Howard says Bethesda Game Studios is looking to keep expanding its support for the modding community with the upcoming space-faring RPG.
“One of the things that I’ll call out is, it’s important for us not just to enable that, but to participate,” he said. “To make is easy for them, to make this where they can make it not just a hobby, but a career."
What they really want: a sanitized official mod store that dominates over the Nexus and Loverslab. I’m not sure how they’re going to pull that off, but I fully expect them to try.
In theory, modders asking to be compensated for their work is not that outlandish of an idea, however in practice there are a ton of problems that need to be solved when going down this rabbit hole:
- IP and ownership: Is the mod really 100% originally created by the seller?
- Compatibility: The game is going to be recieving big updates, is there a garantuee that the mod will remain compatible, or be updated as well?
- Dependencies: Does the mod require other mods? Are the creators of that mod OK with their work being used to make money by others? What if the required mod breaks or becomes unavailable?
- Load order: Anyone who’s modded Skyrim or Fallout before knows how fickle mods can be, often requiring specific configs and tweaks to the load order. Is Bethesda going to offer tools for that alongside their store?
- Quality Assurance: Am I even getting my money’s worth? Is there a refund policy?
All of these proved to be major issues when they tried a paid mod store for Skyrim. Stolen mods, a fishing mod that required an animation framework mod who’s creater demanded the fishing mod be taken down, mods that had major incompatibilities with other popular mods, and bought mods just inserting themselves wherever they felt like in the load order.
If Bethesda wanted to create an official mod store, it would need to be carefully curated, with contracts with the modders requiring them to keep their mods updated, and seriously upgraded tools for configuring purchased mods. Honestly, I just don’t quite see it happening.
also users cant exactly build huge mod lists if many mods are paid
I think that maybe it would be better if there was something like an effort to set up paid third-party large DLC. Bethesda doesn’t really sell small things, on the order of what a lot of mod authors provide (well, they tried to sell individual models and skins in Fallout 76 , which I don’t think has been fantastically successful). They’ve never had an industry where one could a la carte buy individual game mechanics from them. What they’re known for is making full-on expansions and selling those. I can imagine an industry where third parties can sell those maybe working out better.
Classic Todd bs on the level of “it just works”
tell me lies tell me sweet little lies
Todd…
not just a hobby, but a career
They’re definitely planning on making a mod store.
Already have. Fallout 4’s mod store has so much mod “dlc” microtransactions on it that when you add it all up, it’s several times the cost of the base game and all of its dlc combined.
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Modders should be compensated. I’m not too convinced Microsoft’s cut won’t be too big to make the whole thing worth charging for. It’s a big ask to sell mods since that’s not the norm. Patreon or something might be more viable way for modders.
As if they’d allow any of the dirty adult content that you’d find on LL. They would also just look for more ways to monetize mod content.
I mean, there are vendors of adult content in the world. I could hypothetically imagine that as long as Microsoft can create arms-length distance for their brand and not be directly-tied to it from a business standpoint – like, maybe they license to another vendor who deals with that – that they’d be okay with it.
I discovered that there are sort of “tiers” that wound up getting created around mods in the game, where you have sites that object to content and then the crowd that wants that going off and creating a group somewhere else, and people on one site refer to the site that they object to with euphemisms and the like
Fallout has historically dealt with some topics that some consumers are not going to be happy with. Drug and alcohol use, slavery, violence, killing, dismemberment, torture, prostitution, suicide, rape, and cannibalism. It’s had ESRB ratings itself to facilitate blocking access to it for people who object to that, and Steam will throw up a pro forma “are you 18” message before showing their Fallout 4 page to a viewer.
Bethesda has historically not wanted to associate with some of the content that goes on Nexusmods, stuff that has characters running around in sexualized outfits or being fully-nude.
Nexusmods, in turn, has not wanted to associate with some thing that go on on LoversLab, like animated sex scenes, sexual slavery, forced gender changing, player participant in rape, bestiality, tentacle rape, BDSM, probably more that I’m unaware of.
The LoversLab crowd draws the line at sexualized depiction of adolescents, which group apparently jumped over to Schaken-Mods.
