Jump to content

Why do people continue to mod Bethesda games?


BeowulfMKII

Recommended Posts

I mean seriously.

Every game that comes from them is more bugged than the other.

No quality control at all.  

And it's clear that they don't give a s*** about the community. A community which is the reason why their games are popular.

 

Would you play Skyrim on PC without any mods? Probably not.

 

They don't even implement a reliable debug system so that modders can know what caused a crash and so on.

 

For example look at Stalker: COP. When the game crashes a message box is displayed explaining exactly what caused the crash, be a texture or a script.

 

If you got a CTD in Skyrim/FO4 and don't find any information on the net, you're on your own, needing to resort to hours of testing until the culprit is found.

The newest game still uses the same (but "updated") engine as Morrowind

 

Combat in their games is crap. No combat mechanics. No strategy needed.

 

The player actions have no weight in the game world. You murder everyone in riverwood and the only thing you need to do is pay the bounty and is almost like it didn't happen.

 

Kill the emperor: get a sad remark from a guard.

 

I don't need to say anything about the Magic system.

Instead of learning from the community and implementing the best ideas, the games all continue the same.

And not to say the laughable graphics that their games use compared to other same generation titles. They don't even bother trying to keep up because they know that the community is going to release mods that will.

The animations are junk.
The game physics are non-existent.

The company Motto is "Why bother fixing the game, when the community will fix it for us?"

 

Why?

 

 

Link to comment

They give the tools to modders, albeit buggy or downright horrible. But they do give some way to mod games, whereas other developers/publishers make it so its much harder to mod and sometimes restrict modders from doing so. Plus, I guess people are used to modding beths game because they are all utilising the same mesh and texture formats and scripting languages somewhat. I heard Witcher 3 had some modding tools but I havent checked out the modding scene for them yet.

Link to comment

Because TES and Fallout are open world and allow the player to create their own character. The freedom and scope of the games lend themselves well to modding, and allow the player/modder to craft their experience in many ways that would be difficult with other types of games.

 

Also, Bethesda have been releasing modding tools with their games for a long time now, and the community has grown up around it.

 

I think having buggy games actually incentivises modding in a way, because it encourages players to tinker with the game and fix it. Same with graphics/animations/UI etc. If Bethesda games were perfect noone would need to mod them.

Link to comment
Guest endgameaddiction

That's because the toolkit is there so modders can fix their broken games, being able to add stuff just comes along with it. It's easier for them to release an unfinished game knowing that the mod community will do the rest.

 

I precisely have lost a lot of interest in Bethesda as a company and their games from Skyrim and Fallout 4 and what ever titles come after that because it's been a long long ongoing track of broken, unfinished, stale/dull games that have such great potential but they see the easy way out to make quick money. Because they know they have a huge ass buffet line of slobbering fanboys ready to buy any mediocre thing they produce.

 

I haven't modded since Fallout 3 and a little bit of New Vegas. Just not interested in modding Skyrim and I won't touch Fallout 4. I do add mods to Skyrim and that's what I am still currently playing for the time being. Until that dries up and it's time to pack my bags and call it quits.

Link to comment

Having buggy games actually shows that they are getting more and more commonplace and lazy if there were no tools the games that came out would be way better and have less bugs because they would have to do the stuff themselves instead of relying on others to do their job for them and now with new games like fallout 4 with their new eula they can take your stuff and say my shit I made it if they want to. People also mod them and fix the bugs because if they don't beth probably will not.

Link to comment

The first very important step on your journey is comprehending that this is your opinion and yours alone. You don't enjoy these games, others do. Simple as that.

Are you implying that what i said isn't true? That i'm a 14 year old that got beaten in a Bethesda game and now i'm lashing at the company for no reason?

Also i didn't say that i don't enjoy the games. But the lack of stability and tools to diagnose bugs is astonishing.

