“We had ridiculous scenes happening” Fallout: London’s devs had to ditch rideable horses and bikes because they wouldn’t stop flying up buildings

Fallout: London’s massive, but naturally there’s still some stuff that didn’t quite make it into the Fallout 4 mod. For example, in addition to the whole cut Wild Card questline that’ll be arriving in a future update, the team had a go at making rideable horses and bikes.

Yep, if you’ve not run into Fallout: London’s Sleipnir – eight-legged post-apocalyptic horses which look just as terrifying and goofy as they sound – there were once plans to let you clip clop about the capital on one of them. Sadly, the mutated broncos shared a bit too much DNA with their Elder Scrolls cousins to make them worth keeping in.

Speaking to VG247 for an interview which also featured chat about how Team FOLON sees its ideal future path and how it went about nailing the vibes of British Fallout, project manager Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter explained what went down when the modders tried to get their Grand National on.

“We really wanted rideable horses. We’ve got it in, but it was just so buggy and broken,” Carter recalled,” If anyone remembers what it was like in Skyrim, there’s the joke about the horse [being able to] go up the side of the mountains. The reason why you could get that get away with it in Skyrim is because for the most part [the world] was was very flat, you know, you’d have mountains and then that’s where it would show, but where you have mounds and piles of dirt and trash and cars [it’s a lot more noticeable].”

So, what exactly did those extra obstacles do? “The horses were just jumping over everything, you were scaling up buildings and it was like, no matter what we could [do], it was just how the engine worked, it couldn’t keep them grounded. At least in the time frame that we wanted.

“I think there is someone that’s making something now as a mod with driveable cars and stuff. But like, we didn’t design our map for drivable cars and it’s definitely not designed for horses that can clip on things,” the modder continued, “We had ridiculous scenes happening when people were doing it. It was like, a chase quest or whatever, and the guy was just like flying off a mountain. So that never made it. The horses are there, we call them Sleipnir, but yeah, you can’t ride them.”

There was also at one point going to be a rideable bicycle, with Carter classifying that as “a bit of a weird one”. “The bicycle was always designed to just be a set piece, where the guy gets on the bicycle and zips off down the road,” he told me, “That one is our fault, because there was so much feedback [from people saying] ‘I want a rideable bicycle’, we tried to do that as well. Similar situation, wasn’t designed for it, and then by the time we’d gone so far, we realised we were so far away from where we wanted to be, with it being such a small inconsequential thing, we actually realised we just had to scrap it, unfortunately.”

Do you think you’d have preferred it if your Fallout: London playthrough had featured the chance to ride a posh stallion up the side of The Shard? Let us know below!