The Schaken-Mods crowd considers sexualized depiction of preadolescents to be objectionable, and those people apparently jumped over to another site whose name I cannot for the life of me recall, or I’d link to it, but IIRC has “pure” in the name, and there they’ve got work on scenarios with child molestation and suchlike.
googles
No, not “pure”, All The Fallen.
I’m pretty sure that the all of the above object to copyright-infringing content, stuff ripped from other mods or video games, or mods that the mod author wanted taken down, and I think I’ve seen links before to some site that archives some of those.
My guess is that there are probably other niche sites that I’m unaware of that smack into one community’s social norms and relocated as well. And I’m sure that there could be more. If LoversLab weren’t fine with furry or LGBT content, I’d bet that those would have their own sites.
Those communities, while often objecting very much to each other’s social norms, seem to more-or-less leave each other alone, as they’ve drawn up their lines and seem to stay on their own sides of them. And they do have some level of mutual symbiosis, as they build up on content on the other sites. Sometimes a mod author will object to a site for one reason or another – the Nexusmods site had a major uproar when they stopped letting mod authors take their mods down, for example, and some authors moved even non-erotic mods to LoversLab, and Schaken-Mods has hosted at least a few mods whose authors objected to some sort of policy on LoversLab, like the mod whose name I don’t recall that remodels the male body face. Bethesda knows perfectly well that sexualized content on Nexusmods exists and is fine with sales that are driven by the context there, but don’t want their brand associated with it.
They will probably just try to pay modders more for their mods on the official store than what Nexus is paying them, by charging users a microtransaction to download each mod. Modders probably will make so much more money for their mods, that they won’t want to upload to Nexus or anywhere else. Also, there’s no way that Bethesda is going to allow nsfw mods on their official store, so I guess we’ll see what happens.
I’m hopeful that the approach will be closer to how Minecraft works, now that they’re under the same umbrella. But it seems more likely they’ll just monetize things heavily and push creators to monetize. (e.g., mods over a certain size require a minimum payment amount to ‘recoup bandwidth costs’)
100% it’s this. Their dream is to convince the wider playerbase that mods are something that should be purchased, it’s creators making money from it, Bethesda retaining all ownership and rights in perpetuity of any/all mods uploaded.
The way everything has to be monetized these days is to me pretty disheartening. This idea that a thing isn’t worth doing if you’re not making money from it. Fortunately right now mod communities are alive and well and free to all.
They should just design a game that doesn’t require so many mods in the first place
I’ve never really modded any of Bethesda’s games. I play them through once or twice and never feel it lacking.
What the mood support does is give the game legs for decades, and thousands of hours of playtime. Most games that aren’t engineering / creative games like Minecraft, no matter how fun, are going to get stale after 100 hours.
Having good mod support means you can keep tweaking the experience to keep it fresh.
If you haven’t, if you go back and play them again, I’d at least recommend trying some of the “pretty” mods that bump model and texture resolution for modern computers.
I really wish that Bethesda could work out a way to make that more-accessible to players, because I know that a lot never try a modded game because of all the poking at the game that they’d need to do (“do I want this high-res grass mod or this high-res grass mod?”)
Maybe have something like a built-in Wabbajack so that getting a large set of recommended mods installed amounts to saying ”install this curated list of mods that this player selected". Then recommend the top couple of modsets that players are playing with. That’s not going to do it for people who are really into precisely optimizing the environment for their particular preferences (this particular chair model is superior to this particular chair model), but it’d hopefully lower the bar far enough for more people to be able to benefit.
I mean, Skyrim is still entirely playable without mods, as shown by the fact that it was still a massive success on consoles and on release (when mods didn’t exist yet).
Mods just make it strictly better. I love that the game can feel fresh because of the addition of new mods. And how I can increase the depth of the game with stuff like more enemies, more spells, and more equipment. Skyrim had good variety in the base game, but mods just made it unbeatable. And similarly, graphic mods can make this 12 year old game feel like a new release.
I wouldn’t still be playing Skyrim to this day if it wasn’t for the wealth of mods.
Their games don’t require mods. Mods allow for extra life in pretty much all games that allow them. In fact entirely new games have been created via modding frameworks.
