The future of the Fallout 4 scene.

[zanity]

When the game that was NOT Borderlands 3 bombed, Gearbox suddenly discovered a new love of the Borderlands Franchise in its original genre form. But Gearbox is a small company with a game every couple of years or so- so what could they do. Bethesda is a massive corporation with the planet's richest 'game daddy', and can afford to lose interest in a once billion dollar franchise like Fallout, after an horrendous misstep.

 

So I think for the longest time going into the future, our scene will remain Fallout 4 + mods. Sadly Fallout 3 and NV, good as they are, are way too primitive visually for most people today.

 

Nothing on the horizon looks like adding to the moddable world of Skyrim and Fallout 4.

 

So, in this forum (not Skyrim) it is a question of what can keep us coming back to Fallout 4. One factor is that many people who play the game are maybe only now getting PCs that can run the game well. Which itself will breath new life into the game.

 

A lot of our best modders are now working for Beth's Creation Club and Atom Store (and incidently are the lowest paid coders and artists in the AAA game biz- free modders to microtransaction modders is a lousy career path- it you want to get into the paid game biz, please do it properly and get a proper wage).

 

However the Nexus modding scene continues, and I think the current fiasco (new vanilla Beth vision vs old heavily modded Fallout 4) speaks volumes for why the Nexus existed in the first place.

 

Yeah a lot of people do NOT mod- especially when you take into account console sales- but then again look at the download figures for the most popular mods here.

 

The pity is that Fallout:4 is now disowned by Beth (save for 'updates' breaking the .exe in order to try to persuade people to give in and use paid CC mods). I've been using Rimworld ('dwarf fortress' genre) and that game has mods and is still supported by the devs. Same as with so many interesting titles on Steam.

 

But Fallout:4 will see no more DLCs. Today it is what it always will be mods aside, like current Skyrim. So the question is "what will keep us playing?". Or "what will keep modders interested in still making new mods?".

 

After a LOT of years, the Total Conversions finally start to appear. NV has just got a big one, and I think we get 'Miami' soon as well. But I must say I've never been a fan of TCs. They are amazing work- and amazing co-ordinations between a lot of modders (many of whom come and go in the project during its long gestation)- but I always feel they are a 'step too far' in the sense that they never come close (in my opinion) to an official major DLC. There are some things best left to a pro development environment- just as there are some things modders can and do a LOT better than paid Beth employees.

 

Too much complexity (especially without access to the studio tools Beth uses for their own more complicated work) shows (to me) too much of the limitation of TCs.

 

OTOH, the modded 'followers' of Skyrim (a certain infamous blue cat) and the iNPC team have done insanely good work in inserting complex new content into the existing world space. If you haven't heard of INTERESTING NPCs, google it- the team has place holders on the Nexus, but their project, like Sim Settlements, really lives off the Nexus.

 

I was playing the Nukaworld DLC, came across amazing new content near the entry to Nukaworld, and then realised it was the free iNPC mod, and not from the Nukaworld DLC.

 

A lot of people here might naively say "but aren't the better modders waiting to work on the dumpster fire called Fallout:76 when it introduces 'private' servers and 'mods'?". Well you may think that when FO:76 goes F2P is a few months, that will turn its fortune around- but actually the F2P move for a game that once had a AAA price tag is but the final death rattle for the title. That ex-Epic guy's self-financed disaster called 'lawbringers' refused to go F2P for this very reason, and the guy just cancelled the game outright instead- he could have wasted another few months as a failed F2P, but he understood a bad rejected game is just that.

 

And the 'private' servers are, In Todd's definitive own words, servers you'd rent from Zenimax's server farms- NOT your own PC. And 'modding' means MICROTRANSACTION PAID 'mods' from the Atom store you'd run on your rented server. Again in Todd's explicit words.

 

So if Fallout:4 modders are thinking of, and working on designs for Fallout:76- unless they intend to be (very low) paid workers of Beth, those plans are not going anywhere.

 

Fallout 4 cannot get any type of multiplayer modded into the game either. The much simpler Skyrim has a promising co-op mod that never releases.

 

The 'nuke your world' gameplay of Fallout:76 could be added to Fallout:4 (in a generic copyright free way) since FO:76 simply adds a rad-storm effect to the nuked region, but otherwise doesn't even singe a blade of grass, or cause one leaf to fall. The spawns change in the nuked area, as does the loot- all easy to do in fallout:4. It's just I don't see the point. Oh collecting/decoding the launch codes and having nuke launch bases to raid is cool- but the aftermath in Fallout 4 would be rather naff.

 

But one did have the option to launch a nuke strike in Fallout 3, and launch a missile in NV.

 

Yet I've always noticed that story mods are NOT (iNPC aside) common in Fallout 4 like they were for earlier Beth games. Whereare the great fallout 4 followers like the brilliant Skyrim followers? All those mods that added tons of new dungeons to Fallout 3 and NV.

 

I always felt that with Fallout 4, Beth set a lousy example (storywise) that modders kinda adopted. So visual mods Fallout 4 has in spades- and objects for your (pointless) settlements, and clothes and bodies. But Fallout 4 never seemed to inspire new stroy-telling. Even with iNPC, it is no where as inspired as iNPC is for Skyrim.

