Fallout 4 turns 11 on the same day its hated Anniversary Edition turns one

Eleven years is nobody’s round anniversary on its own, unless you forgot to buy a card at ten. November 10 still deserves a circle on the calendar because one game now celebrates two birthdays on the same date, and the second birthday was the part fans disliked most.

Back on November 10, 2015, Bethesda shipped Fallout 4 worldwide for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, just five months after showing it off at the company’s first E3 press conference on June 14. Retailers took 12 million copies for $750 million in the first 24 hours, and by July 2026 worldwide sales had passed 35 million copies. If you built a rambling sheet-metal tower outside Vault 111 that week while ignoring your missing kid for forty hours, you weren’t alone.

Before that 2015 launch, reporters asked director Todd Howard whether the studio would try paid mods again after the failed effort to add a paid mod system to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Howard said there were no plans for a similar effort here. Players took him at his word and went right back to building giant free overhauls on PC.

Two summers later at E3 2017, the studio announced Creation Club anyway, putting an in-game microtransaction shop for custom items inside the RPG starting in August 2017. Season Pass buyers who had been promised “all of the Fallout 4 DLC we ever do” for one price ended up in a 2019 class-action lawsuit over whether paid add-ons counted when the publisher called them something else.

That arc peaked a year ago today. On November 10, 2025, the publisher released Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Windows, bundling the base game, all six official add-ons (Far Harbor, Automatron, Nuka-World, Contraptions Workshop, Vault-Tec Workshop and Wasteland Workshop) plus over 150 Creation Club items. Five days before launch, IGN flagged the publisher’s own warning asking players to “disable any mods that change the main menu” because the patch would wire the new Creations hub into every existing install.

You can guess how well a forced title-screen rewrite went over with people nursing a decade-old PC load order. Popular community mods broke on contact with the update, and the new shop barely stood upright on launch week: Kotaku documented Reddit threads full of error screens, an $8 Pip-Boy skin with a broken preview window and a separate $20 Fallout 4 Creations Bundle sitting at “completely negative review status” on Steam.

Three months after that rocky PC and console rollout, the package arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 on February 24, 2026, putting Fallout 4 on a Nintendo console for the first time. On a closed handheld where players can’t install outside PC mods, that built-in shop is the only modding counter in town. If you’re jumping back into the Commonwealth tonight for its eleventh birthday, check your main-menu mods before patching on PC; if you’re playing unmodded on console, at least wait for a deep sale before paying twice for horse armor’s grandchildren.

Another settlement needs your wallet.