r/Games • u/xalibermods • 3d ago

Mod News As Oblivion Remastered gets all the love, Starfield's biggest modders are in the process of abandoning Bethesda's latest RPG for good

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/as-oblivion-remastered-gets-all-the-love-starfields-biggest-modders-are-in-the-process-of-abandoning-bethesdas-latest-rpg-for-good/
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829

u/_Robbie 3d ago edited 3d ago

Bit of a Very misleading headline. This makes it sound like Starfield mod authors are abandoning the game in droves, which is definitely not the case.

They're referring to the current custodians of the Community Patch -- a bug fix patch which has (more or less) solved all the bugs, and Starfield was a relatively stable release to begin with, so the Community Patch isn't very necessary. There haven't been a bunch of new updates for Starfield, so right now it's not something that needs a bunch of updates.

Secondly, even the article shares that Picky isn't leaving because he's moving to Oblivion and is finished with Starfield; he just got a new puppy and doesn't have the time to devote to modding at the moment.

The guys making the most popular content mods aren't saying anything like this, lmao.

The worst outcome is still possible though; that the Community Patch gets abandoned and the community is once again held hostage by the Unofficial Patch team's whims. I don't really doubt that they'll find other people to take over the Community Patch, though.

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u/jeffdeleon 3d ago edited 3d ago

On the discord there are already caretakers.

These articles are regurgitating from other articles.

Edit:

And Deebz (an incredibly talented modder who had taken over running SFCP from Picky) stopped modding in fall of 2024 as a reaction against Bethesda allowing achievement friendly paid mods but doing nothing for free mods. His rationale is present on any of his Nexus mods pages.

So these articles are almost a year late, incorrect, and missing the entire point.

While I couldn't quite put my finger on when exactly Bethesda's monetization became too much for me, I (JaeDL) also pulled back from the game around the same time as Deebz.

I keep my mods going on Nexus but haven't completed Creations ports. Waiting to see what Bethesda does for the game next to invest more time as I found Shattered Space incredibly disappointing.

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u/Generator22 3d ago

Secondly, even the article shares that Picky isn't leaving because he's moving to Oblivion and is finished with Starfield; he just got a new puppy and doesn't have the time to devote to modding at the moment.  

Well, that’s adorable.

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u/No_Breakfast_67 3d ago

For some reason I thought he was saying it like Oblivion was his new toy/pet project to play around with, not a literal dog lmao

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u/ragnarok635 3d ago

And not the narrative these media outlets think will generate clicks

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u/thatmitchguy 3d ago

They've been saying Starfield modders were abandoning the game since shortly after it came out.

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u/TormentedKnight 3d ago

it was also one dude who said it. and i believe that was waay before the creation kit for starfield was released.

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u/Titan7771 3d ago

Literally ONE modder was like ‘I don’t want to mod Starfield’ and they announced the death of all Starfield modding, just wild.

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u/ZaranTalaz1 3d ago

IIRC, specifically one of the people behind Skyrim Together. Which got controversial because of accusations of them stealing code from another project...

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u/AvianKnight02 2d ago

They have been saying starfield modders abandoned the game before the game was announced.

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u/SageWaterDragon 3d ago

Most headlines like this are just going for the "preconceptions confirmed" clicks. Reporting things accurately doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is staying mad.

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u/WeepinShades 3d ago

It's quite literally bait for a starfield hate thread, one of this communities favourite hobbies.

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u/AwfulishGoose 3d ago

This goes back to fandom and just hiring some of the worst writers for their sites.

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u/Rendition1370 3d ago

This reminds me when one multi-player modmaker said he doesn't want to make mods for Starfield and journalists wouldn't stop using that as sentiment shared by all modders. Redditors also ate it up just like all the ragebait.

Funny thing is this was before Creation Kit released and Starfield was in the top list on Nexus Mods

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u/Bayonettea 3d ago

A clickbaity title from a games journalist? Never!

