“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
feel an afterthought
It’s not a feeling, it is an afterthought
Which is weird when you think about how dependent Bethesda is on the Modding Community.
I see so many people excusing Bethesda’s poor design choices and lack of content by saying mods will fix them.
That may be true, but the publisher making hundreds of millions shouldn’t be offloading their work onto the free labor of the community.
This will not change unless the free labor ceases.
I see that as a net positive, because the alternative is likely them killing mod support altogether.
The alternative is people not buying games that are perceived to be so buggy as to require fixing. Then they have to put out a higher quality product.
I wouldn’t count on millions of people suddenly all deciding to boycott now, if all the egregious practices of this industry weren’t enough to get them to do it already.
I’m not. Choosing not to buy a bad product has incremental effects on what gets made in the market from 1 person choosing not to buy it all the way out to no one buying it.
It always impresses me how seemingly every corporation adopts this mindset of not needing the “little guy” to function. Like their company isn’t made up of “little guys” that produce their given product.
It was pretty much one of the biggest lessons of the whole covid affair. The groundfloor personel is the most essentiel part of everything. Without, the whole system collapses.
Honestly Bethesda games are just a modding sandbox for me. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Skyrim and I’m not sure I’ve ever finished the main quest. I know I’ve never taken a side in the civil war. The built in story and quests are important but my fun comes from downloading mods and just roaming like a wandering monk doing whatever quests I run into. Sometimes OP, other times with immersive mods or alternative perks or spells.
I’m probably not a typical gamer as I’ve had hundreds on hours into BG3 and only made it to act 3 once so far and have yet to finish any of my runs before I decide to have a relationship with someone different or try a durge run, or evil, or realized I forgot to resolve some quest that is now closed. I’m not sure how long a full run is maybe 100 hours? But it’s a lot to invest before I get bored and want to try something new.
I also have a need to collect all the gimmicky items even when I know I have or will get much better stuff for the slot. I play Bethesda games the same way. Gotta run over and collect the book of arcane bow if I’m going to be an archer…
Anyway, mods are a core part of the deal for me. They should prioritize them more.
putting in an official way for users to create and load mods takes resources that the small indie company Bethesda just can’t afford to use; the modders can do the work for that, too
Have you ever considered not working for a giant corporation to fix their products for them for free?
I partially agree, but I assume these people get a decent amount of donations. There’s a reason they keep coming back for each game. That said, Bethesda should be the ones paying them.
Wouldn’t be surprised if mod tools never come at all.
If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that gaming companies will promise you anything to get on your good side. Take statements like these with the biggest grain of salt.They’ll definitely release the CK.
But it’s not for the benefit of modders anymore. It’s because of how they can monetize them like they did with Skyrim and Fallout’s “Creation Club”.
Get modders to make what’s essentially some minor DLC for you and offer it at a “small price” or with a “Special Edition upgrade” while those same modders are actually making waaaaay better mods and releasing them for free on Nexus or wherever (this is basically the state of Skyrim AE; some very notable modders did some cool stuff for CC, but their other mods were way fucking beyond those in terms of quality).
I would argue the mods they don’t directly make money from still increases their profits. People aren’t still playing Skyrim for the Creation Club content, which is pretty much all garbage and actually makes the game worse.
True but Bugthesda has got to know that mods and modders are the backbone of the longevity of their games by now, right? Without mods their games tend to be unplayable.
If that was the case, how have they been so successful on consoles?
Because people try to find ways to jailbreak consoles just for a fraction of the mods PC users get.
That’s a very good question. I completely gave up on them as a company specifically because of the abysmal quality of their games on console.
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So people play it on console because it’s a good game without mods, which would mean it’s not unplayable. There’s also little reason beyond just general cynicism to believe mod tools aren’t coming when their past several offline games got mod tools a handful of months after release, including Skyrim. As far as I can tell, it’s quite normal for mod tools to come several months after release for non-Bethesda games as well. I don’t think the longevity of mods has anything to do with whether or not a game is unplayable.
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If the game is so riddled with bugs it famously needs modders to create mods for the sake of fixing the product, there is quite the significant tie between longevity of an unplayable game and mods. See, the problem is your wording sees the cause and effect the wrong way around. Hopefully this helps you to understand.
Oh and yiu ask about people continuing to play Bugthesda’s games on console, I’ll happily point out you’re asking fir a logical answer from a market that proliferated child gambling, standardised season passes and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70. It’s not because something is bad that idiots won’t buy it.
I’ve played Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the latter two at launch. I’ve never installed mods for any of these games, and I rarely install mods in general. Skyrim had a rough launch, where it would crash for me frequently, but that problem was resolved within a few weeks, tops. They’re all very playable, and I never felt like I needed mods to fix them, which is why they also sell well on consoles.
and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70
Inflation is a fact of life, and prices were going to increase somehow, especially since a lot of AAA games these days are recklessly large, including Bethesda games. There’s a lot more at play with the way DLC works and the pricing around them than just trying to sneak a price increase by you, but the short answer is: I don’t think it’s a big deal to have an entry level price for a game and another price for the game and expansion content.
