load order and play the game,” the studio continued. “The Fallout 4 update on November 10th will require adjustments to the main menu screen. So, prior to November 10th, please disable any mods which change the main menu, as these may break with the patch.”
While you might end up being able to get away with certain mods, my view as a frequent mod user is that you’re likely best off temporarily disabling all of your mods if you’re desperate to jump into the game right after the update drops and are able to do so. It’s frustrating, but if there’s one thing you can set your watch by, it’s that updates to games always have the potential to result in mods requiring updates of their own to keep working as intended. It sucks, as we saw with Fallout 4’s next-gen update, but it’s a fact of life that comes with the territory and – trying to look at the glass as half full – an excuse to totally refresh your mod setup for a game if you want to.
You can, of course, also disable the game’s ability to auto-update and keep on playing the pre-anniversary update version of it. Instructions as to how to do that on Steam, Epic, and GOG can be found here.
Speaking of Fallout 4’s next-gen update, this anniversary one also sees Bethesda finally deal with some lingering issues which, at least in one case, have been milling around for a year and a bit. “VATS hit chances are now consistent across platforms and no longer drop to 0% or show incorrect values,” reads one of these fixes. “Targeting enemies through walls without the Penetrator perk is no longer possible.” While the only instance I’ve found showing this happening is from an Xbox player, so I’m not sure if it was as pesky a problem in the PC realm, it’s nice to see Bethesda finally sort it.
You can read the full notes in the update post I’ve embedded. If you want a full rundown of what Fallout 4’s anniversary version includes and the couple of other bits Bethesda announced in their Fallout day broadcast this year, here you go. Now, excuse me while I purge many instances of Walton Goggins’ face from The Commonwealth ahead of this update.