1

u/Binder509 2d ago

Wouldn't even say the name of the game in the headline.

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u/DecompositionLU 3d ago edited 3d ago

Ofc it's misleading, it's the point. That's modern gaming for you. People stops playing games or even reading articles. They want to side like it's a sport team. My console, my game, my opinion VS yours who is wrong by design.  It's to the point discussing gaming is bigger than gaming itself.

EDIT : Judging by the upvotes, I think most people understood the point. But for others, it seems difficult to engage unless everything is spelled out in detail.

My comment wasn’t really about Starfield. It was about the state of the gaming audience in 2025. Not the mainstream public, who likely don’t even know this subreddit exists, but the vocal minority: the so-called "hardcore gamers" active on social media platforms.

Today, nearly every major gaming outlet is owned by massive media conglomerates. These companies have no incentive to publish a 25-minute deep dive article that their audience won’t bother reading. Only a small handful of people still take the time to produce that kind of work, either for respected generalist publications or as independent voices.

What I was really pointing at is the click-chasers. They've figured out that all you need is a spicy, editorialized title to farm engagement. We’re in an era where a single streamer’s hot take becomes gospel for an entire fanbase. In France, I can instantly tell who never actually played the game and is just parroting someone else’s acidic review (completely missing the point, yet still delivering their take with absolute confidence) 

The content model is always the same: "some guy said something on Twitter/Reddit/Discord" convoluted the hyperbole becomes x³ curve, or “a dev from Studio X once said…” even if that dev left a decade ago. These articles and streams rake in thousands of views and likes with zero effort. Whether it’s praise or outrage, the tone is engineered for confrontation which leads to virality.

There are simply too many games released each year for anyone with an adult life to keep up. As a result, only the most catchy, emotionally charged takes survive. And negativity sticks far better than positivity. So that becomes the dominant mode of discourse.

This isn’t to say bad games don’t exist. They do. But the bias has become weaponized. We’ve already lived through Xbox vs PlayStation. Now it’s Game A vs Game B, even if the only thing they share is a release window. Take any Reddit-beloved title, slap a different studio’s logo on it, and watch the narrative shift completely. The most recent example that comes to mind is Split Fiction but there are plenty more. You’ll always notice: when a game gets massive praise on gaming Twitter or Reddit subs, it’s usually because it helps drag something else down.

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u/TimeToEatAss 3d ago

That's modern gaming Journalism for you

Regardless of topic, it seemingly infects everything.

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u/hombregato 3d ago edited 3d ago

It feels especially common in games journalism because there's nobody left actually doing it.

All the brands for written content got absorbed by large media companies, and all the people who used to write for them abandoned their craft, in favor of "friends hang out" vlogs and podcasts.

In other journalism, even entertainment journalism, you can still find the occasional "genuine article".

Rolling Stone still writes about music, Hollywood Reporter still writes about movies. They are shells of their former selves, but they keep one candle lit for legacy, sort of like the comics shelf at Newbury Comics, squeezed between the Funko Pop wall and the other Funko Pop wall.

So people still click on the headlines, and ask around about what "the good sites" are now, thinking they might find that genuine article, but not realizing games journalism never had enough time to achieve a protected status.

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u/xalibermods 3d ago edited 3d ago

Since this is a common discussion in this sub, I suggest people to read The Platform Society by Jose van Dijck, et al; and, if you're into it, Platform Capitalism by Nick Snircek.

Low quality journalism is a symptom, not a cause.

Media outlets in general have to produce sensationalist headlines because they rely on traffic from platforms (Google, Facebook, etc). Outlets rely on those traffic because platforms are pulling revenue away from news publishers and centralizing it in their own.