I very much disagree. I think that their games are quite competitive with other open-world games even without mods. But I sure do want the mods.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Translation, modders will fix our bugs and gameplay for us.
First thought I had as well.
Agree, but the Microsoft spokespeople have said that they’ve made sure to get Bethesda to spend more time just on debugging (part of the reason for the delay last year) to make sure it’s less buggy on launch. In fact I think they said that it’ll be the least buggy Bethesda launch in recent history.
Which I take to mean that it’ll still be buggy, but not so much that it’ll be totally unplayable, with faces not showing up and “dragons” (spaceships?) flying backwards and all that. Hopefully very few crashes.
So… another broken ass Bethesda game that the loving community is going to fix for free? Awesome.
Why do people need to be upset about everything all the time? Things can just be good things occasionally.
It’s Todd Howard. The song “Tell Me Lies” plays every time he enters a room.
The man has 10 charisma I swear
Things can be good occasionally, but history often proves otherwise. Especially when it comes to Bethesda games.
I applaud you for your optimism… but it doesn’t correlate with reality.
Things can just be good things occasionally, yes. And there’s also value in looking at trends, seeing what Bethesda has consistently released in the past, and setting reasonable expectations.
“Reasonable expectations” based on Bethesda’s past releases = “broken game modders will have to fix.”
Edit: btw @ripcord you know kbin exposes who downvotes a comment, right? Lol, you hit almost everyone who replied to you. Don’t be a butthurt disagreevoter. Take that shit back to reddit, we’re here to actually talk to each other.
My #1 desire for a new Bethesda game is for them to figure out how to make console modding good, and to do it early. Would love for the next generation of nexus mods to have console stuff from the get go, and for the missing tools to immediately be good enough to not require PC specific tools to expand it like SKSE.
Hopefully they’ve already looked at SKSE, and made sure Starfield supports that stuff natively.
I think it’s not possible for them to make modding tools that are as powerful as DLL plug-ins like SKSE. While they can try to cover their bases with modding hooks, the reality is that they can’t think up everything that a modder might want to do and so DLL mods will still exist. And because DLL mods involve modifying the game code to do literally whatever (including potentially turning it into a completely different homebrew game, hacking the console, or even booting an OS), the problem with that and consoles is that the console makers do not want arbitrary, unsigned code to be running on their consoles.
No matter how many official hooks are added for modders to use, the PC platform will always have strictly more powerful mods.
A lot of the DLL stuff had to exist to work around limited support in the game for modding using the game’s environment, though. I think that a lot of classes of things could legitimately be done in a sandbox.
I think that there are certain things that can be modded on consoles, but console modding is inexorably going to run into a large limitation – games tend to push consoles closer to their limits than they do PCs. If you’re a game developer, you know what a console user has and can consume resources up to that point. On PCs, you don’t, as different users have different computers, so you have to have a somwhat-soft resource usage cap and have some headroom for some users even at release time.
Not all mods eat up memory or CPU time or GPU cycles. But a number do.
With PCs, one major thing that modding has done for Skyrim or Fallout 4 is to just update the game with higher resolution textures and models to reflect what current hardware can handle, as PCs continue a more-incremental march forward. Throw shaders, ENBs into the mix to leverage more-plentiful GPU cycles. That’s directly-tied to there now being more headroom to work with. Can’t really do that on the consoles in the same way.
There are certainly some major areas that modding has explored that mod authors could do, like adding new areas or the like. But what could be done on consoles is always going to face that limitation. And you can’t fix it by making consoles upgradeable or something, or you lose the benefits of the console in the first place, the fact that it’s a consistent, fixed system.
Another issue – consoles are designed to be easy to set up and hard to break. A number of tools that have existed for past Bethesda games act on the game in ways that could break it in confusing ways. I’m not saying that safer analogs couldn’t be built for at least some of these – and even on the PC, I wish that there were better tools for identifying issues and rolling them back. So this isn’t a fundamental limitation like the above. But I think that to some degree, the aim of a console vendor, to create an easy-to-use, reliable, cannot-dick-it-up environment is going to conflict with at least some of the tools that exist on the PC.
