Discussion: Will Starfield Have Good Modding Support?

[QuickTwist]

I was watching a video that has over 200K views (released 2 months ago) about rumors about Bethesda and one of the things that the person said is that Starfield is not as easy to mod as other Bethesda main titles (like Skyrim and Fallout 4). This does not make sense to me. Not only is Bethesda coming out with a new version of the creation kit, but it has not even been released yet so we have no idea of its capabilities. Also, it strikes me odd to say that Starfield will not have as good of modding support as these other titles by the simple fact we already have some similar kinds of mods that took a long time to come out with for the other titles (like StarUI compared to SkyUI).

But what do you think? Is your experience similar to this person from the video, or is it more in line with my thoughts? BTW, I did not get into Skyrim modding until years after its release so take what I say with a grain of salt.

The person from the video says some interesting things, but mostly it just seems like rumor and speculation (with some exceptions in the video). Here's the link:

 

[HeyYou]

Basically, it's some writer filling space in a column. I agree with you on this, we don't have the CK yet, so, its no surprise (or, at least, it shouldn't be) that mods are rather limited at this point. There is still a fair bit of data to decode..... we simply don't know what it does. Once the CK drops, I expect to see some REALLY cools mods.

[LarannKiar]

Landscape/worldspace modding is usually the most questionable part. Quests, items, NPCs and most game forms haven't been changed as much so they'll be editable in the CK. Content that requires automated processes to build/generate and licensed third party engines are unlikely though. (Despite Havok, on which Starfield highly depends on, has been purchased by Microsoft in late 2015).

Certain aspects of Starfield's menus will be editable in the CK too I'm sure, due to the cell renderer..

As far UI modding, interface (.swf) files are Adobe Flash files, Adobe Animate CC can be used for those. BGS relies on Scaleform GFx to communicate with it. (Both Flash and Scaleform are discontinued actually).

If I have to guess, I'd say with proper modding support Starfield can become more popular as many of its elements act as a "shell" one can fill up with content. Technically speaking, the game has a lot of potentional for modding already.

Edited February 23 by LarannKiar

[fraquar]

I can't see Starfield becoming more popular.   

They'd literally have to do a 180 with their planned DLC from what they delivered with Starfield.

Beyond that there is nothing compelling about this game that screams "we need a sequel".

I mean what planet would it be on?    The ones you visit have nothing on them - and there are a billion of them......

Modders can only fix that for this version - Bethesda needs to create the glue that would tie future installements together.

[LarannKiar]

At this point, BGS must have realized they can't impress many players by a recursive/random content generator to "populate" most of the game world. I guess on paper it seemed more.. appealing. (Though I still can't see how making the frequent open/close of fully enclosed menus part of the gameplay or the travel from load screen to load screen design could look well even on paper).

A sequel of Starfield.. hmm I was actually thinking about a Starfield 2.0, in which they use their updated code to develop a more "traditionally designed BGS game" most were probably interested in. Needless to say, those games granted BGS that award winning creators' place in the industry.

Edited February 29 by LarannKiar

[HeyYou]

It isn't so much the 'procedurally generated' content that is the issue though. (at least, not in my observation) It's the small pool of POI's that is used to populate those worlds..... This leads to a repetitiveness (is that even a word?) that is just way to obvious. This is one of the things that I believe is going to be on of the largest categories of mods. New POI's to expand the pool. Even variations of current POI's, with different enemies, in different places, and different loot, would help.

I could see an 'open planets' mod, to the extent that you could manually fly to any moon/planet in a system, without a loading screen..... But, I don't see being able to do much more than that to reduce loading screens..... Just won't work with this game engine.

[LarannKiar]

I just wrote a quick xEdit script to count how many worldspaces have the form component to be used by the content manager. It returned

"Number of Worldspaces with BGSPlanetContentManager property = 357"

Don't how many of them have "special" conditions but their number is surprisingly large.

I think when one travels to a new location they seek to discover something new, unlike when revisiting (intentionally) an already known location. In other BGS games the player can get to choose when to revisit a discovered location and when to "explore the unknown", but not in Starfield (this is kind of ironic). However, when the static worldspace runs out of undiscovered area in other games the player can only visit known locations. I guess this was that the designers originally wanted to improve upon. The problem is that... game world = ~90% repetitive/random + ~10% unique. One ended up on the wrong side which inevitably caused the other one to end up on wrong side too.. But I guess how much the system was used to "solve" the conflict between ~1600 planets / limited development time is another topic... As for me, I don't know why they thought this needed to be improved at all.. they made pretty good locations in the past. Locations that many players obviously "didn't mind" seeing back, even to this day. So... hadn't the last 10 years of the popularity of their games proven that static worldspaces are fine? Though I have to admit, native support for both static and dynamic worldspaces have more possibilities for landscape/location modding.. in theory.

 

Custom POI and even unique locations like Sonny Di Falco's Island will be popular in my opinion too, if the CK proves to be a proper API for them.

Personally, I'd be more insterested in creating unique ones (which are actually quite similar to POI locations, just not added to the planet content manager to be randomly generated based on conditions).

Edited March 1 by LarannKiar

[QuickTwist]

Just a thought, but what are the chances that some mod could come out and set in stone what every location is without the auto-generated stuff? Like the game would load once (like the way shaders do) and then, poof! You have your non-auto-generated content!

Of course, I have no idea if this is even possible at this point. Just a thought.

[HeyYou]

3 hours ago, QuickTwist said:

Just a thought, but what are the chances that some mod could come out and set in stone what every location is without the auto-generated stuff? Like the game would load once (like the way shaders do) and then, poof! You have your non-auto-generated content!

Of course, I have no idea if this is even possible at this point. Just a thought.

Imagine the size of your save file, having to remember 1000 plus planets, and all the data that goes with them.

[LarannKiar]

8 hours ago, QuickTwist said:

Just a thought, but what are the chances that some mod could come out and set in stone what every location is without the auto-generated stuff? Like the game would load once (like the way shaders do) and then, poof! You have your non-auto-generated content!

Of course, I have no idea if this is even possible at this point. Just a thought.

One would need to reverse engineer everything involved first which currently seem impossible. Basically, one needs to 1) force the game to save all relevant world data during traveling to external files (save games probably won't do), 2) disable the content creator, 3) load (build) everything from the external files at runtime.

Unfortunately, even if one finds a way to accomplish this, the external "world data files" would contain many instances of the same vanilla POI locations (linked to the same interior cells too like "Deep Mines") so it won't be able to help with the repetitiveness alone.