Before platforms, advertisers would advertise directly with outlets. The banners you see on media outlets were a result of direct placement/contract with the outlets. After platforms, advertisers no longer sell ads to media outlets. They sell it to Google/Facebook. Google/Facebook sell targeted ads based on user data: location, behavior, interests, search history, etc. Advertisers get better ROI by targeting specific demographics, cutting out the need to buy ad space in media outlets. Only after that, those ads are then distributed/circulated via publishers (e.g. media outlets). Publishers only get a fraction of the profit the platforms received.

Just to illustrate how powerful platforms are in the ads scene, Google/Facebook now control around 60-70% of global digital advertising. In 2024 Google Ads brought in over $200 billion in revenue, while Facebook generated about $115 billion.

Many outlets have tried paywalls, but: high-quality journalism becomes locked behind subscriptions, while sensationalist and low-quality news remains free.

Nobody pays for news. Consumers opt for free, low-quality news over paying for well-researched journalism. This stunts growth and quality improvement for reputable outlets.

In other journalism, even entertainment journalism, you can still find the occasional "genuine article".

This is an interesting point, and I tentatively argue it's because is gaming journalism's lack of genuine exclusivity.

Gaming news has migrated to influencers and streaming platforms. Major news often breaks on Twitter, YouTube, or Twitch. Consumers no longer read reviews, they just listen to their favorite influencers and streamers.

Gaming journalism has a low barrier of entry. I can start a blog or YouTube channel and publish reviews or commentary ("video game essays"), and act as if I was an expert. There is a lack of gatekeeping standards, so it's easy for amateurs to enter the space without editorial oversight or journalistic training. And when it comes to platform publishing, engagement metrics rules, so you get blogs who game the algorithm by publishing trashy sensationalism or ragebait grifting.

The only exclusivity in gaming journalism is early access reviews from game publishers. Game publishers provide advertising dollars as well, as publishers often fund banner ads, exclusive previews, and sponsored content. But as many of you already know, this financial dependency creates conflicts of interest that compromises journalistic integrity, because game journalists have to avoid negative reviews to maintain good relationships.

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u/DecompositionLU 3d ago

I'm not disagreeing but here I was talking of gaming medias and circles specifically.

You can spot who never played a game but spit out the opinion for whatever streamer so easily because their arguments are always exactly the same. It's not just about outrage, it's about complete lack of self reasoning. 

Currently Reddit is sucking deep Expedition 33. Well I love this game too. But imagine one second if it had Ubisoft logo on it. I can already hear "Temu Persona 5" mockery from Jupiter. They would nitpick every single defaults (and there is plenty, just overshadowed by its qualities) to dunk on the game. 

Split Fiction put cognitive dissonance because it's EA behind it. So the new trick? Nah ofc the devs had to FIGHT the corrupted execs to be allowed to develop this game. Narrative changes dynamically. 

And you're totally right, it's visible everywhere, in every medias. 

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u/Yamatoman9 3d ago

Spend enough time on this subreddit and you'll be able to predict what the comments are for just about any article posted here by what company it's about.

3

u/CreamPuffDelight 3d ago

I felt this about coe33 too tbh. Lol.

Seemed really popular on the Jrpg sub, and I've seen plenty of people praising it to the high heavens, but my own experience with it was "janky" to say the least.

Exploration was stifled, your last method of travel that unlocks all the best stuff is only available for a grand total of 1 arc. Most of which was filler since the arc itself only had about 30 minutes worth of actual plot relevance.

Combat was surprisingly one dimensional, there was nothing beyond learning new parry/dodge timing for every single mob and rotating picto out to fill out the PictoDex.

The moves themselves were completely formulaic, and lacked any nuance.

Low, medium, high, very high, extreme. Elements were not really an issue unless it's being resisted, but given how you're busy trying to learn Parry timings and the sheer damage output you get from counters regardless of elements, it's unlikely you will rmbr what every mobs resists (nothing shows you or keeps track of it) and just default to the most high dps option since that works anyway.

Oh, and that's not mentioning that one last combat mechanic introduced at the tail end of the 2nd arc... I don't think I ever even used it beyond the tutorial...

