The mods that updated for the first update were already updated within 24 hours of the next one.
The only mods that are still broken now are mods that were made and maintained by people who have stopped playing the game some time ago.
And even most of those still work, if they didn't rely on the script extender
The game is a decade old. I get the feeling that most mods will never be updated.
Downvoters should go check out the Stellaris mod graveyard. So many good mods gone forever.
Damn, you're right, it's almost been a decade already. I honestly thought it was younger than that.
I don't like thinking about that, lol. Skyrim being 13 really makes me feel old
i was in 5th grade i think when skyrim released
ive been out of school for nearly 5 years now
Might as well just throw me in a retirement home while you're at it, kid.
Tell me more about Stellaris
Basically the issue is that every six months they break all mods. Many projects over the years got abandoned after an update, or they were just never able to make progress because every six months they'd have to spend weeks patching.
There are some big mods still, but they're mostly just content additions. Anything that does overhauls, or has lots of overlapping systems, is doomed to failure unless they want to target a specific version of the game and never update. There was a big story mod awhile ago that decided to lock the game version that they supported, but it died when some dependencies updated to the new game version.
Modders work in their free time, so they can only make real progress when they have a stable base for a long long time.
Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don't know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn't this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don't care about steamrolling modders' work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol
The mods that weren't backwards compatible were primarily the ones that depended on the script extender. This was an unsupported executable that expanded on the commands available to the scripts in the mods.
Not to say unsupported is bad, but everyone was well aware that if they depended on the script extender, they would break if the game updated at all. The biggest mods avoided that dependency for exactly this reason, and really didn't have any trouble. (Sim Settlements still worked the entire time, for example)
And like usual, the community stepped up and updated their unsupported extension quickly, ready for this outcome.
If you made a mod that depends on the script extender and then quit playing the game or supporting your mod, that was a choice you made as a modder. Meanwhile there's mods that haven't seen an update in 8 years that continue to work without issue.
People act like mods breaking after an update is new. Bethesda (and every other dev team) has been doing it since Morrowind (and long before that) The MWSE and everything else were fine back then, too.
Yeah, Minecraft updates break mods all the time but there it is just something the community accepts as normal and lives with. The huge update rage is something I only see with Bethesda game modding.
Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a "beta" or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the "every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you" hill there wouldn't be any outrage.
No way to decline update
Turn automatic updating off for the game in question in Steam, and then set the download rate for Steam to 0 so it can't update when you start up the game.
People have whined about this for twenty years. Yawn
Then perhaps it is an issue that should be remedied?
They've got top men working on it as we speak.
Top. Men.
I prefer my men bottom.
Right, that's really more of a Steam issue than a Bethesda issue. I get why Valve and Bethesda don't want to provide customer support for old versions, but they don't have to. People have been figuring out their own problems when using obsolete systems or software for a long time.
I have no issue with Steam pushing the updates and encouraging you to take them, but giving no way to decline is a pretty poor user experience. Especially when we already know they keep old versions on their servers, as people have made guides on how to downgrade with Steam
So you say that you want the gog.com version of the game then?
Without having to re-buy the game, yes. I'd even be willing to pay GOG a bit of money for the cost of hosting the files etc, but I'm not paying Bethesda twice. That's just rewarding bad behaviour.
I mean, the issue is that the updates fix nothing of value and break mods in this decade old game. Passable update for console, “why did you even try?” on pc.
They add plenty of value, people just haven't really read into it. I.e. widescreen support, performance optimization, etc.
You mean things that mods had fixed almost a decade ago?
Yeah, but let's be real - modding isn't for everyone. The show was a mainstream hit, so a lot of eyes were on the game again. Adding native improvements like that are a benefit to the game overall and to the people who don't know how to mod or care enough to do it. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. But at the end of the day, hooking to a binary is just a hotfix away from being broken till someone fixes it again.
Bethesda offloads bug fixing to modders altogether too frequently to simply handwave modding as niche on PC. Over a decade on, comprehensive bug fixing mods are still amongst the most frequently downloaded files on nexusmods for Skyrim and even Fallout 4. They can’t have their cake and eat it too, and then complain that they urgently had to eat it.
