Hearthfire was inspired by riverside shack?!?!?!?!?!

[InDarkestNight]

I just watched a video about 'forgotten mods'. Half the mods on that list I wouldn't say are 'forgotten' (such as apocalypse, clockwork, and forgotten city to name a few). One of the mods it listed though shocked me. I brought up those buildable home mods you saw before hearthfire was released. What shocked me was that video claimed that hearthfire was directly inspired by those mods.

 

Now, I know the creation club is mainly just another tactic in bethesda's war against modding, but hearthfire came out long before that. Before, I thought their attacks on the modding community didn't begin until the release of SE, which is now clearly just an attempt by them to stop modding.

 

Now, I've always preferred the hearthfire homes (even though nobody else does for some reason). I've never really made any use of any of the base game homes other than breezehome. I've long thought that maybe I should actually give all these houses a try. Now, I have coincidentally found my justification for doing so. Knowing what I know now, I will NEVER USE A HEARTHFIRE HOME AGAIN. I will also never adopt (not that I did so much, I always found adopting in this game to be more of a nuisance than it was worth, partially because of that stupid force-greet you'll always be victim to every time you come home to drop off junk). I even just now decided to disable hearthfire just to see if I could get away with doing so. Turns out pretty much my entire load order requires it (only my graphics and audio mods are exempt it seems). So I guess hearthfire will always be part of my game even though I now despise it above all else. I have in the past actually thought about disabling dawnguard and dragonborn since honestly I rarely play through them anyway (I've only done dragonborn three times I think). Too many mods require all the dlc though, which is why I've never done so.

 

f*#@ bethesda and their relentless attacks on mods. Why would they even attack modding that early on? Its really made me question everything I believed before. Hearthfire was the first attack on modding, no SE. The war began long before modding really took off, and long before anyone suspected a damned thing. Bethesda can't be trusted for s#*!. I genuinely hope their next game is a flop and the company dies due to how they're treating their own fans. Maybe then we can mod in peace for the first time in who knows how long, and not have to worry about any more attacks on our community.

 

Guess now I'll finally be trying out Vlindrel Hall, and also be downloading a few extra mods I never saw any point in using due to hearthfire. I also wonder now if dragonborn was an attack on that mod to re-create solstheim? Yes, there was a mod to do that, but it was abandoned after dragonborn came out. It still got released in a form, due to dragonborn missing a lot of content that was in the bloodmoon expansion which the solstheim mod happened to have. So I guess that got saved in a form, and it is quite a nice mod. Its called 'the lost levels' if you want to go look at it.

 

edit: Oh, and I remembered something else: there's some files in this game labeled BYOH that are part of Hearthfire. So, they even blatantly signed their work indicating what mod it was meant to DESTROY. Wow, how brazen can they be? Does the bullshit survival mode have files mirroring Frostfall? f*#@ bethesda.

Edited July 7, 2023 by InDarkestNight

[showler]

Buildable homes were part of the Game Jam week Bethesda did in the week following Skyrim's release (along with adoption), so unless those mods came out really damn fast your whole post is nonsense.

 

Get a grip.

[InDarkestNight]

Checking on dates, Hearthfire was released between October 2012 and February 2013 (depending on the platform). Build Your Own Home was first uploaded in June 2012. Thus, Build your Own Home preceded Hearthfire.

 

The game jam was revealed to the public in 2012, though a lot of the footage actually originated in 2011. At the time that came out, I don't recall anyone seriously expecting any of that content to actually come out. Most of it was released in either the expansions or CC garbage. Some of it still hasn't become part of the game to this day.

 

As for dragonborn, honestly I have no idea if that project was even known to the public prior to The Lost Levels coming out. Either way, how could anyone have expected Bethesda to completely change the policy they had held through the entire series and let you visit a land that was accessible in a previous game? They would be like Bethesda now releasing their own expansion letting you explore all the other provinces, despite the Beyond Skyrim project being deep into development.

 

Granted, maybe build-able house and adoption mods were inspired by the Game Jam, though how they named the files still comes across as a slap in the face. Maybe they did or didn't know about the Solstheim project, but its still disgusting how they negated all the hard work that one developer did COMPLETELY FREE. Guess it just looks darker now after the SE non-sense. Its just so freaking obvious they're trying to stop all of us from using mods (at least ones they don't approve of, and AREN'T MAKING MONEY ON). Maybe the damage wrought by Hearthfire and Dragonborn served as inspiration for them, even if what happened wasn't what they intended.

 

Either way, I'll never buy a hearthfire home again. If I do Solstheim, it'll be with the Lost Levels mod, just to pay homage to that one modder Bethesda shut down after he spent months, maybe a year developing the thing all on his own.