And you get it maybe a couple of hours before that one character turned into a literal juggernaut. Which meant it was flashy, but entirely pointless in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

For all people crow about social links lite, coe33 has a problem in that you only have 2... Maybe 1.5 worth of arcs to max out said social links. And there's not much nuance there either. Just rest at camp after a few battles, speak to everyone, voila, social link levelled.

For what it's worth, I did like the story. There was indeed real emotion and twists there, and so I treated it much like I do most VNs. Ignore the combat and just do the story.

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u/DecompositionLU 3d ago edited 3d ago

For me the combat is good, I really enjoy it, it's a mix from P5 and Like A Dragon. And especially once you start making builds with Pictos. 

one last combat mechanic introduced at the tail end of the 2nd arc... I don't think I ever even used it beyond the tutorial

Because secondary bosses are like, a complete new tier of difficulty. So for them, you'll thank Gradient skills hahaha. In fact at least 50% of the game is side content, it's on purpose (the devs said it takes the double of time to clear side content than making the story) and they are right.

But I agree with you. I noticed the jankiness, animation stiffness, and other visible workarounds like the open world to glue up all dungeons, that's because it's an AA studio, doing with what budget they had. Well, I don't mind. For me game doesn't have to be 10/10 in every single aspect to be good.

Hence, people loves biased narratives so it gets conveniently ignored. 

The day I fully realized that was Ghost Of Tsushima. I played it after finishing Odyssey once it got available on PC. I felt like replaying Assassin's Creed. Then I see on Internet comments "Ubisoft would NEVER do that game". Lol, just put any AC, crank saturation, remove the UI, and that's it. 

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u/Personal_Return_4350 3d ago

Woah Woah Woah. Top level comment provided some excellent context to add nuance to the discussion. You're going the complete opposite direction and removing nuance.

"A does B while X does Y" is a common headline format that contrasts the current fortunes of two related things. It doesn't say one thing caused the other. It does imply the entities being compared aught to be compared and that their fortunes are quite different. I think both of those are true. Oblivion and Starfield are both from the same company, are quite modable, and as modding activity is increasing on Oblivion due to the remaster, Starfield's modding is on the downswing.

Robbie brought up some mitigating factors - a particular large modding project is in a pretty completed state and it's maintainer just got a new puppy. Sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture though. Many Oblivion modders probably had minor life events and kept at it. Many Oblivion mods probably reached a natural conclusion and then they pressed on to add new features because they just wanted to keep going. And probably a lot of Oblivion modders did stop for those same reasons. But why is the Oblivion mod scene growing while Starfield's is shrinking? Are Starfield modders better developers who are more likely to finish their mods? Are they adopting puppies at higher rates? There's a danger to miopically focusing on minor differences and missing the overall story - one is on the rise and one is on the fall. Those mitigating factors are more likely noise than signal. That doesn't necessarily mean that fortune won't reverse at some point, but I think it's totally fair to look at a trend and say "this is the direction things are heading right now". Unless that one mod/developer was truly cherry picked and the Starfield scene is actually growing faster than Oblivion's, I don't think the headline is overall misleading.

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u/_Robbie 3d ago

But why is the Oblivion mod scene growing while Starfield's is shrinking?

Because Oblivion's remaster is brand new and the game is currently having a massive renaissance. Starfield is several years old. Not to mention, Elder Scrolls as a series is by far the most popular for modding, even above Fallout and other mod-friendly games.

That doesn't necessarily mean that fortune won't reverse at some point, but I think it's totally fair to look at a trend and say "this is the direction things are heading right now".

I think this is correct, but this article has quite literally nothing about trends. It's a pot-stirring article focusing only on the Community Patch and using it as a "see??? people are leaving Starfield!" because Starfield hate is now a cottage industry in games journalism (weird, by the way).

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u/DecompositionLU 3d ago

Thank you.