Link to comment

 

 

They give the tools to modders, albeit buggy or downright horrible. But they do give some way to mod games, whereas other developers/publishers make it so its much harder to mod and sometimes restrict modders from doing so. Plus, I guess people are used to modding beths game because they are all utilising the same mesh and texture formats and scripting languages somewhat. I heard Witcher 3 had some modding tools but I havent checked out the modding scene for them yet.

 

Because TES and Fallout are open world and allow the player to create their own character. The freedom and scope of the games lend themselves well to modding, and allow the player/modder to craft their experience in many ways that would be difficult with other types of games.

 

Also, Bethesda have been releasing modding tools with their games for a long time now, and the community has grown up around it.

 

I think having buggy games actually incentivises modding in a way, because it encourages players to tinker with the game and fix it. Same with graphics/animations/UI etc. If Bethesda games were perfect noone would need to mod them.

 

That's because the toolkit is there so modders can fix their broken games, being able to add stuff just comes along with it. It's easier for them to release an unfinished game knowing that the mod community will do the rest.

 

I precisely have lost a lot of interest in Bethesda as a company and their games from Skyrim and Fallout 4 and what ever titles come after that because it's been a long long ongoing track of broken, unfinished, stale/dull games that have such great potential but they see the easy way out to make quick money. Because they know they have a huge ass buffet line of slobbering fanboys ready to buy any mediocre thing they produce.

 

I haven't modded since Fallout 3 and a little bit of New Vegas. Just not interested in modding Skyrim and I won't touch Fallout 4. I do add mods to Skyrim and that's what I am still currently playing for the time being. Until that dries up and it's time to pack my bags and call it quits.

 

There are very few games out that have good tools to mod with. ES games have probably the best toolkit and mod support. If there were no tools for the games they probably not be very popular.

 

i guess they were the only who give us full control(kinda) of our game so i guess bethesda kinda did well

 

Having buggy games actually shows that they are getting more and more commonplace and lazy if there were no tools the games that came out would be way better and have less bugs because they would have to do the stuff themselves instead of relying on others to do their job for them and now with new games like fallout 4 with their new eula they can take your stuff and say my shit I made it if they want to. People also mod them and fix the bugs because if they don't beth probably will not.

That's really sad. Shows how much this industry is deteriorating. But as you all said Bethesda really provides the modding tools for players. Their mistake here is relying too much in this.
Link to comment

Bethesda does provide modding tools? really?

Then tell me, where is their Maya/Max/Blender import/export plugin? where are their Havok tools? (yes, i know some of the reasons why they dont provide those, but essentially if you really dig deep, its all just excuses).

There are other modable games, for which you dont even need any 3rd party tools, because the devs provide their own - true, some of them are really basic, far from feature rich, but you CAN use them to do everything you need.

So, there is a way, only Bethesda doesn't give a shit (or they are too greedy to spend some time and money to develop such tools).

 

Bethesda provides the CK and that's it, and even that thing is broken, crashing every now and then!

 

If i'd knew how this is gonna be, i wouldn't buy Skyrim back then - i did so only because i was expecting some improvements (foolish me!).

And then again, i did the same with Fallout 4 - i was thinking "no way, by now they must have learned what ppl want, this time it will be different", well, it wasn't different at all.

So, what else can i do now except keep trying, because saddly, there isn't really anywhere else to go - no other games i know of, provide such potential combined with open world and similar settings (ie. there are much better moddable games, even open world, but they are quite different in many aspects, in the world setting, etc.).

So yeah, i am still trying, and probably gonna keep trying for quite some time, but no way i am gonna get ANY other Bethesda game, until i see a complete set of modding tools and some significant improvements in both the game mechanics (Bandit lloking at dead comrade: "must have been nothing...") and moddability.

Because as someone wrote before: Bethesda's games aren't good until you mod the shit out of them.

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

Probably because of how open it is to modding.

 

As a sandbox "make your own story" kind of game, Bethesda games tend to lend themselves to a high variety of mods. Couple that with the fact that Bethesda themselves make it rather easy to mod (compared to other games) and you get the result we have.