[showler]

Can you please try to make some sense? Did Bethesda "shut down" the Solstheim project or did the modder abandon it because they realized Bethesda was already doing a similar project? There's a vast difference between those two things.

 

edit: Ah, a little bit of research indicates that the author of the Solstheim WIP mod abandoned it months before Dragonborn was even announced.

[InDarkestNight]

I was saying the project was abandoned after the expansion was announced. That's what the page for Lost Levels claims.

 

That said, how did you find out about when the solstheim project was actually abandoned? It was never uploaded, so there's no telling when it was actually abandoned. The guy who uploaded The Lost Levels isn't even the original mod author. No idea how they found out about it. Then again, I wasn't really into modding that early so I never would've seen such a project being announced.

[showler]

There's a Solstheim WIP mod from that time period available on the Nexus. Maybe you mean a different one. In either case Bethesda isn't responsible for them abandoning their projects.

[InDarkestNight]

That doesn't appear to be the same one. The Lost Level's page claims the mod author was called Ionisthebear. That project was called 'solstheim 4e', and it was abandoned AFTER dragonborn was announced according to The Lost Level's mod page. That mod author apparently used some of the assets in their 'northpoint' mod (their current name is ionis). The Lost Levels also claims that some of the assets were also used in another mod called 'the hunting grounds', but I can find no evidence of that mod.

 

So yes, the project was abandoned due to dragonborn. Bethesda did kill one person's hard work. Apparently the worldspace and multiple dungeons were already completely when dragonborn was announced and the project was abandoned. Maybe it was on purpose, maybe not, but it does seem strange that they would break company policy at that point in time and let players explore a previous zone. Even if it wasn't intentional, that still doesn't excuse their later behavior. I'm still playing with The Lost Levels, and some of the mods they killed with Hearthfire, even if they have some small issues like unvoiced dialogue and missing models (I already fixed that by making a patch for SiC anyway, turns out The Lost Level's Grahl has stats intermediate between the two versions in SiC, so it works out perfectly).

Edited July 8, 2023 by InDarkestNight

[showler]

The idea that Bethesda releasing content "kills" the work of a modder making similar content is absurd to the point of idiocy. It's not even an opinion, it's just wrong. The idea there was a company policy against revisiting areas is wrong. The idea that they are working to damage modding is wrong.

 

Again, not a matter of opinion, evidence shows that it is wrong.

 

Stop playing whatever you want to stop playing, but for someone who complained about the spreading of false information on the internet a few days ago you sure seem to love participating in it.

[InDarkestNight]

Let's see, shortly after SE came out the SKSE team reported that the updates bethesda was releasing that SEEMED TO DO NOTHING was attacking code skse needed to work. Bethesda claimed these updates were for CC downloads, even though everyone was getting them regardless of whether they had any cc installed or not. Also, why then were they attacking parts of the game that clearly had nothing to do with the cc? People responded to this by not updating their games. Bethesda responded to this by rigging the updates so you couldn't run mods that were made more than a few versions away from the version you were running. This fragmented the community due to everyone stopping their updates at different points in time. Mod authors were having to state what version they were running just so users could tell if they could run it or not. I myself couldn't run any of the latest mods coming out, completely regardless of what they were. They simply wouldn't do anything if installed. Same thing with old mods; I could only run mods made within a specific span of time. I quit at the point and switched back to LE (and not just because of bethesda, for some reason LE runs far better on my machine than SE ever did, besides NMM had mangled my data folder beyond repair, which is why I switched to mod organizer for LE). Years later, bethesda FORCE-INSTALLED CC TRASH INTO EVERYONE'S GAME WHETHER THEY WANTED IT OR NOT. Some other players all over the internet found that the specific pieces of CC they installed CONFLICTED WITH OVER 90% OF MODS RELEASED. They also apparently launched their most damaging attack against skse too at the time. Then on top of all this, they delisted SE from steam and are to this day trying to force everyone to play with AE, which clearly can run no mods because of the sheer number of cc trash burned into the thing. Even freaking Legacy of the Dragonborn, which vehemontly insisted for years that they would never support CC, were forced to do so just so people could keep enjoying the mod they had put a monumental effort into. All modding projects, including Odyssey and Beyond Skyrim then declared that their mods would only be available for SE, because patching them to work with AE's force-installed garbage was simply unfeasible. Since then the SE nexus has been flooded with mods that only work if you DIDN'T accept the AE update for SE. People who did have found themselves unable to mod the game anymore, which resulted in an exodus back to LE. Meanwhile, mod authors started flooding the SE nexus with pre-AE mods to protest what Bethesda had just tried to do. Bethesda responded to this by pointing to the SE nexus to refute that they had stopped mods from working, completely glossing over that the SE modding scene does not work with AE, and in fact is fundamentally a zombie-fied modding community. They're making mods for a game that no longer exists, not the game that replaced it.