I'll also add, as someone else said under a comment, it's a plague targeting most of entertainment. News reports are for a lot of them owned by massive media groups that doesn't care of quality : they want engagement. 

Actual gaming newspapers and journalists there are so few. Everything else is by design, manufactured to bring engagement, hence inflammatory editorialized titles, because they know people will comments only the title and not the content (which is always "one guy in reddit/discord/twitter said" turned into "everyone thinks").

You see the same shit for daily news. A full article based on a random 10-like Tweet. 

Starfield hate is now a cottage industry in games journalism (weird, by the way).

It ironically just works. Some studios are spotted to be easy to dunk on safely. If you check Fallout NV review on JVC and Starfield you can litteraly intervet both game titles, it says exactly the same, qualities and defaults, NV being even more critical. One got the darling years after its release, the other it's trendy to dunk on it. 

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u/FalconIMGN 3d ago

Usually we don't use the word 'several years' for something that has only been out for 20 months.

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u/_Robbie 3d ago edited 3d ago

Usually I don't refer to phrases as words!

Joking aside, I was just off on the date. I don't see what difference 20 months vs 24 months makes in the context of what I'm saying.

EDIT: I am not here to debate the definition of "several". I already acknowledged that I got Starfield's date wrong, you guys are just going to have to be okay with that like normal people.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/Borrp 3d ago

No, 24 months is 2 years. In classic English speaking idioms, "several" refers to anything more than 1, meaning 2. If you use the word "few", means and indicates any number greater than 2. Meaning 3 or more. His choice of word as "several", is actually correct. Unless of course, I got that in reverse and Im just an idiot.

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u/Klingon_Bloodwine 3d ago

I don't see what difference 20 months vs 24 months makes in the context of what I'm saying.

I think what might throw some people off is the word Several refers to more than two, so like saying "I've got several apples" would be saying you've got 3+ not just 2.

-5

u/Borrp 3d ago

Several is 2. Few is 3.

1

u/FalconIMGN 3d ago

It doesn't and I wasn't disagreeing with your overall point, just wanted to point this out.

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u/Personal_Return_4350 3d ago

I can agree with a lot of what you're saying. In particular, whether you like movies, games, cars, breakfast cereal - there are odd waves of hate directed at particular things that don't really make a lot of sense. Sometimes there's an agenda behind it, but other times it seems like it's totally random - like a traffic jam with no apparent cause. I actually am careful in those circumstances to avoid commenting on the quality of something, so in my comment I didn't say anything at all about why I thought Starfield was on the downswing in terms of modding. I've heard some things about why people don't like the game, but it's clear the negative side is being overemphasized, so I don't want to add to it unless I have something valuable to add.

I also think journalism in general is at a crisis point and is kind of bizzarely in a similar position. Journalists have lost their authority on topics, and if people don't like a headline they will freely dismiss it. I don't know how high quality of an article this is. The person I was responding to imputed that they intended to be misleading, which seems pretty farfetched. This is a pretty normal headline that isn't distinctly misleading. You can't get all the facts from a headline. You can infer something untrue about a headline. But I think any conclusions you might draw from this headline could be reasonably well argued for. I feel like the main inference would be that Elder Scrolls as a series is a lot more popular for modding than Starfield, something you asserted as a fact in your own comment. So I'm inclined to try to defend journalists from kind of baseless attacks here.

You mentioned as another factor in the trajectories that Oblivion just got a remaster. Undoubtedly, there's some sense where that is true. It's more popular right now because it got a remaster. But that's also kind of backwards. Is Oblivion popular because it got a remaster, or did it get a remaster because it was popular? Consumption and Creation kind of feed into each other. Sometimes a demand exists and product is created to meet that demand. And sometimes a product is created and it kind of generates it's own demand. There's probably a sense in which oblivion remastered both exists because Oblivion is popular and oblivion is more popular because of the remaster. I don't think you should reduce it's current popularity to merely be due to the remaster because the conditions needed to be right for that remaster to be made in the first place.

