PC Gaming

Classic Todd bs on the level of "it just works"

tell me lies tell me sweet little lies

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.

not just a hobby, but a career

They're definitely planning on making a mod store.

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.

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.

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.

Why do people need to be upset about everything all the time? Things can just be good things occasionally.

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.

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'll believe it when I see it.

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 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.

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.

that's what mods are for!

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.

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.

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.