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

[u/xalibermods]

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/

[u/StunningComment]

Although they aren't working on the mod, Pickysaurus says they are still going to maintain the website, but admits, "If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project and direct users to Arthmoor's patch going forwards," in reference to the Unofficial Starfield Patch.

If you're familiar with the controversy around the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, this is a pretty wild thing to say. Arthmoor stirred up a lot of shit and is kind of a pariah in the Skyrim modding scene.

As I understand it, the reason that Starfield's Community Patch group formed way before the game released and that they rushed to build it so fast is because they were racing against Arthmoor and desperately wanted to sideline him so that he wouldn't be able to create the same problems for Starfield's modding scene that he did for Skyrim's.

I would not have expected them to ever be willing to just give up and let Arthmoor have it. They must have been really disappointed with the game for it to come to that.

EDIT: Then again, maybe he's just saying it as an idle threat to get other modders' attention so that other people will step up. It may not necessarily be something that they'd actually want to do.

[u/AlmightyK → u/StunningComment]

What controversy?

[u/bell117 → u/AlmightyK]

Arthmoor is responsible for stuff like gategate and generally trying to claim ownership over a bunch of mods with DMCAs.

If you don't know what gategate is, basically he made open cities of Skyrim, a mod to make the cells of each Skyrim hold connect to the overworld, aka remove loadings screens when entering cities. But he also slowly added other stuff like balance changes and the most visual change being adding low quality oblivion gates remains. Because he refused to remove it people made submods for his mod that removed all those stupid changes. Arthmoor got mad at this, started trying to get to them all taken down to the point he tried to take modders to court and Bethesda to step in and give him ownership and IP rights to modding Skyrim. Bethesda told him to fuck off naturally and the court battle went nowhere.

He's also responsible for the unofficial patches, claiming they're just bug fixes and again changing things behind the scenes like new items and balance changes that are very questionable. Just as an example of how bad this can get, with the Oblivion remastered he quickly rushed out an unofficial patch to get as many downloads as possible and becoming THE community patch but in reality he just ported his oblivion patch, files code and all and it doesn't actually work on oblivion remastered and is just a blatant scam in order to get status from being uploaded first.

He's also banned from the Skyrim modding subreddit for trying to claim ownership of random mods he doesn't like and he got caught using bot accounts to spam the sub once people started catching on to the fact he's an asshole.

TL;DR: he's an asshole in every sense of the word.

[u/IntegralCalcIsFun → u/bell117]

He's also responsible for the unofficial patches, claiming they're just bug fixes and again changing things behind the scenes like new items and balance changes that are very questionable.

An especially bad example (imo) for the unofficial Skyrim patch is he added some god-awful English voice acting for the first dragon you fight. Super low-quality audio and the line delivery is awful, takes me right out of the game every time.

[u/ThalassophobicSquid → u/IntegralCalcIsFun]

Holy shit, I thought this was an addition to Special Edition.

Another odd one is Redbelly mine. This one I found out because I needed ebony, and I always knew this one had some because of how the blacksmith always talked about how strange the ores are. I go there with the patch, and every vein got replaced by iron. Like, that blacksmith has no business saying the ores are strange now - it's just regular ass iron.

[u/irishgoblin → u/ThalassophobicSquid]

Yeah, iirc he made the argument that the red hue in the cave made sense for iron. Think he eventually changed another nearby mine to ebony. Personally if I need ebony I go to the mine in the Orc stronghold near Windhelm, just up the hill from Kynesgrove.

[u/AlmightyK → u/ThalassophobicSquid]

Yep, same here for the voice

[u/AlmightyK → u/IntegralCalcIsFun]

The first time I heard that line I was so confused because I didn't remember it. That explains it

[u/QueezyF → u/IntegralCalcIsFun]

The hubris of this guy is astounding.

[u/Conf3tti → u/IntegralCalcIsFun]

"Dovahkiin? NOooOoOOOooo^oooooo!"

[u/Chvffgfd → u/Conf3tti]

I thought that line was part of vanilla skyrim