The Pending Death of Fallout 4 - Murder by Mod System

[Bernt]

Fallout 3 is by now some 8 years old. This year I reinstalled the GOTY on my new rig. I've managed to make it run -almost- flawlessly on a Win 10 setup. It took a little tinkering but I'm playing it using - by now- 143 mods. Some are new. While others are age old favorites that I picked from the stock on my harddisk. It will run for 2-3 hours before crashing. Sometimes even more.

Just my two cents :smile:

[Ethreon]

Fallout 3 is by now some 8 years old. This year I reinstalled the GOTY on my new rig. I've managed to make it run -almost- flawlessly on a Win 10 setup. It took a little tinkering but I'm playing it using - by now- 143 mods. Some are new. While others are age old favorites that I picked from the stock on my harddisk. It will run for 2-3 hours before crashing. Sometimes even more.

Just my two cents :smile:

Make sure you grab Bethie's new mod :D

[JaYmZeE311074]

Regarding Fallout 3 - if you turn it into TTW you'll be amazed at the stability/non crashing fantastic non stuttering performance you can gain.

 

I consistently found it freaky - waiting for the CTD that never came.

 

As for Fallout 4 dying by any method, mod related or otherwise - it's not going to happen - I'm sitting with a borked game where all my settlers have started to turn into Radroaches with names like Beatrix etc - I've just finished bashing my skull against the wall as after hours of trying to fix the problem I found https://community.bethesda.net/message/192298?tstart=0#192298 and realised that fixing this is so far beyond my talents that I'd be as well trying to claim I am the chosen one and should be worshipped by all - both have the same probability of happening.

 

Regardless, despite it's flaws I can still see awesome potential for FO4 - flawed or otherwise - this settler/settlement bug is a horror - I appreciate some people don't like the settlements, but I quite like it for a change of pace after battling and exploring for hours - it's like playing a different game for a while then I'm ready to go out and do more exploring and battling.

 

Worrying though wnen Artmoor mentions even the possibility of the death of the unofficial patch - I'm starting to wish I didn't search to see if anyone else was having settler issues!

 

Too many talented people give a thingy about these games for one reason or another - I have faith in the talents of the modding community to fix all the can with the tools at their disposal - here's hoping Bethesda step up.

 

I'm going to play Football Manager for a couple of weeks!

 

James.

[steve40]

I have enjoyed Fallout 4 immensely, especially with the application of Mods that I have been able to install to customize the game to my liking and to fix many issues Bethesda should have fixed.

 

Unfortunately, as time passes and mod authors stop updating their mods as the game is updated, many of the mods that have fixed, overridden, or hidden issues of Fallout 4 that irritate us, will become invalid thereby returning the things that irritate us to the game. Spending hours working on a settlement only to have it all undone with a game update is very infuriating and deters me from wanting to invest further time into something that will be undone again with the next patch.

 

This will cause many of us to stop playing the game which in turn will cause Bethesda to eventually stop updating the game. As a result, I think this game may experience a premature death.

 

While I really like the concept of the game and it's features, the crafting system, especially as it relates to settlement construction was very incomplete. For example, the vanilla construction of buildings and other items such as fences did not allow the elements to follow the terrain - especially fencing. Another irritating aspect of the settlement construction was the inability to fine tune the placement of items - that is, the snap feature was very limiting.

 

It also seems to me that there is a demand in the gaming world for such features as decorating. It would have been nice to have base features in the game that allowed for placement of items such as OC Decorator (by McFace) allowed.

 

I could go on but I think you get the point and many of you probably agree. I hope Bethesda considers this in the future for any games that work similar to Fallout 4. What could have been a very long running game could end up experiencing a premature death. While playing the game without mods has some level of satisfaction as far as the 1st person exploration and fighting, the vanilla crafting/settlement system is clearly under-developed.

 

Future games must figure out a way to be more friendly with the Mod System!

 

 

 

 

[gamingunderscoreogre]

*Sigh* This idea that mods stop working every time Bethesda releases a patch is completely wrong. My Radio Mod for Fallout 4 was released back in January and has never "broken" because of a Fallout 4 patch. Furthermore, mods don't just "die" or become "invalid" after some indeterminate period. My Knock Out Arrows mod for Oblivion still works just fine, despite it being about 10 years old. Might there be newer, better mods that do the same thing? Sure. But that's just how it happens - new mods (sometimes) replace older mods and the cycle continues.