 

The quality of the game doesn't matter, nor the company.

 

What matters is that any guy, the quest maker, the texture expert, the gameplay innovator, all have the tools to change the game their way. The games themselves can be lacking, or have huge flaws, be it technical or personal, but that doesn't change what can be done with it.

 

Let's look at Dark Souls. It's a great game with amazing gameplay. The modding community around it is not that big however. Most of it is weapons, armors and retextures, with some UI changes. That's because it doesn't lend itself great to modding : Not only is there no creation kit, but being more of a combat-oriented game with no real quest, it's harder to come up with ideas to begin with? New quests, adventures? Maybe territories, but that's about it.

 

Bethesda games aren't perfect, but they're the most moddable games out there. A saying goes "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", and while I wouldn't apply it to everything in life, it definitely applies here.

 

Even Witcher 3, even if it had as big modding support, would probably have a hard time catching up to Bethesda games, as Geralt is the character and this is his story, unlike Skyrim, where the Dragonborn can be anyone. You don't even have to be Dragonborn, where Witcher wouldn't make much sense if Geralt just stopped being one. Witcher 3 is openworld, but not a sandbox. And as far as moddable sandbox game, the only concurrent is what, Minecraft?.

Link to comment
Guest endgameaddiction

 

The quality of the game doesn't matter, nor the company.

 

What matters is that any guy, the quest maker, the texture expert, the gameplay innovator, all have the tools to change the game their way. The games themselves can be lacking, or have huge flaws, be it technical or personal, but that doesn't change what can be done with it.

 

 

You've proven why this gives bethesda an excuse to be a shitty company. And why people should spend their money on half-assed products because quality doesn't matter any more.

Link to comment

It's kinda complex issue, which has several variables, mainly in relation to how people react to games by todays standards (or lack of standard, bu-dum-tish).

 

More then anything, it's because people are beasts of habit, thats it, they cannot adapt or even imagine working on another game or series (kinda like those people who keep on replaying Dark Souls only, even if they finished for the 200th time, and did a no death/bonfire run, they still keep on playin the game like it's the last game on the planet), even if they could very easily cobble together a sex game in another engine without a single bug (I guess having prefabs also doesn't hurt, although considering the amount of content for Beth's games that are direct ports from another game, it shouldn't matter to the modding community + Patreon), I guess the basic are there for the world, which could give someone a head start, but I wouldn't exactly call buggy, ported clothes with no physics and no modding points a head start in any way or form for modding.

 

Basically there is a playing field already there, that is what could be the enticing factor for people (or at least, one of them).

 

Also, it suffers from Big Legacy syndrome. Even if a game isn't good, it will still sell today due to "too big to fail" (Steam Greenlight should be example enough) idealogy, when you have 7 billion people across the world, and at least several hundred million of those have access to the internet and are interested in video-games, even selling to 1% of those people will recoup the game and make it a best seller, like it or not. The quality control from the consumer simply isn't there any more (reference this to the 90's, when women would strike and no buy eggs if the price slightly increased, forcing it come down again compared today where people spend hundreds on a kickstarter for a mobile phone controlled coffee maker without coffee making), where something like 1 millions units was a break it or make it result.

Plus being the second, third or fourth game of a franchise will make  sure it has a head start out of the window. I'm pretty sure if someone decided to make what is essentially Fallout 2.0 in their own way and own Lore, it wouldn't sell a 1/10 of what Fallout 4 did, because again, people like Legacy and people like what they know and won't play the other game, even if it's  better (compare to Destiny and Warframe for example, or League and Dota 2 in Chinese Market, even Torchlight/POE vs. D3 release setup). Hell, even WatchDogs and many of other Ubisofts games show the issue correctly, even as back in the 90 and early 2000's we had the DriverGate drama with Atari.