 

This is not a conspiracy theory, the evidence for it is overwhelming. To disprove it, you'd have to explain why Bethesda keeps doing things that serve no purpose beyond stopping mods from working, and why they keep responding to everything the modding scene does to work around this. Modders, both authors and users, are engaged with a war with bethesda just so they can express themselves and play the game the way THEY want to. You straight can't even mod SE if you don't take into account what bethesda has done to it.

 

Just because someone says someone is doing something insidious doesn't mean its not real. People do in fact do shady things from time to time. And yes, the gaming industry as a whole is doing shady things. A recent study found that a huge number of game companies were paying for good reviews, like the company did for Shadow of Mordor. Even small indie companies are doing this. I've also found a number of games where youtube is flooded with videos of people clearly playing an altnerate version of it. Oh, years before that there was the Trump guy for Hearthstone. He kept uploading videos of himself playing the game showing it was possible to win without paying the ungodly amounts of cash needed to get all the cards. As he uploaded more and more runs of this though, something was clearly wrong. He kept consistently getting the best cards in his first pack, even though that should be highly unlikely. Looking at his videos, it was clear he was playing with modified odds. The chances of getting one of the legendaries that were actually usable was 1/40. His odds were 1/4. Around that time it also came out that he was actually an EMPLOYEE OF BLIZZARD who was commissioned to make these videos to try and mislead the public on pay-to-win aspect of the game. Keep in mind here, I'm just talking about gaming companies. There's entities out there doing things far, far more serious than harrassing and misleading gamers. Oh yeah, and there's also the game Smite. Years ago they admitted that all their matches were rigged. Well, they didn't put it that way. What their system did was essentially the reverse of what ELO is supposed to do. If you had a high elo, the system would team you up with allies who had a low elo, and players who had one exponentially higher than yours to make you lose to bring your elo down. If it fell below a certain threshold, it would do the reverse to make you win. They claimed this system was meant to make sure everyone had a winrate of 50% so that they would feel confident. People tried to talk reason into them, pointing out how this was causing a culture of elitism because everyone without an exception thought they were a pro due to their winrate being 50% regardless of their actual skill. It also made matches unfair. Playing the game myself for YEARS, I only ever had 2 games that were actually a fair fight. All others one team was clearly helpless against the other, in my favor as often as not. And the reason I know all this was happening is because I witnessed it myself, and I was in fact one of those people trying to talk reason into the developers. As if that wasn't bad enough, now they're claiming that in reality the whole thing was actually a conspiracy theory conjured up by noobs, even though in reality they themselves proclaimed it and the first people to get suspicious were the ones playing ranked because in ranked you could actually see the elo of everyone involved. Of course, to be fair this was years and years ago so they may have changed their matchmaking system since then, but it still doesn't excuse them for claiming what they were doing, which they fully admitted to back then, was actually a conspiracy theory and everyone who believed it were sub-human noobs. I have no idea how that game is even still online, though last I heard its not doing too well these days (the game now has far too many characters, as before there's no resemblence of balance in the thing, when I played the developers openly admitted they didn't do anything with the reports they got, and it clearly showed, the Smite community seriously makes the Dota community, or any other moba, look friendly and caring and considerate).

 

Its what I don't get about conspiracy theorists. A lot of psychologists are speculating people turn to conspiracies to give themselves a feeling of control over the world. That makes sense on the surface, but when you think about why then do they deny things that are real? They deny climate change, gerrymandering, that the far right is racist and fascist, that the gender pay gap exists, you name it. If they're looking to conspiracy theories to fill some psychological need, then why are they insisting on things that clearly make no sense while denying things that are real? Wouldn't they be better off whining about things that actually are happening? Maybe if they did so things would actually go somewhere. Then again, shaming Trump and white supremacists throughout Trump's presidency never accomplished anything, and they aren't a freaking multi-million dollar company!

 

Of course, I would guess people denying insidious things that are real is due to overcompensation for dealing with conspiracy theories. Basically, if anyone says some powerful entity is doing something not very nice, they just default to assuming its a conspiracy theory, to hell with evidence. Such lovely times we're living in. As if what's going on politics isn't enough, we can't even find an escape from stark-raving madness in our freaking games. I seriously wonder at time why I even bother to turn my computer on, let alone go online anymore.