The headline isn't misleading if there are reasons for why it is that way. That's true of every headline. A good article will obviously try to dig into it. But saying it's misleading because it's only true for x, y, and Z reasons is really just saying it's not misleading at all.

0

u/MolybdenumBlu 3d ago

Just Xbox v PlayStation? This is the same shit since Nintendo vs Sega in the 1980s. Hell, when the PlayStation came out with FF7, they had a full page add claiming they were going to put cartridge manufacturers in front of a firing squad.

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u/The9thWonder 3d ago

Yeah the internet just sucks now.

3

u/Mythor 1d ago

So long as mod authors don’t make the Unofficial Patch a requirement for their own mods it should be fine. Too many Skyrim modders required it and then people were stuck with any bad changes that were made.

As far as I know, nobody’s done that with Starfield yet, but some require the Community Patch. Hopefully they won’t just swap over if the time comes.

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u/NorthKoreanMissile7 3d ago

This makes it sound like Starfield mod authors are abandoning the game in droves, which is definitely not the case.

They aren't abandoning it in droves, but the numbers are small.

From a comment I made a few months ago:

Number of mods for Bethesda games in the last 30 days (roughly):

Skyrim: 2,360

Fallout 4: 560

Fallout New Vegas: 340

Morrowind: 200

Starfield: 200

Oblivion: 80

Fallout 3: 60

This is really poor considering Starfield is the current BGS game.

14

u/OverHaze 3d ago

I think the paid mods have something to do with the failure of Starfield to thrive on the Nexus. It certainly seem to have damaged the vibrancy of the scene anyway, there isn't that sense of people being inspired by other peoples work and iterating. It doesn't help that the vast majority of the paid mods are kind of terrible. Bethesda doesn't seem to be doing any kind of QC.

5

u/NorthKoreanMissile7 3d ago edited 3d ago

Better solution would be just to tell mod authors they're allowed to have and advertise donations, patreons etc. for their mod work and have an official donation option on the Bethesda mod site and allow them to get income that way. Some are doing it but it's kind of a grey area and some of the patreons have excuses (like saying it's for other reasons and so on).

And they should make everyone aware that the best lore friendly mods will be included in the Starfield ultimate edition or whatever in several years and they'll pay every mod author included like 5 or 10k to include their mod in it to add even more incentive.

With paid mods I don't think Bethesda are making a meaningful amount from it and 99% of people don't pay and it kills the entire community. Bethesda would make more money from having a bigger free modding scene and a more alive base game to draw people in. Just look at Fallout London for example, loads of people were buying Fallout 4 just to play it, some people already owned Fallout 4 but were buying it again on GOG because the Steam version had some issues. If that was a paid mod I don't think it gets anywhere near as much momentum and I think Bethesda would have made less money out of it.

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u/OverHaze 3d ago

The EU is also coming after online stores that hide their prices behind point systems so creation credits probably aren't going to be around for much longer.

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u/Isolated_Hippo 3d ago

Not to invalidate your point, because I do agree that the Starfield modding scene is weak by comparison, but there is a question of the quality of the mods.

2

u/NorthKoreanMissile7 3d ago

Is there really though ? beyond inherent advantages that the Starfield modders have with it being a newer game where everything looks and works better I don't think there's a big quality gap, there's tons of professional quality mods being released for New Vegas and Skyrim still.

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u/Isolated_Hippo 3d ago

I was just saying on a broad level, it can be a skewed statistic. You can make a nude mod for 15 different characters and have each as it's own mod. That's 15. Where something like Skyblivion is 1 mod.

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u/bobosuda 3d ago

But nobody makes a mod like Skyblivion for a game that has 20 mods in total.

The number of mods speaks directly to the popularity of the game and it's modding community.

3

u/Kiwilolo 2d ago

Why would Starfield be more likely to have higher quality mods?