 

Of course fighting felt like it had a point in Fallout 3/NV/Skyrim, but not Fallout 4- fallout 4's story-telling is strangely broken and unsatisfying. Of course, that's down to the game having clearly at least THREE attempts at story design before release, and the version released ending up with the 'best' of these three different ideas mangled together. The whole human synth thing being the major downer that I feel uninspired a ton of would be story modders.

 

It's like Fallout 4 needs a grand story reboot that different mods try to serve, rather than having mods try to 'fix' the original unsatisfying and boring narrative. Not a reboot that changes the world physically (like a total conversion) but one that re-interprets the existing game world. The 'WHY' of it.

 

Otherwise we dip back into our heavily modded Fallout 4 to get our fix of something other games do not currently offer- but each time, even with visual improvements, it just becomes more and more familiar, and less and less mentally challenged til, before we know what has happened, we haven't launched the game in many months.

 

Imagine if Sim Settlements served a new meta story that explained the whole world-space narrative of Fallout:4. A fella can dream. Without such I know I'll end up entering the same building one time to many, hear the same dialogue one time too many, shoot the same things one time too many, and then, sadly, it will be 'game over'.

 

[PhanomGames]

Fallout 4 doesn't have as many good systems as NV/FO3, which is why there's a smaller modding scene with less content being created.

 

Just hope starfield doesn't continue to remove RPG elements, I'm worried it won't even have on-foot travelling.

[Rasikko]

^I think that's largely because papyrus is just a stripped down version C++ that people can barely do anything with. While Fallout 3/NV used ObScript. That and, the CS was a bit more user friendly despite actually having less features.

[sinlessorrow]

At this point the FO4 modding scene is essentially dead.

[montky]

"the future of the FO4 modding scene"

well, check out folks like MarkyRocks, ThermalTakeAORUS etc...

I want you to ponder for a moment, "AGI-assisted mod making".

Imagine, how that might alter how accessible mod-making is for folks...

 

as long as folks wish to continue making mods,

mods will form.

 

 

 

more likely our computers will fail, or we will get bored,

before folks stop modding a few games.

FO4 is one of those potentially.

 

though, to be fair,

we already have a lotta lotta mods for FO4.

I mean, there's a holographic orrery,

and there are new lands cells for those 'planets',

such that it's possible to procedurally iteratively 'dungeoneer'

across planets within the broader Fallout multiverse...

 

some folks made

rebijectable readable books,

so there are literally kahjillions of books you can read in-game.

 

Better Regionalizations -

languages, built-environment, structures etc,

means you can experience stuff like the MesaVerdean Dzhonglas,

and all kinds of other decor.

You can learn a different language or several, using VR/AR environments...

 

 

 

We can continue to mod the game indefinitely in theory;

as was asked in prior "when is a game dead" threads;

I asked, what is the difference between 'analog' 'iconic and culturally-significant" games such as Chess, Go, Dominoes etc.

and could there be a 'digi-equivalent' of those?

- are games such as FO4 or similar open-world sandbox games, potentially similarly important like Chess etc?

or, is that something that only RTS's etc can be?

 

I mean, whole schools exist for some analog games.

Chess used to be played in the ancient olympics and was regarded highly

track and field all-rounders could run a marathon and then win at chess, philosophical rhetoric etc,

with very little time for recuperation.

Chess has been around for ~4000+ years, backgammon even longer.

[taryl80]

Since the beginning of Fallout 4 some people think that the FO4 modding scene is dead. We can take that for real... Or we can just look at the mainpage of nexusmods.com and see that this game has more mods as Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim Special Edition -_-.

 

Some people still modding Morrowind guys. Let us talk about that in maybe 20 years :|.

 

Btw. some dlc sized mods for Fallout 4 are in the oven, but mods like that can't be made in a day and Fallout: Miami is imo just the most noticeable of them at the moment and as always: If someone miss any kind of particular mod, he can learn to mod and build it by himself. There is no holding back :).

[Moksha8088]

At this point the FO4 modding scene is essentially dead.

That is both blasphemy and untrue. Mods are the only thing that will help us survive this long winter brought on by the Monetization Monster.

 

Dream Mod: Something cooked up by Thuggysmurf and Team, along with Kris Takahashi and Seddon.

[Zzyxzz]

At this point the FO4 modding scene is essentially dead.

 

 

Oh, it's dead. Didnt recognize that. Thanks for pointing that out! Now I can finally stop making mods for Fallout 4! And I was already working on two new mods, lol.

[Rasikko]

Some people still modding Morrowind guys. Let us talk about that in maybe 20 years :|.

 

Haha, Morrowind is probably now older than most of the mod users have been alive.

 

I look at it from different point of view. Modding for Fallout 4 isn't dead. It wasn't "dead" out of the box either. The fanbase is just smaller than Bethesda's flagship series(I feel like they want to abandon it for other IPs though). It's not fair to expect the modding scene to be omgbbq huge.

 

Furthermore, Bethesda put the lifeline of these games, post release, in our hands. When people complain about lack of mods, all I can say is the CK is just a download away. People are trying though, plenty brand spanking new modders have shown up with questions in the CK forums.

[SKKmods]

At this point the FO4 modding scene is essentially dead.

 

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