Is Bethesda Trying to Kill Modding Community?

[showler]

Starfield might skew the numbers even more due to being on Game Pass as a day one release. Depends on Xbox ownership and Game Pass membership.

 

The most interesting question to me will be whether it still suffers the limitations of other Game Pass games or whether Microsoft will try to make it more moddable as a flagship title.

[InDarkestNight]

 

 

 

[Edit] Like I said, I dunno if Skyrim is like Fallout 4. But with Fallout 4, we can disconnect from the steam client by launching the game thru a 3rd party. Such as Vortex, or F4Se.

I would think that Skyrim can also do that thru vortex, and I BELIEVE there's a skyrim version of F4Se (tho I dunno what it's called).

So screw um, they can't update your game if you bypass the launcher that tries to force it.

[/edit]

Late reply, but that tactic doesn't actually work. Yes, there are ways you can keep your game from updating, but this doesn't help much. Mods for SE are only compatible with versions of the game that came out around the time of the version the mod author used to make it! If you keep your game from updating, you won't be able to use any mods coming out after a while, and if you do update you'll have to ditch most of your load order. That's why the SE community is divided between so many different versions of the game; they all stopped updating at different times and they can't change that without removing most of the load order they've become accustomed to.

 

That's the problem, every solution modders come up with bethesda counters in some way. This wasn't a problem when they first started doing this shortly after SE came out. Also, mysteriously mods backported to LE work completely regardless of what version you're running (then again, you'd probably be hard pressed to find someone not running the latest version of LE). With LE, you can run mods coming out now, or that came out on day one without issue. Bethesda is literally rigging the game so mods won't work if they're too far away from the version you're running. This tit-for-tat has been going on for years now. The most devastating thing they ever did was the forced AE update. Basically, the update force-installed some of their CC garbage (a bunch of cheap sub-par knock-offs of popular mods that they expect you to pay for) into everyone's games. In Skyrim, you have to worry a lot about compatibility. Every mod you install puts a limit on what other mods you install. Its why most skyrim youtubers suggest load orders now rather than individual mods. The specific things they force-installed through the AE update was particularly devastating. They literally conflict with 90% of the mods already released. They literally rendered thousands upon thousands of mods unusuable by that one update alone. The full AE version isn't much better. It has so much stuff installed you literally can't run anything at all. Worse yet, its not even a well designed load order. They just installed a bunch of random CC in it that aren't even all compatible with each other!

 

Yeah, there's people denying this all over the place for some reason. Honestly, I find it hard to believe they even mod the game. I mean, you can't successfully mod the game if you just ignore all this! You're constantly having to dance around bethesda's s#*!, and they always seem to have new stuff to throw at you. I've even seen them ridicule people for using mods, or using mods that are more than a few weeks old. Seriously. Frankly I suspect some of them are actually getting paid by bethesda to spread this misinformation. I know some years ago it was discovered on the steam community that most of the people refuting bethesda's actions didn't even own the game, which people discovered after some of them made these really ignorant comments like they had never played the game before.

 

Its overwhelmingly obvious they're doing this. Why is anyone's guess though. Personally, I gave up on SE years ago and have been playing LE since then, so I haven't personally been having to deal with this. I do admit though I miss rain occlusion, and there is a couple of SE mods I wish I could use (namely Take a Peek and that mod that came out years ago that adds in seasonal changes to the landscape). We did get Classical Lichdom backported somehow at least, and you can technically get rain occlusoin through ENB (even if you don't actually have an enb installed), of course the rain looks terrible but its something. Before SE everyone used a mod called Real Shelter, but the thing is long abandoned and literally doesn't work with the current version of TES5Edit. You have to downgrade to version 3.2 I think to run it. Even then, the patch it makes doesn't work anyway. It would appear all weather overhauls have been rendered incompatible with it due to their own updates. Oh well, not much we can do about it. If only there was a way to get enb rain to look decent, but there is not. True Storms seems to be the only thing that makes any real difference.

 

I really wonder how much longer Skyrim is going to remain moddable. LE certainly won't be supported on future operating systems. I've also seen people claiming even SE isn't working on windows 11. Bethesda has de-listed SE from steam, making it not appear in search results anymore. Someone has to just give you a link so you can get it. If you look up skyrim, all you'll get is AE, which as I said can't be modded. Even if you do somehow find something that doesn't conflict, last I heard they were released updates 4 times a day just to scramble the code so no mods could ever work. Its well established that if you play AE, you're not using mods of any sort.

 

To add insult to injury, if you talk about any of this most places people just off-hand brand you as a conspiracy theorist. Of course, in general everyone seems to default to that if you claim any entity is doing something insidious. Guess its over-compensation for the spread of actual conspiracy theories online. The internet just freaking sucks...

[showler]

With the exception of mods using the script extender most SE/AE mods don't care what version of the game you are using.

 

SE/AE hasn't had an update from Bethesda since before November of last year if I recall correctly and the update prior to that was six months earlier.

 

Myself and many many others run AE games, with the full CC package, with hundreds of mods.

 

It's possible your issue is that pretty much everything you said is wrong rather than over-compensation by anyone.

[InDarkestNight]

That was my experience last time I played SE. If it isn't true, then why couldn't I run any mod made more than a few months away from my version regardless of skse or not? For a time people were labeling their mod which version they were running just so people would have some idea before hand if they could run it or not. I admit though, when I stopped accepting updates just about every mod in existence required skse. I did contemplate playing without it to deal with the updates, but I found that would require me to remove my entire load order, and never make use of any mods outside of graphics mods pretty much (and even some of those required skse, in my case Vivid Weathers which I still use today). I think requiring skse is less common now, though that's probably a response to bethesda.