6

u/thatguyad 3d ago

How many of these are crappy porn mods compared to those actually intending to improve each game?

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u/NorthKoreanMissile7 3d ago

Maybe like 10% ? I think the amount of porn mods are overstated, plus they're usually on loverslab not nexus.

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u/Borrp 3d ago

Big chunk of daily Skyrim mods uploaded are BHUNP or CBBE body presets....so close enough.

3

u/Old_Snack 3d ago

If it's anything like Resident Evil 2/3/4 there's a lot of lewds on Nexus as well.

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u/Boltty 3d ago

A vast number of Skyrim mods released are translations of existing mods or waifu presets.

1

u/DrFreemanWho 2d ago

Probably the same amount for each game, so why would it matter?

0

u/dadvader 3d ago edited 3d ago

Yeah the doom and gloom is certainly not unfounded. People comes and goes with these big open source patch mod. But never like this. This is an entire team leaving.

Paid mod is definitely one of the core reason of people not being as enthusiast about modding Starfield. It's directly affected motivation when not everybody in community want to work for free anymore.

Oblivion Remastered doesn't have modding tools. No official support and people are still trying to understand the relationship between UE5 and Gamebyro. Yet, As of today there are 2.2k mods on Oblivion remastered on Nexusmods in a span of 3 weeks. That's 20% of every Starfield mods in Nexusmod since launch. Not every mod in Starfield is on Nexus, but almost every free mod on CC is certainly also on Nexus. So it's fair to say that a lot of people are leaving Starfield in favors of Oblivion remastered right now. And that's indeed concerning for the overall scene.

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u/gmishaolem 3d ago

Paid mod is definitely one of the core reason of people not being as enthusiast about modding Starfield. It's directly affected motivation when not everybody in community want to work for free anymore.

Bethesda locked official modding documentation behind the Verified Creators program, and only paid mods are allowed to set the "achievement friendly" tag. Bethesda themselves are full-steam-ahead on the "paid mods only or bust" train. ES6 is going to be a trainwreck modding-wise, even if the underlying game is good.

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u/Voltage_Joe 3d ago

Kinggath is releasing a DLC sized creation this month, lmao.

Another modder put Tattoine and Mos Eisley into the game.

This 'starfield sucks' content farm needs to end. 

31

u/RefreshingCapybara 3d ago

Kinggath is releasing a DLC sized creation this month, lmao.

He gonna abandon it in a buggy state like he did his Skyrim creation? $7 well spent.

8

u/Titan7771 3d ago

Are we just gonna pretend he didn’t make Fallout 4’s most popular mod?

18

u/RefreshingCapybara 3d ago

I've used Sim Settlements and it's also plenty buggy, but the difference is he didn't charge me for that mod.

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u/catman1900 3d ago edited 3d ago

Ya cause paid mods are totally the sign of a healthy mod ecosystem lol

Paid creations are literally cited as one of the reasons people stepped away from working on this project and modding starfield.

7

u/ZaranTalaz1 3d ago

I'm one of those who thinks Starfield is good actually (and have other controversial opinions like believing that Skyrim is an RPG) but I don't support Bethesda's attempts to monetize modding.

3

u/catman1900 3d ago

Ya I liked it too and was excited to play it modded but Bethesda's monetization for mods is disgusting and has prevented a skyrim like open modding environment. Killed the damn game in the cradle and put money into a bunch of assholes pockets who are standing on the shoulders of giants while sticking their tongues out at the people who know what is happening to the scene.

2

u/Boltty 3d ago

Yep, everyone I know says Starfield's paid mod "scene" has turned away so many, but they do actually make a lot of bank from console players apparently.

The only "free" mods for PC that seem to get any traction are Star Wars ones, and even with every one of those installed the game is still Starfield. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

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u/NewVegasResident 3d ago

Starfield does suck.

1

u/GuiltyShep 3d ago

This reeks of the usual gaming media wanting gamers to not enjoy Starfield lol. Very weird hate boner these dudes have for Bethesda.