Their actions don’t exist in a vacuum. Had they done this 5 years ago, it may have been received with confused appreciation, as it was with Skyrim. Now? After those mod creators have long since abandoned the game? It’s no longer welcome.
Personally, I still think Gamers (capital G on this one) are really stupidly entitled when it comes to shit like this. I agree with the other person, it's not on the company who made the game to stop the work they're doing on it, just to make sure third-party modders are okay with the update. They don't have to, and they technically shouldn't have to either. In a perfect world, yes they would communicate with the mod authors and all, but this ain't a perfect world.
In a perfect world, Bethesda would produce a whole game and rely not on free labor but themselves to create something. They went the Reddit route, instead opting to do as little as possible until it was inconvenient or even actively antagonistic toward their audience. They cannot have their cake and eat it. Their company is as much their modders as their employees. But they didn’t rerelease it under another edition, so I guess I can compliment their finite capacity for greed.
their company is as much the modders' as it is the employees'
You lost me there, lol. Just because I go to eat at a restaurant every single day for years doesn't mean the restaurant is partially mine, nor does it mean I work there if I just decide to help with the dishes some time.
The mod-supported ultra-widescreen option was not good. Bethesda's update is definitely better than it was, and since that was the only Fallout mod I used these updates are all good to me.
Technical question - does the script extender use signature/pattern scanning at all?
It sounds to me that it may have broken because it doesn't use it.
You could say "oh they recompiled it so the registers changed" but I highly doubt they changed the code that much or touched optimization flags.
The next gen update used a completely different compiler, and that created a highly different executable, that's why the update for script extender took so long and that's why the script extender for next gen edition is unable to load "old" script extender mods.
It is the same that happened with Skyrim Anniversary Edition.
Oh this is the "next gen" update? That would explain things.
Oh well...
They actually do fuck up the memory registers. It's essentially the same problem DFHack has whenever Dwarf Fortress gets an update.
Yes...core game updates typically do break mods. This is nothing new
It's mostly about the timing that is infuriating people. Fallout regained popularity with the TV show and they dropped a mod breaking release days later. Now they keep updating it with shit nobody asked for and breaking mods.
Ahh I see. Timing is key. Thx
Your accusations are driven by anger but they don't make much sense.
It's mostly about the timing that is infuriating people. Fallout regained popularity with the TV show and they dropped a mod breaking release days later.
At the end of last year when Bethesda announced the next-gen update would be delayed, it was already easy to suspect they will be releasing it along with the tv show. As soon as the show premiered, they announced they'll release the update in 2 weeks. Annoyance by the initial delay aside, this was a perfect moment to release the update.
dropped a mod breaking release
Mods are not developed by Bethesda, they are not integral to the game or necessary to play it and you cannot expect Bethesda to align the release date with every "modder" or test for each mod compatibility. Modders are welcome to create mods but it's not their game - you seem to be implying that Bethesda is required to consult with modders on game development. It's up to modders to keep their mods up to date with the game, not the other way around.
Additionally, Fallout 4 has seen a significant increase in sales during that period, which not only confirms it was the right moment to release the update, but also that it brought many new players, who are unlikely to play the game for the first time with mods.
Now they keep updating it with shit nobody asked for and breaking mods.
Just because you haven't been waiting for the update, it doesn't mean nobody has. Many players waited for this update, myself included. The next-gen update, as the name suggests, is mostly intended for consoles and the game has never looked or run better on my PS5.
The only reasonable issue you can have with this update is if you're on PC and playing the game via Steam - they automatically updated the game and don't allow to rollback. But that should be a protest directed at Steam, if you play the game via GOG, you can easily rollback the update. Or disable the game-breaking mods.
The article itself is rather unimpressive and not very investigative. Victoria Kennedy did "quick scan over on Steam's Fallout 4 forums" and decided to make an article about it because she knew mocking Bethesda will bring precious clicks.
Saying mods are not an integral part of a Bethesda game is a real hot take there.
