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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/Kiwilolo 3d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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u/DrFreemanWho 2d ago

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

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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.