I missed Oblivion so I can’t weigh in on that one. However, every game since has brought some kind of issue that prevented me from finishing the game to a satisfying level of completion. I will be including New Vegas in this because, although it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, there were enough caveats included in the creation - including their god-awful game engine - that Bugthesda might as well have made it themselves, and thus suffered from the exact same game-breaking problem Fallout 3 did.
Fallout 3 & New Vegas: If you owned the original disc versions of the games and bought the DLC (how dare we), there was a glitch where the save game would become large enough the game would cease to run properly, gradually getting laggier and laggier until the game would struggle to manage a whole 5fps in a built-up environment like the Bethesda Ruins. This same bug would occur without the DLC during the natural progression of the game once the player heads into Red Rock Canyon although that particular iteration fixed itself as soon as the player bruteforced their way into one of the rabbithole buildings. I can’t say for the RRC version but the one that would lead to basically dead saves was fixed by buying the GOTY/Complete editions respectively and only with a fresh save. All old saves were still borked. To highlight the difference in the developers, the parts of New Vegas that get praise are the parts Obsidian were left to their own devices.
Skyrim: 70+ hours in, I personally encountered two game-breaking glitches that locked me out of the Companions and Blades quest lines respectively.
Fallout 4: After a game patch, I loaded up the game to find my 110-hour save hardlocked from loading (permanent black loading screen). Reaching out to Bugthesda gave me the solution of “completely reinstall the game and DLC and just start a new save”. Naturally, I wasn’t too impressed with their “help” considering this was also back when I had 8Mb/s internet so spending another week redownloading wasn’t inconsequential either.
All of these previous games were on console. From here, both I and the friend to be mentioned had already swapped from console to master race.
Fallout 76: After the lackluster release, I had zero desire to play the game, let alone pay for the (dis)pleasure but a couple of years after further development (which should have been done prior to release but the true mark of a money-grubbing company is convincing your playerbase to pay you for the privilege of beta testing for you. We’ll be coming back to the corporate practices you want to excuse later, don’t worry) my best friend - the person who introduced me to the game series - decided he wanted to play 76 and wanted company for the endeavor so he bought me a copy of the game. Much to my surprise, the experience started well. There were the usual hallmarks of a GaaS product such as the daily grind-a-thon quests, the multiple currencies - one of which could only be obtained by paying - and the walled garden of desirable cosmetic items conveniently tied to the premium currency as well as other niggles in that vein but it was overall enjoyable so we got a couple of hundred hours of it… until they updated the game and I suddenly found myself with a lighting glitch that prevented me from seeing anything in buildings (the overworld kind, not the rabbithole kind). Naturally, I reported the issue and got a canned response; reinstall, blah blah blah. Didn’t fix it. So I waited patiently for the next patch, then the next update and the inevitable patch to follow. Still borked. Eventually, I just removed the blight from my hard drive since it was only taking up more and more space to keep hoping Bugthesda would actually fix their game (something I should have already learnt was a good punchline instead of even wishful thinking by that point).
Starfield: Now for this pile of crap, I refused to watch any trailers, listen to anything anybody was saying about it before the release, genuinely skipped segments of podcasts to avoid hearing any amount of hype about it. Just didn’t care for it. Naturally, cultural osmosis being what it is, I still ended up hearing bits and bobs including when release time came around and all of Dear Todd’s Molyneux-isms (see: false advertising) came to light too. A buddy hooked me up so I got to find out how bad it was for myself. Despite meeting required specs by some margin for 1080 high settings and being installed on undeserved SSD real estate, I encountered constant lag spikes despite how slow movement speed is in the game and generally empty environments. All problems that reek of minimal optimization at best.
Games like Dishonored, DOOM, and Deathloop prove Bethesda has an eye for quality and make for one hell of a AAA publisher but as a developer, they’re subpar on a good day and depend on unpaid modders to put the other cheek in their half-assed jobs. Personally, I don’t care for The Elder Scrolls - fantasy just isn’t typically my bag but I really like the premise of Fallout and I genuinely think the only way we’re going to ever get a genuinely good one, the overlords of Microsoft need to micro-manage enough to see Obsidian in charge of the next release. Their choice of team, story and most importantly, get rid of that massively out-of-date and unfit-for-purpose engine Bugthesda insists on repolishing.
Inflation is a fact of life
Sadly, that’s where you’re actually right. However, the excuse of inflation only goes as far as explaining why the real release of the game costing $100 until recently. And even then, that’s when being extremely generous. You refer to the bloated size of games - most of which isn’t needed and often drags would-be great games down - as a reason for increased cost but something people tend to fail to mention is how much bigger the market is than when $60 became the norm. There are more players than ever before and the industry is bragging bigger profits year after year. You see, the problem there is that one and one doesn’t make three. If the cost was rising equal to all of these different price hikes, why are profits not comparable to how they’ve always been? Instead, what we see is exponential growth in profits. That’s profits, not net worth. Those two are very different and should not be confused.