If you want to see how devs should approach mod makers so it works out for everyone, take a look at Ludeon does it with Rimworld.
You are free to choose which games you play based on whatever criteria you like.
Without mods, Bethesda's games would not have been so consistently played since:
2011 for Skyrim's FIRST release
2014 for Fallout 4's FIRST release
Saying that mods aren't important, is actually kind of weird. Without those mods keeping the games afloat through the internet ether, they would not be AS popular as they are today.
People STILL play Fallout 3 and New Vegas TO THIS DAY, because of mods that LITERALLY allow the game to be played as crash free as possible.
From that context, I would assume mods are pretty damn important for these games.
That is true, but it is also true that the script extender (and that is all that broke) is literally hacking and forcing it's code into the game. And modern code and compiler is built to resist such attacks, if only by randomizing the needed jump addresses with every compilation.
All changes to the exe will break script extender, there is nothing that can change that. Well nothing but, maybe, a official deep plugin API for the exe and it is very unlikely that Bethesda will provide something like that.
I am literally replaying Fallout 4 right now without any mods and the game works great.
I also played Skyrim with mods that were installed in correct order and everything by the book and mods that were supposed to fix bugs actually instroduced game-breaking bugs which I haven't encountered playing vanilla game.
Yeah, it's great there are mods and you can adjust some parts of the game to your liking but attributing the success of those games to mods is misplaced. People keep playing them simply because they are great games and mods support it's an added bonus. You've got other older great games that people still play even though they don't support mods (The Witcher 3 as a similar example from the top of my head from around the same period as FO4).
I'm glad you can play Fallout 4 without mods. I really just use mods that make the experience better than vanilla such as:
The AWFUL dialogue options they did for Fallout 4
The bad voice acting for my character
The lack of options for character creation
The lack of diversity between characters and the armor/guns they use
And any cool clothing/armor/weapon mods I would like to use or add to my companions
OH and changes to the AI for the companions and enemies to make them just a wee bit better than just standing there in the open like a fool
The Witcher 3 has had plenty of very good mods, though. And modding is so important to people that CDPR is releasing a whole ass modding kit, so...
And modding is so important to people that CDPR is releasing a whole ass modding kit, so...
Yeah, they are releasing it now but you cannot attribute The Witcher 3's success to mods.
Definitely not, no. It was a high quality product to begin with, so mods weren't as needed/wanted.
Ehhhh....
I hope all the newbies already learned to turn off auto updates
Graham Wagner even reminisced about a bug he came across while playing The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, stating that adding 'glitches' into a then-hypothetical second season of the show was "definitely on [his] mind as a concept".
Now I'm seriously hoping there's a scene in season 2 where a character walks into a room and every object on every surface just sorta freaks out and clatters around, a la the traditional Bethesda physics engine insanity.
Really need those clicks, huh Eurogamer?
They're really making an article about mods breaking when the game is updated, an event that nearly always happens when any game is updated. Incredible.
Controversy drives engagement
Exhibit A: All of Lemmy. Seriously, this entire place, especially this community it just controversy and outrage. It's so boring.
You don’t have to use this site
Thanks, I'm considering not. People here are very unwelcoming and elitist. Even more so than reddit, which is impressive.
I'm honestly getting the same feeling. Some posts, the comments will be fairly normal. Posts like this one, though, are when the entitled shits start popping out their heads and and going "ackshually" about how mods work, and how the company is doing this on purpose just to spite them playing with mods.
Like, no dip shit, the company isn't doing this on purpose just to spite you. They've already had this planned and have been working on it for some time, they're not just gonna stop their work if the modders are okay with it.
Ok 💅
I mean it's working. Have you read some of the entitled bullshit people are posting in the comments?
I read the headline and thought "well yea, no shit. Thats what happens". It must be a slow news day (you can only report the "new" release date for gta so many times).
Uh, I was just thinking and I don't think I've seen it mentioned. Have these updates broken the creation club mods?
I believe creation club dlc does keep working, feel free to assume the worst.
