Bethesda's released Skyrim on 8 platforms but left Fallout RPGs idle, so players turn to popular mods for TV show nods, graphical boosts, bug fixes, and more content
Fallout fans new and old have been diving into the RPG series en masse since the release of the live-action Amazon Prime show, with player counts for everything from Fallout 4, New Vegas, and even the initially divisive Fallout 76 skyrocketing. This has simultaneously seen rise to a huge uptick in downloads for Fallout mods, contributing to popular mod site Nexus Mods dishing out 6,300 TB worth of downloads last weekend.
There's good reason for this, though, as there are some fantastic mods out there to spice up and improve your experience with the RPGs – something very needed when you consider how little post-release attention most of them have been given by Bethesda despite its seemingly constant string of Skyrim re-releases. In fact, a plethora of new Fallout 4, 3, and New Vegas mods have been created in the last month, and released to immediate popularity.
Some of these, as you might expect, are TV show-themed. For example, one created by user dragxnflare adds The Ghoul's gun as a weapon in Fallout 3, which uses shotgun shells and has a mag capacity of just one, but high damage to balance it out. Otherwise, if you want to spice up your wardrobe, you could use user QwibQwib's mod to add Lucy's Vault-Tec backpack into Fallout 4.
If you're a veteran fan revisiting the RPGs for the first time in a while, you might be interested in some of the mods that serve to add fresh content. For example, Fallout: New Vegas players can now download Nova Arizona – A Legion Lands Expansion, which describes itself as a "lore-friendly expansion covering the land east of the Colorado River and the people living there." This is still in beta, mind you, and while the outside spaces are almost fully complete, the mod team is still working on adding more NPC dialogue and quests.
Meanwhile in Fallout 4, a mod called Attack of the Lobotomites by The Bone Zone Team adds a new quest along with a fresh dungeon, complete with voiced NPCs, a selection of weapons, armor, and more. You can even enhance the Fallout 4 experience further with bp42s' popular Karma mod, which adds "a fully fledged, integrated, and polished version of Fallout 3/New Vegas’s Karma system."
Other mods, meanwhile, can fix bugs and even upgrade the visuals of the games. While not a new release, the Updated Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch mod does exactly as its name suggests, and fixes errors and bugs in Fallout 3 and its DLC. You can also find loads of retexture mods, like the New Vegas Marvelous Mirrors mod, which "makes all those broken mirrors look less awful."
There are so many mods out there that it's well worth browsing through them yourself if you're planning on playing any of the Fallout RPGs any time soon, although you should always be careful when downloading files online. For Fallout 4 fans, it's also worth keeping in mind that the highly anticipated free next-gen upgrade is arriving on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S tomorrow, which will boost frame rate on consoles and add widescreen support on PC, amongst other things.
If you're looking for something new to play, be sure to check out our ranking of the best Fallout games.
