“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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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
airships?
But dragonriding…
I mean there is plenty of space… Not airless space… But plenty of sky or fields to fly that beast.
Oooh, pirates!
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.
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.
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.