Why even share this? (Or more accurately why even make this article) Everyone knows every update will break mods, nobody is surprised and nobody needs to read an article about it Everytime a moldable Bethesda game updates.
Yeah, we know. And its always a shit update too, nothing worth breaking mods for. Just break steam updates and move on.
The mods that updated for the first update were already updated within 24 hours of the next one.
The only mods that are still broken now are mods that were made and maintained by people who have stopped playing the game some time ago.
And even most of those still work, if they didn't rely on the script extender
The game is a decade old. I get the feeling that most mods will never be updated.
Downvoters should go check out the Stellaris mod graveyard. So many good mods gone forever.
Damn, you're right, it's almost been a decade already. I honestly thought it was younger than that.
I don't like thinking about that, lol. Skyrim being 13 really makes me feel old
i was in 5th grade i think when skyrim released
ive been out of school for nearly 5 years now
Might as well just throw me in a retirement home while you're at it, kid.
Tell me more about Stellaris
Basically the issue is that every six months they break all mods. Many projects over the years got abandoned after an update, or they were just never able to make progress because every six months they'd have to spend weeks patching.
There are some big mods still, but they're mostly just content additions. Anything that does overhauls, or has lots of overlapping systems, is doomed to failure unless they want to target a specific version of the game and never update. There was a big story mod awhile ago that decided to lock the game version that they supported, but it died when some dependencies updated to the new game version.
Modders work in their free time, so they can only make real progress when they have a stable base for a long long time.
Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don't know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn't this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don't care about steamrolling modders' work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol
The mods that weren't backwards compatible were primarily the ones that depended on the script extender. This was an unsupported executable that expanded on the commands available to the scripts in the mods.
Not to say unsupported is bad, but everyone was well aware that if they depended on the script extender, they would break if the game updated at all. The biggest mods avoided that dependency for exactly this reason, and really didn't have any trouble. (Sim Settlements still worked the entire time, for example)
And like usual, the community stepped up and updated their unsupported extension quickly, ready for this outcome.
If you made a mod that depends on the script extender and then quit playing the game or supporting your mod, that was a choice you made as a modder. Meanwhile there's mods that haven't seen an update in 8 years that continue to work without issue.
People act like mods breaking after an update is new. Bethesda (and every other dev team) has been doing it since Morrowind (and long before that) The MWSE and everything else were fine back then, too.
Yeah, Minecraft updates break mods all the time but there it is just something the community accepts as normal and lives with. The huge update rage is something I only see with Bethesda game modding.
Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a "beta" or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the "every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you" hill there wouldn't be any outrage.
Turn automatic updating off for the game in question in Steam, and then set the download rate for Steam to 0 so it can't update when you start up the game.
People have whined about this for twenty years. Yawn
Then perhaps it is an issue that should be remedied?
They've got top men working on it as we speak.
Top. Men.
I prefer my men bottom.
Right, that's really more of a Steam issue than a Bethesda issue. I get why Valve and Bethesda don't want to provide customer support for old versions, but they don't have to. People have been figuring out their own problems when using obsolete systems or software for a long time.
I have no issue with Steam pushing the updates and encouraging you to take them, but giving no way to decline is a pretty poor user experience. Especially when we already know they keep old versions on their servers, as people have made guides on how to downgrade with Steam
So you say that you want the gog.com version of the game then?
Without having to re-buy the game, yes. I'd even be willing to pay GOG a bit of money for the cost of hosting the files etc, but I'm not paying Bethesda twice. That's just rewarding bad behaviour.
I mean, the issue is that the updates fix nothing of value and break mods in this decade old game. Passable update for console, “why did you even try?” on pc.
They add plenty of value, people just haven't really read into it. I.e. widescreen support, performance optimization, etc.
You mean things that mods had fixed almost a decade ago?
Yeah, but let's be real - modding isn't for everyone. The show was a mainstream hit, so a lot of eyes were on the game again. Adding native improvements like that are a benefit to the game overall and to the people who don't know how to mod or care enough to do it. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. But at the end of the day, hooking to a binary is just a hotfix away from being broken till someone fixes it again.