 

Think of if this way, the game might be the worst game in existance, but you'll think to yourself "What does it matter if I buy it? I'm only one person, I cannot make a difference, so I might as well buy it", this eventually snowballs if every other people think the same way, leading to a third point, where sometimes due to lack of caring, a game which doesn't have quality to it in any capacity (or lower capacity) ends up breaking even. You can mainly see this issue in games like Warframe and ingame markets, where developers take advtange on selling expensive stuff, even it's not good, because everyone thinks they cannot make a difference for the better, so they migh as well invest their money in it, even if in turn damages the potential buying capacity of other people.

 

Also, about other games, kinda wrong. Bethesda didn't really provide anything, so I fail to see how they are much better at modding. The only reason for this spear headed modding attitude is because they used the same GameBryo engine that a million Korean MMO companies did back in those days, which the tools were leaked (some of them were literally open uploaded on SourceForge back the in day), and the reverse engineering formats were easy to...well, reverse (I mean some of them are literally uncompressed code, no hidding stuff behind a crappy little password in the .exe file and some of the original people that worked on GameBryo are the main providers of said tools), not to mention, some of them literally had just number changes (oh, cannot open Morrowind Nif file? Just change the header from version 1.2 to version 1.3, literally and voila, file opens now).

I mean people made some really decent sexy mods for Witcher and Dragon Age Origins with full on sexy-time, and even modded Dark Souls for new models, but fell out of it because life took over and they have jobs, and don't have the larger userbase to keep on working for it if one users stops working. Witcher already has the sexy-time in it, but people simply aren't interested in expanding on it, other then maybe the few mods that did for the first Witcher game (again, people simply having a life on a smaller userbase) plus the entire drama about Witcher 1 getting a Remaster which was split into a million different versions (EU vs. US vs. International vs. Patches vs. Expansion, etc), and Dragon Age Origins, while still having said mods really didn't expand outside of 'lolz, random buttsecks with giant men using armor as body condom' (again, smaller userbase) due to aformentioned issues.

Dark Souls is a sour point, because modding weapon model is actually easy, just the people who worked on it have been hired or are working now full-time jobs in Kickstarted and Patreon projects, of course they are not going to spend a minute more creating a suite to mod the game (especially if bans are involved a la DS2).

 

TL;DR: We can delve into a full on essay about loads of things, such as Socio-Economic status and time investment on how a game is presented to the userbase (ei; our game is worth 60$, but you will get million of hours of gameplay out of it - today young people go out less, invest in less social captical to digital capital, as seen by how much movies make in the NA market vs. Chinese on brand name and importtance, etc) to how it's Legacy and brand name is a selling point to get noticed in the modding world (Elianora, FadingSignal, Arthmoor all come to mind) to larger job prospect or personal finanaical gain (maybe even mental). I'm not even kidding, you can dissect to the smallest bone on why a shoddy, messy, unfocused, content and polish lacking game is able to make heads spin and still be a power-hourse in selling it's name, but it would be all meaningless since a large portion of the userbase won't care and never will.

 

 

Link to comment

 

 

The quality of the game doesn't matter, nor the company.

 

What matters is that any guy, the quest maker, the texture expert, the gameplay innovator, all have the tools to change the game their way. The games themselves can be lacking, or have huge flaws, be it technical or personal, but that doesn't change what can be done with it.

 

 

You've proven why this gives bethesda an excuse to be a shitty company. And why people should spend their money on half-assed products because quality doesn't matter any more. Lets just go ahead and rewards the F student the same rewards the A student gets.

 

Bravo.

 

 

Except if you actually read the post. you'd have also seen that there's no A student here.

 

Basically, our option is take the work of the F student or none at all. And Bethesda's more of a C student : It's far from perfect, but it's a passing grade. And given the work implied in making a game as big as Skyrim, I'll take the C student over making the work myself.

Link to comment
Guest endgameaddiction

Well, that's not good. Most people would agree with you, and frankly that's rather disturbing. Imagine if the rest of the world would apply this concept. You should go and buy a brand new car with missing break pads and broken GPS and accept it the way it is. And then go and buy after market products to repair and replace these things because no matter what, they sold you a decent product. Or buy the test driven car instead of the brand new one with 0mileage for the same price as a brand new one.

