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Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered
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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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I'm suspicious, but overall more relaxed. Only wish other companies would be a gracious
Why? Bathesda is probably THE company that supports modders the most. People will still play skyblivion when it comes out.
Bethesda "supports" modders the way WOTC "supports" D&D content creators. They profit immensely off of other people's work without lifting a finger but also try to exploit those same creators for even more profit at every possible opportunity. Usually in such a way that it does permanent harm to an otherwise thriving community.
Starfield was the epitome of this. Rather than make a full game and let modders play around, they launched an empty, barren wasteland not-so-subtly made with extensive modding in mind. They figured that they don't have to put effort into delivering a good product since their fans will do that for them following release.
Id also add that they're creativitly bankrupt. They even said in interviews that they couldn't figure out how to make Starfield a fun game until a year or so before release.
They never really figured that out, actually.
Which is scary for ES VI. If they can't make todds "dream game" fun, what kind of souless weak sauce will the next game be?
At least Elder Scrolls has a foundation. Part of the issue with Starfield was that it was a new IP, with no real predecessors. For ES6 they can look at the past titles and see what players liked.
? So you're saying all modders do is ruin games then?
Of course they support modders, after all, someone has to finish and patch their unfinished games! 😄
I've always joked about that. Why do the work when a modder will do it for you. For free
No, that would probably be Valve. Several fan mods became full games in their own right (Counter-Strike, Black Mesa). Others were mods of non-Valve games (Team Fortress, Dota 2 (sort of)).
Yes. It is also the company that tried to charge for mods.
The millionaires don't need your to defend them.
Succeeded actually, they still sell paid mods.
I mean... if you actually care about the people who make your mods you SHOULD want them to be compensated. Even a simple quest mod or weapon mod is hours of work, if not days or weeks.
And while there is an argument as to whether Bethesda should receive a cut of that... people tend to not want to have that conversation about Valve and Steam so...
I'm pro-paid-mods, but at least the way it was rolled out the first time was pretty shit. The modders were left with a very small cut after Valve and Bethesda each got theirs, and Bethesda did basically no vetting of the content to make sure it wasn't stolen or malware or what have you.
The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.
For a release starting "from scratch" with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of "I don't care who uses this support library" and "I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain" and so forth.
Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was "close enough" to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.
I dunno. I won't at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are "defending modders" while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.
I remember one of the modders behind a UI overhaul talking about the response to paid mods, when users kept saying that a donation system was better, that in the entire time they'd been making the mod they'd only gotten like $50 in donations total.
Edit: And seeing modders use patreon now for support, and those mods still getting "pirated", I don't think the issue was ever about Bethesda or how they handled it.
Yeah.
There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with "game preservation". I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.
Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with "No DRM" to boot. And... overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.
Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for "video game preservation" without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the "feel" of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are "just" writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.
The most? Nah. Yes they're fairly friendly to modders, but there's been other cases of publishers going way out of their way to embrace a modder or mod group. I can think of one right now where a massive localization mod team actually had their work used as the basis of the official Western release of a game.
I'd argue they're the most vocal about it, but no. They release a half lobotomized set of tools, they keep making modder unfriendly changes to the games (recompiling the exe for no reason every time a new cc mod was released for Skyrim, which meant you needed to wait for skse to update too) including having load order broken at launch in Starfield. Also the many ways and attempts they've made at monetising mods with them getting a cut. Not to mention this new Oblivion game needs new tools to work with it and once again like with Skyrim VR, "modding is unsupported", though that could just be a decision made by the Devs since they're developed by third party studios.
I'd say Larian is actually pulling their weight tho, with bg3 modding going quite well and them frequently highlighting mods on their twitter. Also CDPR who looked at the most popular mods and added them to the base game as polished features.
Paradox games are another big one with mod support. Devs are constantly adding new variables and shit for modders to access.
What about gestures everywhere suggests that I should ever fully trust a company?
Huh?