 

What?!? Totally not my experience. Almost every patch my saves break and I have to start over. No amount of fixing I find from the Nexus forums helps. Except for my first play through with no mods, I have never finished a game. They always break before I can play that long. Since I am not alone in this I am wondering what world you live in?

[Ethreon]

 

*Sigh* This idea that mods stop working every time Bethesda releases a patch is completely wrong. My Radio Mod for Fallout 4 was released back in January and has never "broken" because of a Fallout 4 patch. Furthermore, mods don't just "die" or become "invalid" after some indeterminate period. My Knock Out Arrows mod for Oblivion still works just fine, despite it being about 10 years old. Might there be newer, better mods that do the same thing? Sure. But that's just how it happens - new mods (sometimes) replace older mods and the cycle continues.

 

What?!? Totally not my experience. Almost every patch my saves break and I have to start over. No amount of fixing I find from the Nexus forums helps. Except for my first play through with no mods, I have never finished a game. They always break before I can play that long. Since I am not alone in this I am wondering what world you live in?

 

How many mods are you using? ?What type of mods? I've been playing this with over 80 plugins for quite a while now, and only a handful of them break every now and then, and they're usually updated almost same day. I think you live in a world where you have no clue what you did in your game and imagine things.

[PoliteRaider]

 

What?!? Totally not my experience. Almost every patch my saves break and I have to start over. No amount of fixing I find from the Nexus forums helps. Except for my first play through with no mods, I have never finished a game. They always break before I can play that long. Since I am not alone in this I am wondering what world you live in?

 

There are some unavoidable problems with mods and new releases. If your mod relies on F4SE for example you'll need to keep it up to date, since F4SE isn't possible without building it around a particular version of the executable. There's also unpredictable problems, such as changing one element of the game without knowing that a later Bethesda release would change how it works. These are just going to happen, and it's part of the exciting world of modding the game while it's still in an active update cycle. Then there are glitches that may happen through rare bad luck, which is unavoidable with millions of different copies all working on slightly different systems.

 

It is worth noting that Bethesda have done WAY more with their patches than other gaming companies or they themselves have done with previous games. Things like entirely new gaming modes and additional content being released via a patch are extremely unusual. I'm grateful to Bethesda for the free updates but it does exaggerate the problems I've gone into above. To be fair, Bethesda released most of these patches during a time where they explicitly recommended against modding the game and had a specific block in place to prevent it from being possible without altering your .ini and hacking some .txt files that they asked you not to changed. They did warn us.

 

Otherwise though, patches shouldn't break mods. Mistakes will happen, mod authors aren't perfect and we do just do this for free as a hobby. If you're continually getting broken games, then you might need to be a bit more careful and selective about which mods you download. Read the bug reports page on the mods you use, wait until they're out of alpha to download and don't run too many at once or string together large chains of dependency. Watch some of Gopher's mod-clinic episodes for explanations about getting mods to work together. If you get the time, it's even worth learning a little bit about the creation kit and FO4Edit, since you can use them to fix some minor problems yourself.

 

I know it's easy for a mod author, who knows how mods work and can open them up to look for risk factors, to unfairly criticize the broad user base who don't have the information to know how to do that and can't afford the time to learn. However there's still a lot that you can do, just by being a little careful and restraining the impulse to mod your game too far in any one play-through.

[steve40]

 

 

What?!? Totally not my experience. Almost every patch my saves break and I have to start over. No amount of fixing I find from the Nexus forums helps. Except for my first play through with no mods, I have never finished a game. They always break before I can play that long. Since I am not alone in this I am wondering what world you live in?

 

There are some unavoidable problems with mods and new releases. If your mod relies on F4SE for example you'll need to keep it up to date, since F4SE isn't possible without building it around a particular version of the executable. There's also unpredictable problems, such as changing one element of the game without knowing that a later Bethesda release would change how it works. These are just going to happen, and it's part of the exciting world of modding the game while it's still in an active update cycle. Then there are glitches that may happen through rare bad luck, which is unavoidable with millions of different copies all working on slightly different systems.

 

It is worth noting that Bethesda have done WAY more with their patches than other gaming companies or they themselves have done with previous games. Things like entirely new gaming modes and additional content being released via a patch are extremely unusual. I'm grateful to Bethesda for the free updates but it does exaggerate the problems I've gone into above. To be fair, Bethesda released most of these patches during a time where they explicitly recommended against modding the game and had a specific block in place to prevent it from being possible without altering your .ini and hacking some .txt files that they asked you not to changed. They did warn us.

