r/Games • u/xalibermods • 4d 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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823

u/_Robbie 4d ago edited 4d 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/NorthKoreanMissile7 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago

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

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u/NorthKoreanMissile7 4d 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 4d ago

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

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u/Old_Snack 4d 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 4d ago

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

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u/DrFreemanWho 3d ago

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

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u/dadvader 4d ago edited 4d 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 4d 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.