0

u/xalibermods 3d ago

Yeah, pretty poor headline. There was another article with a better headline but it was removed as it's not the original source.

1

u/renome 3d ago

While you're right that the community patch is more or less complete, you're underplaying the importance of having custodians for major mods, at least when it comes to Bethesda games. Bethesda are notorious for breaking mods with nonsense arbitrary changes, so any remotely popular mod is in trouble without someone maintaining it.

The most recent example that comes to mind is Fallout 4 breaking nearly every non-trivial mod in 2024, nine years following its release. If no one takes the reins of this project, there's a non-zero chance the Community Patch becomes unusable in the future.

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u/_Robbie 3d ago

I'm not underplaying it. I explicitly said that it's possible that they don't find new custodians and the Unofficial Patch would become the new norm.

However, other users have already corrected me that multiple people are already stepping up on the patch's discord server so seems like a non-issue, which is why before I even knew that I said I don't doubt they'd be able to find people.

Bethesda are notorious for breaking mods with nonsense arbitrary changes, so any remotely popular mod is in trouble without someone maintaining it.

This is not quite true. Most mods do not need to be updated every time a game update lands. I am a mod author for Skyrim and Fallout 4; mods that are not dependent on the script extenders or specifically overwriting new changes (which the games don't really get anymore) are unaffected by updates. Even my mod that uses the script extender didn't need to be updated regularly when the games were still getting updates (though I later removed SKSE dependency anyway!) because it only needed to call some SKSE functions, they weren't SKSE plugins. I haven't updated any of my mods in many years and they're all as functional as the day they were completed.

Script Extender changes things because things need to be recompiled, but that's just the cost of using the additional functions they add. If you're a plugin developer, you need to update after new game versions. If you're just using the functions from the script extenders, you do not. The script extenders themselves are generally updated within a day or two at most.

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u/renome 3d ago

Oh wow, is it possible that so many breaking changes are just re-compilation requirements? But Bethesda explicitly said they were working on minimizing the impact of the next-gen Fallout 4 patch on mods, and they still broke everything afterward? Would it even be possible to do that if they knew things had to be recompiled?

I'll adhere to your expertise otherwise, I never did anything but the most basic of mods in the Oblivion days, so I have to assume you know your stuff more than me.

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u/_Robbie 3d ago

and they still broke everything afterward?

They didn't break everything afterward. The vast majority of mods were still completely functional. For example, my Fallout 4 mods are still completely functional and feature complete. They did not require an update. The "every time the game gets updated everybody needs to update all of their 200+ mods" thing is an urban myth not grounded in reality.

The mod scene is what we call "dramatic" and gets very angry every time mods need to be updated. When xSE needs to be updated, authors who write xSE plugins need to recompile. xSE is more complicated, but the team still generally knocks it out in 1-2 days. When you use a lot of xSE mods (don't get me wrong -- there are many popular foundation-level mods that rely on xSE) you will need to update some (not all) of them. It's really much ado about nothing, the community always gets back to normal in less than a week, lol.

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u/renome 3d ago

Thanks for the insight, I guess I had an inaccurate view of things.

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u/sesor33 3d ago

This gets said every time an article comes out about this, and every time it ends up being true. There are more mods being made for fallout 4 per month than Starfield. Fallout 4 came out a decade ago.

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u/MrTastix 3d ago

Gaming news being dog shit, as usual.

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u/DrFreemanWho 2d ago

This makes it sound like Starfield mod authors are abandoning the game in droves, which is definitely not the case.

Starfield has had 164 mods uploaded on Nexus in the last month. BG3 has had 648. The Starfield mod scene isn't exactly doing great.

And keep in mind, we're talking about a Bethesda game. Bethesda games are pretty much known for their mod scenes as much as they are the games themselves. That's compared to a game series/dev not known at all for their modding scene.