Starfield group fixing Bethesda's bugs say their job is tough as mods feel an afterthought
eurogamer.net
"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."
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.
Not really. Often companies degrade their products as a calculated choice, considering that they will save and increase their profits more than they will lose. If only a few people protest, which seems to be the case here, then they have no reason to change course.
But chosing to buy from companies that do better can at least carve out a niche.
That's exactly my point. At some point, Divinity: Original Sin was a niche. Now Baldur's Gate 3 is poised to be called Game of the Year and outsold Larian's wildest expectations. Many of those sales came from people who bought BG3 and not Starfield. That sends a message for what customers actually want. There wasn't some mass campaign to boycott Battlefield 2042; their customers just told them, by way of not buying it like they used to, that the product EA put out was not worth the price they were asking.
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.
their games have featured modding on both playstation and xbox in some capacity
but yes, its also nonsense
I mean, Skyrim SE and FO4 had some level of mod support even on consoles. That was and still is mostly unheard of otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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
I mean there is plenty of space... Not airless space... But plenty of sky or fields to fly that beast.
Oooh, pirates!
airships?
But dragonriding..