 

Either way, I don't want that cc garbage in my game. Its cheap and game-breaking, and I never felt inclined to use most of the actual mods they rip-off (minus frostfall, which I used so long it may as well be part of the vanilla game to me). I am NEVER playing the game without frostfall. I don't want bone wolves in my game, I don't want a crap-ton of game-breaking alchemy ingredients in my game, I want the models for draugr weapons from Heavy Amory instead of those cheap pieces of crap that seriously look like they were ported from oblivion. I admit I would like a fishing mod, but what they gave is by far the worst ever made. I would prefer it if art of the catch was fixed and finished. We did get Last Seed, which I never expected to see, so maybe there's hope?

 

Either way, LE runs far better on my machine than SE ever did. In particular I have this issue with SE where I crash to desktop upon walking up the stairs in dragonsreach. This would happen even if I didn't have a single mod installed, it persisted through multiple complete re-installs (and yes I made sure to manually delete all the files in both those folders that don't get removed), and trying SE again after re-downloading it before the AE update came in, the issue is still there and there isn't a single thing installed other than SKSE, which I installed so I could run the game without steam force-updating it. I wasn't too happy about that, but what can you do? Point is, no one could find a solution to my problem, and after a while people started accusing me of straight lying, which clearly didn't help my case. I can never play SE again one way or another. Also, I get far less crashes in LE for some reason. I've even managed to make my game (almost) entirely crash-free somehow. Sadly, most of my fixes wouldn't work in SE, so oh well. I'd still like to know though why I can't run any enb. I was running 4k paralax textures in SE and any enb I wanted. In LE, even the most performance friendly enb drops my frames by 10 to 20, which is enough of a slowdown to render my game unplayable. I was actually running 1k performance textures for some time LE seemed so weak to me. I run 2k now, though I still can't run any enb. Last time I tried I was simply trying to get rain occlusion in my game. Turns out, you can get the feature without installing an enb, though it makes your rain look awful. I've long accepted I'm just going to have to learn to live with rain and snow clipping through my campfire tents. I've tried to remedy it, but I just can't find a way. Sadly, Real Shelter, what I used in the past, doesn't work anymore. You have to downgrade your TES5Edit to 3.2 just to get it to run, and even then its incompatible with all weather overhauls including ones it worked with in the past due to them being updated. The patch now only does anything if you use 100% vanilla weathers, and who does that seriously? I just can't stand to play without True Storms at the very least. I even run it alongside other weather overhauls. Thankfully I got the patch for Vivid Weathers before it was deleted.

[xrayy]

With the exception of mods using the script extender most SE/AE mods don't care what version of the game you are using.

 

SE/AE hasn't had an update from Bethesda since before November of last year if I recall correctly and the update prior to that was six months earlier.

 

Myself and many many others run AE games, with the full CC package, with hundreds of mods.

 

It's possible your issue is that pretty much everything you said is wrong rather than over-compensation by anyone.

it is not entirely wrong. it is a shock if you installed the the ae version by accident the first time. that was true for sure if you played with skse and some dependent mods, some of them are in my opinion essential. the game was unplayable for me.

[codeinject202]

What you expect from a company that sells overpriced games, sells different versions , dlcs, sold mods that where already here in community, gave us fallout 76, microtransactions. ,spend majority of founds to be featured in "gaming" magazines and marketing and shaves their own studio leftist politics and ceo personal politics in their games at every chance they get? They have shown their face for a bit, Scruples. Would not surprise me.

Edited August 16, 2023 by codeinject202

[Guest deleted34304850]

What you expect from a company that sells overpriced games, sells different versions , dlcs, sold mods that where already here in community, gave us fallout 76, microtransactions. ,spend majority of founds to be featured in "gaming" magazines and marketing and shaves their own studio leftist politics and ceo personal politics in their games at every chance they get? They have shown their face for a bit, Scruples. Would not surprise me.

LOL! Clown.

[JimboUK]

What you expect from a company that sells overpriced games, sells different versions , dlcs, sold mods that where already here in community, gave us fallout 76, microtransactions. ,spend majority of founds to be featured in "gaming" magazines and marketing and shaves their own studio leftist politics and ceo personal politics in their games at every chance they get? They have shown their face for a bit, Scruples. Would not surprise me.

 

What are you on about? they don't do anything that's not common practice these days. And can you give us an example of these leftist politics? I've not noticed anything.

[showler]

Leftist politics in a post-apocalyptic game about evil corporations and right-wing military nuts destroying the world? How could they possibly...?

[xrayy]

funny :smile:

 

since july 2021 not only bethesda irritates with their business priorities and how they are performed. modding is just business in the meantime! minorities do not count, rights for decades are sacrificed for new business models and the lack to acknowledge minorities and to find and apply compromises has no priority. time runs...

even if a minority contributes a recognizable part of the used sources - it does not matter anymore. hobby is now business.

what happened in july 2021 is accepted but not forgotten - it never will be like any silent game (business) changing surprise badly communicated.

 

same happens with updates, microtransactions, forced online connections in story mode...

be happy with it! i will kick all that stuff in the future including rdr2 or starfield if necessary. gaming is fun, unreasonable drm and some business models is definitely no fun.

 

take part or leave - yes i`ll do if it begins to hurt and drm like "big brother" methods begin to rule my life. learn your lesson, keep a backup and be prepared for any bad surprise!