 

Funny when Guitar Center used to try to sell me the guitar off their wall after I told him I wanted a new one and tried to sucker me and say there weren't any left. I told another guy to check and he brought me a brand new one never touched before. Other guy wanted to sell me that shit for the price of a brand new one. 800USD. I should of complained about that to the manager.

Link to comment

Why? Because compared to most other games, they are easy mod-able. If Witcher 3 would be as "easy" to mod as Skyrim, there would be a lot of modders already working on that, but with the current state of CD-Projects "modding tools", even adding a little quest seems next to impossible. So, if it itches me to create a little quest, in this sad state and given the two choices, I either use Skyrim or don't mod at all.

Link to comment

 

The company Motto is "Why bother fixing the game, when the community will fix it for us?"

 

Well, the community can only fix the PC versions of their games, but the majority of their sales is on consoles, so that can't be their motto, it's probably just "Why bother fixing the game... if we can still sell it in millions?"

Link to comment

There are 2 reasons I see that the TES / Fallout games are buggy:

1- A game engine that has been patched and updated for decades.

2- How the game content is put together.

 

There isn't much that can be done about the first one other than learning to live within its limits. In Oblivion I could only get about 160 esp's running before the game engine hit its limit and would not load them all. Skyrim I can run with the max number of esp's without any issues (other than ones caused by mods themselves). Skyrim's stability isn't helped by the fact that there is a lot of unfinished content in it.

 

As for how the game content is put together with it being such a modular system and them having multiple people working on it at the same time it would be easy to do something in one place that can break something somewhere else but fir a single modder it makes it rather easy to create content. I can build a quest with dialogue and scripts rather quickly, my only problem is that there are features in Skyrim's CK that was disabled with the game engine update.

 

Fallout 4 has been very stable for me. I do use the unofficial patch but as of yet I have not had a single crash of the game with multiple play through's. I have not looked into building any mods as of yet as I am not sure what it is I want to do.

Link to comment

Well, that's not good. Most people would agree with you, and frankly that's rather disturbing. Imagine if the rest of the world would apply this concept. You should go and buy a brand new car with missing break pads and broken GPS and accept it the way it is. And then go and buy after market products to repair and replace these things because no matter what, they sold you a decent product. Or buy the test driven car instead of the brand new one with 0mileage for the same price as a brand new one.

 

Funny when Guitar Center used to try to sell me the guitar off their wall after I told him I wanted a new one and tried to sucker me and say there weren't any left. I told another guy to check and he brought me a brand new one never touched before. Other guy wanted to sell me that shit for the price of a brand new one. 800USD. I should of complained about that to the manager.

 

Again, you leave aside the main factor : There's no better moddable game than Bethesda games out there. There are better guitars in the world than the one on the wall, but there's nothing over Bethesda games.

 

We're not settling for the worst, we're settling for the best available.

 

Imagine a world where technology never made it past 4gb RAM. That would be far from optimal, as games like Skyrim would usually want a minimum of 6 (4 for the game, around 1.5 for windows itself), but in that alternate reality, 4gb is literally the best you can have.

 

And honestly, I don't know what's so wrong with Bethesda games. Sure, they're buggy, but in my opinion, a game can be worst than buggy. A game can have so many issues apart from bugs. Dark Souls 2 killed a big part of it's online features by making it work with souls rather than levels. Dragon's Dogma has quest chains that break for no damn reason. Kingdoms of Amalur has some of the most retarded tracking on attacks I've ever seen.

 

These are things that made the games much less enjoyable to me than some bugs that required me to open the console or load an earlier save. And while this is more of an anecdote, my mother's boyfriend has played Skyrim for easily 400 hours on PS3, and I've never heard him mention a bug, so they're not that apparent or game-breaking either.

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. For more information, see our Privacy Policy & Terms of Use