 

Otherwise though, patches shouldn't break mods. Mistakes will happen, mod authors aren't perfect and we do just do this for free as a hobby. If you're continually getting broken games, then you might need to be a bit more careful and selective about which mods you download. Read the bug reports page on the mods you use, wait until they're out of alpha to download and don't run too many at once or string together large chains of dependency. Watch some of Gopher's mod-clinic episodes for explanations about getting mods to work together. If you get the time, it's even worth learning a little bit about the creation kit and FO4Edit, since you can use them to fix some minor problems yourself.

 

I know it's easy for a mod author, who knows how mods work and can open them up to look for risk factors, to unfairly criticize the broad user base who don't have the information to know how to do that and can't afford the time to learn. However there's still a lot that you can do, just by being a little careful and restraining the impulse to mod your game too far in any one play-through.

 

 

All good in theory, but that would take EFFORT on behalf of the lazy passive-aggressive whinging user who doesn't know his head from his arse. Some people think they can just install mods like crazy without reading instructions or description pages and expect everything to just work, because Todd Howard told them so ;P

[greentea101]

Eeeh.. Can we let the doom scenarios die please?

 

I remember PC gaming dying years ago, even before the world ended back in 2012, so at this point I don't even care anymore.

[JaYmZeE311074]

 

 

 

What?!? Totally not my experience. Almost every patch my saves break and I have to start over. No amount of fixing I find from the Nexus forums helps. Except for my first play through with no mods, I have never finished a game. They always break before I can play that long. Since I am not alone in this I am wondering what world you live in?

 

There are some unavoidable problems with mods and new releases. If your mod relies on F4SE for example you'll need to keep it up to date, since F4SE isn't possible without building it around a particular version of the executable. There's also unpredictable problems, such as changing one element of the game without knowing that a later Bethesda release would change how it works. These are just going to happen, and it's part of the exciting world of modding the game while it's still in an active update cycle. Then there are glitches that may happen through rare bad luck, which is unavoidable with millions of different copies all working on slightly different systems.

 

It is worth noting that Bethesda have done WAY more with their patches than other gaming companies or they themselves have done with previous games. Things like entirely new gaming modes and additional content being released via a patch are extremely unusual. I'm grateful to Bethesda for the free updates but it does exaggerate the problems I've gone into above. To be fair, Bethesda released most of these patches during a time where they explicitly recommended against modding the game and had a specific block in place to prevent it from being possible without altering your .ini and hacking some .txt files that they asked you not to changed. They did warn us.

 

Otherwise though, patches shouldn't break mods. Mistakes will happen, mod authors aren't perfect and we do just do this for free as a hobby. If you're continually getting broken games, then you might need to be a bit more careful and selective about which mods you download. Read the bug reports page on the mods you use, wait until they're out of alpha to download and don't run too many at once or string together large chains of dependency. Watch some of Gopher's mod-clinic episodes for explanations about getting mods to work together. If you get the time, it's even worth learning a little bit about the creation kit and FO4Edit, since you can use them to fix some minor problems yourself.

 

I know it's easy for a mod author, who knows how mods work and can open them up to look for risk factors, to unfairly criticize the broad user base who don't have the information to know how to do that and can't afford the time to learn. However there's still a lot that you can do, just by being a little careful and restraining the impulse to mod your game too far in any one play-through.

 

 

All good in theory, but that would take EFFORT on behalf of the lazy passive-aggressive whinging user who doesn't know his head from his arse. Some people think they can just install mods like crazy without reading instructions or description pages and expect everything to just work, because Todd Howard told them so ;P

 

Whilst you by no means suggested all users are lazy, passive aggressive whinging illiterate, head-arse baffling manic installers of mods without looking because Todd Howard told them so I feel I have to say in defence of some users that I've not been a fan of Howard since "Happy Days" and even then I far preffered the Fonz.

 

Edit - just a small point regarding the supposed death of Fallout 4 & the community - my game was unplayable yesterday afternoon - I went away and slept for 8 hours, came back and apparently the dying community had sorted most of it out - I have empiracal evidence on the subject given that my settlers are no longer turning into Radroaches.