Bethesda offloads bug fixing to modders altogether too frequently to simply handwave modding as niche on PC. Over a decade on, comprehensive bug fixing mods are still amongst the most frequently downloaded files on nexusmods for Skyrim and even Fallout 4. They can’t have their cake and eat it too, and then complain that they urgently had to eat it.
Their actions don’t exist in a vacuum. Had they done this 5 years ago, it may have been received with confused appreciation, as it was with Skyrim. Now? After those mod creators have long since abandoned the game? It’s no longer welcome.
Personally, I still think Gamers (capital G on this one) are really stupidly entitled when it comes to shit like this. I agree with the other person, it's not on the company who made the game to stop the work they're doing on it, just to make sure third-party modders are okay with the update. They don't have to, and they technically shouldn't have to either. In a perfect world, yes they would communicate with the mod authors and all, but this ain't a perfect world.
In a perfect world, Bethesda would produce a whole game and rely not on free labor but themselves to create something. They went the Reddit route, instead opting to do as little as possible until it was inconvenient or even actively antagonistic toward their audience. They cannot have their cake and eat it. Their company is as much their modders as their employees. But they didn’t rerelease it under another edition, so I guess I can compliment their finite capacity for greed.
You lost me there, lol. Just because I go to eat at a restaurant every single day for years doesn't mean the restaurant is partially mine, nor does it mean I work there if I just decide to help with the dishes some time.
This is a bad take.
The mod-supported ultra-widescreen option was not good. Bethesda's update is definitely better than it was, and since that was the only Fallout mod I used these updates are all good to me.
Technical question - does the script extender use signature/pattern scanning at all?
It sounds to me that it may have broken because it doesn't use it.
You could say "oh they recompiled it so the registers changed" but I highly doubt they changed the code that much or touched optimization flags.
The next gen update used a completely different compiler, and that created a highly different executable, that's why the update for script extender took so long and that's why the script extender for next gen edition is unable to load "old" script extender mods.
It is the same that happened with Skyrim Anniversary Edition.
Oh this is the "next gen" update? That would explain things.
Oh well...
They actually do fuck up the memory registers. It's essentially the same problem DFHack has whenever Dwarf Fortress gets an update.
Yes...core game updates typically do break mods. This is nothing new
It's mostly about the timing that is infuriating people. Fallout regained popularity with the TV show and they dropped a mod breaking release days later. Now they keep updating it with shit nobody asked for and breaking mods.
Ahh I see. Timing is key. Thx
Your accusations are driven by anger but they don't make much sense.
At the end of last year when Bethesda announced the next-gen update would be delayed, it was already easy to suspect they will be releasing it along with the tv show. As soon as the show premiered, they announced they'll release the update in 2 weeks. Annoyance by the initial delay aside, this was a perfect moment to release the update.
Mods are not developed by Bethesda, they are not integral to the game or necessary to play it and you cannot expect Bethesda to align the release date with every "modder" or test for each mod compatibility. Modders are welcome to create mods but it's not their game - you seem to be implying that Bethesda is required to consult with modders on game development. It's up to modders to keep their mods up to date with the game, not the other way around.
Additionally, Fallout 4 has seen a significant increase in sales during that period, which not only confirms it was the right moment to release the update, but also that it brought many new players, who are unlikely to play the game for the first time with mods.
Just because you haven't been waiting for the update, it doesn't mean nobody has. Many players waited for this update, myself included. The next-gen update, as the name suggests, is mostly intended for consoles and the game has never looked or run better on my PS5.
The only reasonable issue you can have with this update is if you're on PC and playing the game via Steam - they automatically updated the game and don't allow to rollback. But that should be a protest directed at Steam, if you play the game via GOG, you can easily rollback the update. Or disable the game-breaking mods.
The article itself is rather unimpressive and not very investigative. Victoria Kennedy did "quick scan over on Steam's Fallout 4 forums" and decided to make an article about it because she knew mocking Bethesda will bring precious clicks.
Saying mods are not an integral part of a Bethesda game is a real hot take there.
