Breaking Benjamin Singer's Mid-Concert Fallout 4 Mod Pitch Was Born From a Broken Drum

Benjamin Burnley of Breaking Benjamin recently clarified the story behind his mid-concert speech promoting a Fallout 4 mod he created. The incident, which was filmed and circulated online weeks ago, turned out to be unplanned improvisation rather than a deliberate stage moment.

"What happened was my drummer broke a snare drum head," Burnley explained in an interview with Nexus Mods. "We were standing around waiting, and in all of my spare time, I work on my own mods just for my own personal game. I just so happened to have been working on that one."

Burnley, who creates mods under the username Killemloud, said he was speaking off the cuff to fill dead air during the technical pause. "Time on stage when there's dead silence, every second feels like an hour," he said. "So I really just started to joke about it to kill the time. It wasn't a planned thing, and it wasn't a serious thing."

The mod at the center of the discussion is called True First Person, designed to keep players in first-person perspective at all times in Fallout 4. Burnley explained that the mod addresses a specific need he encountered while touring. "When I'm on tour, it's hard to set up my VR setup every day when I'm on the bus travelling," he said. "I do play flat from time to time when I'm on tour, and because I love VR so much, I don't like being forced out of first person."

Burnley's interest in modding grew from his enthusiasm for VR gaming. He explained that Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR benefit significantly from community modifications. "Anyone who's played Skyrim or Fallout VR, not that they're bad in any way vanilla, but they're most certainly vastly improved with mods," he said. "Mods for those games, to me, are even more important than flat ones because we're talking about basic functionality, being able to grab something, for example, and things that aren't as imperative in the flat version of the game."

Before creating True First Person, Burnley primarily worked on VR ports for existing mods, including Better Vampires and Convenient Horses. His modding journey began before official VR releases were available, using a program called VorpX that converted flat games for VR play. "There were a few that worked really well, like Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3," he said.

Regarding the initial reception to his mod, Burnley noted that early versions often face criticism. "My experience as a mod user is that the first version is very rarely representative of the final version," he said. "Everybody's system is different, everybody has different expectations, and Mod Authors improve their mods as they go based on user feedback and people's setups."