Now, I’m not opposed to expansions, they aren’t a new concept by a long shot but they need to add value. I, and many others, think of The Witcher 3’s expansions as valuable. They scratch the itch for more of the same product while being easier for the developers to bring to market than a full game. Win-win. Not every expansion can be on that same level, I will give you but there’s also a massive difference between a Blood & Wine and all the nickel-and-diming bull excrement companies like Ubisoft, EA, Activision and Konami - for the sake of pointing out it’s not just North American companies who are guilty - have become infamous for.
A company has won when they can convince their customers they’re getting a bargain for ultimately giving them nothing. By the way you’re buying and reselling the regurgitated excuses, you have clearly lost to them like many, many others and I’m genuinely dreading what my favorite hobby is going to look like in five years time because of those people and their ever-increasing tolerance to getting screwed and expected to be grateful.
I mean, Skyrim SE and FO4 had some level of mod support even on consoles. That was and still is mostly unheard of otherwise.
their games have featured modding on both playstation and xbox in some capacity
but yes, its also nonsense
I sunk about 50 hours in but have decided to wait for mods to make the game more as it should have been like I did with Cyberpunk though CDPR at least fixed it themselves without relying on the modders.
3 years later. Starfield’s been out for two months.
I waited until CP 2.0 to play it. I can wait for SF 2.0 to play it. I am not a unicorn in this regard.
That’s all well and good. I just think it’s silly to say that “at least CDPR fixed Cyberpunk, but Bethesda won’t fix Starfield” when these things take time, and Starfield hasn’t had much of that yet. And then we have people here calling mod tools an afterthought as though this company hasn’t always prioritized making mod tools for their games because they know how important they are, just because (like their past several games) mod tools are going to take several more months before they come out.
Past experience has shown that Bethesda absolutely won’t fix Starfield.
It has shown that modders will.
My past experience has been bugs that ruined my experience at launch and then got fixed shortly after. I’m sure there are plenty more bugs that I didn’t notice, but they certainly fixed the ones that I did.
Yeah but Bethesda has the reputation of leaving it up to the modders, even long-term. Look at the 20 releases of Skyrim; some of them have the same bugs that they did on launch, classic Bethesda weirdness resulting from using the same busted-ass engine for 5 generations of games. Those bugs have only been addressed and mitigated by the modding community, despite there being a re-release and remaster on every single console for the last three generations.
It’s not that Bethesda can’t given the opportunity, but they tend to only do so when they are unable to rely on modders, like FO76.
You won’t hear me defending them using that old engine, except that development time is also a resource. They should have spent it a long time ago migrating to a more modern tech stack, and maybe they will for ES6 now that there’s a new boss in town; Microsoft did, after all, delay the game by a year and a half to make what is by all accounts their least buggy launch of one of their RPGs in decades. I also don’t know how much we can claim they’re leaving it up to modders when plenty of console versions are completely unmoddable.
I’m sure I could boot up the 360 version of Skyrim and see some great classic Bethesda bugs.
I agree that Starfield was the least buggy release in ages. I had also heard that at some point they were being directed to adapt the idTech engine which runs DOOM to become the new base for Bethesda games, but I guess that hasn’t happened.
To whit I played a few dozen hours of Starfield and generally by that point with any other Bethesda game, I’d have found some stupid bug that causes me to get annoyed and quit, but I just got bored of the game because of the repetitive nature and the confinement to fast travel for everything.
I had also heard that at some point they were being directed to adapt the idTech engine which runs DOOM to become the new base for Bethesda games, but I guess that hasn’t happened.
They must have had trouble, because Arkane moved from Unreal to Void (which is built on idTech) for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop and such, and then back to Unreal again. Everyone got in a hurry in the 2010s to have their own in-house engine to avoid paying out fees to Epic, and then after running into trouble trying to adapt those engines to genres they weren’t built for, they’re back to Unreal again.
In 10 years people have good enough graphic cards to run that mess. It’s 2 month after they sold the game. They shouldn’t have to fix their game, they should just finish the game and release it in 2 years.
A valid point but I played about the same amount of CP then waited til it was all done three years later before doing another, much more thorough and patient playthrough. Have done a similar thing here and will wait a fair amount of time before diving back in.
Lol, I love how they can’t mention it in the article, but freeing the main bugfixing patch from Arthmoor’s grasp is probably a bigger accomplishment than the patch itself.
If I had the slightest idea how to write mods I’d probably go ahead and add some space ships to Skyrim instead.
Without the space it’d be just a ‘ship’
A NASA shuttle is still a space ship in the hangar
Oooh, pirates!
airships?
But dragonriding…
I mean there is plenty of space… Not airless space… But plenty of sky or fields to fly that beast.
They should just wait until the tools are available tbh. Why bash their heads against the wall and waste all that time?
This was my thought. Bethesda games are considered great because of the modability. Until the tools are released it seems like a hassle to do anything more than simple. Especially knowing that it will just be replaced when the tools come out.
Plus you can spend the time roadmapping it/playing vanilla and really dial in what you want to do.