For at least some users, I think that it might be easier to provide a way to just use their PC to game on a TV. Steam has tried to do that to some extent, with Big Picture Mode and such. some people don’t want to have a dedicated gaming PC in their living room, though. Maybe you could facilitate that with hardware. Like, okay, if you’ve got a computer in one room and Ethernet between the TV and the PC, have a little device in the living room that:
- Decides video and displays it to the TV.
- Acts as a transceiver for wireless controllers.
- Can power the PC on remotely.
That doesn’t solve the issue for people who want a console because they want to avoid PC-style upgrades or troubleshooting, but I think that those people may tend to hit the more-fundamental issues I mentioned above of console vendors aiming for more of a plug-and-play experience on a predictable device clashing with modding.
Why do they keep trying to make a game that is everything to everyone? I prefer a game that is 10-25 hours of great content, over a game that requires 60-120 hours of slogging, interrupted by occassional 5 minute cutscenes.
that’s what mods are for!
Because some of us really love long, expansive games. There are plenty of 10-25 hour games out there. Games with as much content as something like Skyrim where you can clock 1000+ hours and still have things to do are relatively rare, and I’d like for them to continue to exist.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, I think most people agree. I think even Bethesda’s admitted that most people don’t even finish their games or even the main quest. “Open World” games with tons of recycled content that are a mile wide and an inch deep aren’t great, and are generally mediocre at best. Plus, the Bethesda habit of sticking clutter and containers everywhere that you have to search through and selectively pick loot out of one by one waste a crapton of time and is why carryweight limit 1000 lbs (or using the console to do the same) is so popular.
Quality > Quantity. The best thing that Bethesda does with its games is to make them moddable so their userbase can make their games much better, or make fan content that is as good or better than the base game.
They’re downvoting because the guy is missing the point. With mods, the game can be whatever you want it to be. You want a super short main quest? That can be done. You want the slowest game possible without even having a main quest? That can also be done.
Personally I down voted him because even though I also prefer short, tightly focused experiences, there’s room in the world for all types of games. Just don’t play the ones that don’t appeal to you.
So basically these giant open world games get all the funding, coverage, and attention only to have the actual game design aspects of game design left up to the dedication and size of your volunteer mod squad. So really designing the best game means designing the best looking platform for easy game design. Which helps explain Skyrims sucess in contrast to the challenges of later OWRPGs.
My favourite example of Bethesda going quantity over quality is when they looked at New Vegas, saw that every gamer and their (cyber)dog said they loved the dialogue, and Todd’s takeaway from that was “Soooo…we should fully voice the player character…twice over?”
Oh, and there’s a reason they went to a dialogue wheel…
That sounds kind of like maybe you’re looking for a JRPG.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_video_game
By the early 2000s, the distinction between platforms became less pronounced as the same games appeared on both console and computer, but stylistic differences between Western role-playing games (WRPGs) and Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) remained, rooted in the earlier distinctions.[54] Though sharing fundamental premises, WRPGs tend to feature darker graphics, older characters, and a greater focus on roaming freedom, realism, and the underlying game mechanics (e.g. “rules-based” or “system-based”[54]); whereas JRPGs tend to feature brighter, anime-like or chibi graphics, younger characters, turn-based or faster-paced action gameplay, and a greater focus on tightly-orchestrated, linear storylines with intricate plots (e.g. “action-based” or “story-based”[54]).[25][55][56][57][58][59][60] Further, WRPGs are more likely to allow players to create and customize characters from scratch,[61] and since the late 1990s have had a stronger focus on extensive dialog tree systems (e.g. Planescape: Torment).[62] On the other hand, JRPGs tend to limit players to developing pre-defined player characters, and often do not allow the option to create or choose one’s own playable characters or make decisions that alter the plot.
Wow, people on this thread are somehow overly negative haha.
Mod-ability has always been one of the DNA of Bethesda’s games since Morrowind, I don’t understand the negativity in this thread.
FO76, and recent big companies going greedy-as-fuck, has taken a toll on peoples trust I think.
Considering the last time they released anything with official mod support was Skyrim SE (the non-Switch, non-VR versions) I’m surprised to see them mention mod support at all, especially considering that Gamepass will almost assuredly break script extenders in some way.
This doesn’t at all line up with the rumored initial plans of it being a Sony exclusive …
But will they have to go thru creation club?