If you want to see how devs should approach mod makers so it works out for everyone, take a look at Ludeon does it with Rimworld.
You are free to choose which games you play based on whatever criteria you like.
Without mods, Bethesda's games would not have been so consistently played since:
2011 for Skyrim's FIRST release
2014 for Fallout 4's FIRST release
Saying that mods aren't important, is actually kind of weird. Without those mods keeping the games afloat through the internet ether, they would not be AS popular as they are today.
People STILL play Fallout 3 and New Vegas TO THIS DAY, because of mods that LITERALLY allow the game to be played as crash free as possible.
From that context, I would assume mods are pretty damn important for these games.
That is true, but it is also true that the script extender (and that is all that broke) is literally hacking and forcing it's code into the game. And modern code and compiler is built to resist such attacks, if only by randomizing the needed jump addresses with every compilation.
All changes to the exe will break script extender, there is nothing that can change that. Well nothing but, maybe, a official deep plugin API for the exe and it is very unlikely that Bethesda will provide something like that.
I am literally replaying Fallout 4 right now without any mods and the game works great.
I also played Skyrim with mods that were installed in correct order and everything by the book and mods that were supposed to fix bugs actually instroduced game-breaking bugs which I haven't encountered playing vanilla game.
Yeah, it's great there are mods and you can adjust some parts of the game to your liking but attributing the success of those games to mods is misplaced. People keep playing them simply because they are great games and mods support it's an added bonus. You've got other older great games that people still play even though they don't support mods (The Witcher 3 as a similar example from the top of my head from around the same period as FO4).
I'm glad you can play Fallout 4 without mods. I really just use mods that make the experience better than vanilla such as:
The AWFUL dialogue options they did for Fallout 4
The bad voice acting for my character
The lack of options for character creation
The lack of diversity between characters and the armor/guns they use And any cool clothing/armor/weapon mods I would like to use or add to my companions
OH and changes to the AI for the companions and enemies to make them just a wee bit better than just standing there in the open like a fool
The Witcher 3 has had plenty of very good mods, though. And modding is so important to people that CDPR is releasing a whole ass modding kit, so...
Yeah, they are releasing it now but you cannot attribute The Witcher 3's success to mods.
Definitely not, no. It was a high quality product to begin with, so mods weren't as needed/wanted.
Ehhhh....
I hope all the newbies already learned to turn off auto updates
Now I'm seriously hoping there's a scene in season 2 where a character walks into a room and every object on every surface just sorta freaks out and clatters around, a la the traditional Bethesda physics engine insanity.
Really need those clicks, huh Eurogamer?
They're really making an article about mods breaking when the game is updated, an event that nearly always happens when any game is updated. Incredible.
Controversy drives engagement
Exhibit A: All of Lemmy. Seriously, this entire place, especially this community it just controversy and outrage. It's so boring.
You don’t have to use this site
Thanks, I'm considering not. People here are very unwelcoming and elitist. Even more so than reddit, which is impressive.
I'm honestly getting the same feeling. Some posts, the comments will be fairly normal. Posts like this one, though, are when the entitled shits start popping out their heads and and going "ackshually" about how mods work, and how the company is doing this on purpose just to spite them playing with mods.
Like, no dip shit, the company isn't doing this on purpose just to spite you. They've already had this planned and have been working on it for some time, they're not just gonna stop their work if the modders are okay with it.
Ok 💅
I mean it's working. Have you read some of the entitled bullshit people are posting in the comments?
I read the headline and thought "well yea, no shit. Thats what happens". It must be a slow news day (you can only report the "new" release date for gta so many times).
Uh, I was just thinking and I don't think I've seen it mentioned. Have these updates broken the creation club mods?
I believe creation club dlc does keep working, feel free to assume the worst.
Why even share this? (Or more accurately why even make this article) Everyone knows every update will break mods, nobody is surprised and nobody needs to read an article about it Everytime a moldable Bethesda game updates.
Yeah, we know. And its always a shit update too, nothing worth breaking mods for. Just break steam updates and move on.