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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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A company fares to continue providing support and free updates at the same time other companies are shutting down servers and pulling games out of people's libraries, yet haters still find ways to complain.
The game in question is Fallout 4. It's a single-player game with zero online components.
Just like with Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, as well as Fallout 3 and New Vegas mod support is an actual feature of the game with officially released tools and documentation for creating mods.
Given that, the fact that mod support was a major selling point for the game (IMO the only selling point), and the age of the game, it would have been better if Bethesda stopped supporting the game altogether rather than push updates with no meaningful changes that break a feature that for some people is the primary feature of the game.
Aside from F4SE which will just need a minor update which mods do you think are going to irrecoverably broken by this update?
Based on my modding experience?
Fucking everything beyond simple reskins.
The mod scene is a jury rigged house of cards slapped together by the kind of people that get mad that they aren't allowed to pull out the foundations at will.
I would strongly disagree that modding was a major selling point considering that it released for consoles without mods for the same price.
What kind of masochist buys Bethesda games on a platform that can’t support mods? Dafuq
Most people.
Also the majority of people even on PC play vanilla. When will people who mod understand this. MOST PEOPLE DON’T MOD. That’s not even counting the people who did mod when they had the time to fuck around with stuff like that and no longer do, like myself.
I fell into both.
Bought Skyrim on PS3 a few months after it came out. Had an absolute blast and it immediately became a favorite for my wife and me. The load times were terrible and there were bugs, but the bugs were usually just funny visual glitches. The DLC came out and was fantastic - I still wish they released more.
Eventually built a new gaming PC. My wife really wanted to try the earlier ES games so we bought the physical PC pack with all of them in it. The load times were way better with an SSD. The graphics and frame rate were way better. At that point patches had fixed a lot of the bugs.
I tried some mods and found that most of them aren't even worth the time it takes to browse for. 80% are just adding softcore porn that ruins the aesthetic. Another % are shit posts like replacing dragons with a model of Thomas the Tank Engine or replacing bears with Shrek- funny for maybe 30 seconds but not worth actually playing. 5% are other weapons that are just overpowered. The I'd guess about 4% are decent UI and graphics mods, some of which have since been rendered obsolete by newer editions. Probably <1% is actually good new content that I'd want to play, but even most of that isn't as good as the base game.
It's a similar situation with tabletop homebrew. Everyone and their mother thinks they have some great ideas, but in practice they usually aren't as fun as the main product. It's hard to compete with a corporation spending millions of dollars to pay people to work things out.
Add in how annoying it is to mod and how, even without any updates, it tends to break things. Skyrim has a reputation for being a broken and buggy game, but in my experience on multiple platforms (I eventually got the Switch and PS4 versions too lol) it's really pretty solid. Back in the day when it was common to see posts complaining about how buggy the game was, 90% of the time you could dig into it and find that the OP was using a crap ton of mods.
Yeah wow who would do such a thing? Certainly not the ~30 million people that bought non-pc copies of Skyrim, right?
What a cringe ass "pcmr" douchebag comment.
The console versions totally have mod support, albeit limited. The most important mods like the unofficial patch are there.
Breaking changes to public APIs are generally considered a faux pas
I haven't been part of the modding scene for a while now. But most likely, none of their public APIs were changed. Naturally, I could be wrong since I didn't read the patch notes, but that's typically not where it goes wrong.
Many modder, and I mean many, do not find Bethesda's provided APIs to be sufficient for their goals. So people extend those APIs further with their own libraries and scripting engines. Then other modders build on top of that extensions. These work against the binary code of the game and contain a list of pointer addresses in binary. So even the smallest changes to the game binary ends up making all of these extensions to stop working.
These mods have a headache anytime any kind of updates are pushed. It's an API thing, but it's not the API Bethesda made.
It's amazing the amount of "developers" that aren't aware that semantic versioning is a thing.
I don't know why people keep defending Bethesda. None of their games that got updates after a long time of nothing improved in any meaningful way. Its a single player game riddled with bugs and after the patch guess what it will still be. If they actually improve the performance that's great since 4 was pretty rough, but why now? Maybe I'm just beating a dead horse armor though...
They just should let users choice to use older version, like concise games that strive on mods do. Like Rimworld or ONY
Th old games are available if you use the steam depo to download the versions of the game you want.
Tell me the game version you want, and I can give you the exact info you need to get it in less words than it took to write this reply.
I've written a couple guides on it in the past, because I get very particular about my gaming experiences sometimes. Most people are oblivios to this option because it is rarely discussed anywhere. However, unless I am mistaken, every update the developer uploads is forever archived and accessable to anyone who owns the game through Steam.
That said, I wish they were all just available in the dropdown list like you provided. It would make things so much more simple.
They updated Fallout 3 a few years ago to remove the whole games for windows live bullshit.
Fallout 1 and 2 also got updated in 2013 to be playable in modern computers.
Updated OG doom as well
I'll take gfwl removal but it should have been a crime to implement it in the first place. The current m$ integrations can get fucked too. If you have telemetry blocking via pi hole or similar you can't even sign in. In the case of the game grounded, it would fail to even provide the login screen and just return to the main menu without dropping any sort of error code or message.
I use pihole and I don't have any of the issues you describe. I played grounded the other day in fact with no problems.
I've asked the skywind community for their view on ~~it~~ a recent Bethesda update that screwed things up for Skyrim mods, and my takeaway was that it was basically a mixed bag, some good and some unfortunately not so good. Maybe they're just in the habit of playing extra nice with Bethesda, but maybe there's nuance below the surface.
I mean... You can just go read the patch notes to find the things they've fixed and improved. Going from playing the original Skyrim to the Anniversary edition is similar to what a lot of other companies would try to call a re-make.
And with the horse armor- Todd Howard has since claimed in interviews that was priced that way due to pressure from Microsoft. It was the early days of experimenting with online digital content distribution. It was the time when most phones still didn't have touch screens, but had some level of Internet connectivity. People were paying $1-$5 for low-quality 30 second music clips to use as ringtones, or UI skins. I don't think this has been corroborated by anyone else, but it certainly makes sense.
Yeah I really hate how gamer culture has changed. It’s non stop bitching. Yeah there can be bugs in games, it happens. Lmao you telling me there were no bugs in the games I bought on disk twenty years ago and there was no infrastructure to digitally update them? I’ve got boxes of old pc games that I can use to prove this is just something that happens.
People act like there are nothing but bad releases anymore but 23/24 have had phenomenal titles. I’d say this is a great time for the industry as long as you’re not stupid enough to buy micro transactions and $150 collectors editions Lmao
Twenty years ago games didn't cost over £100 sometimes and weren't full of micro transactions to suck more money out of you
I’ve never paid full price for a game. Not in a very long time. And I don’t buy transactions. 🤷
Depends on the game for me, if it's indie I'll pay full price, helped by the fact indie games tend to be cheaper
Yeah I guess I should revise my statement. I haven’t paid the full 60-70 price for AAA game in a very long time.
Indie games seem to be priced more fairly, most of the ones I’ve bought tend to be 20-25 dollars.
And I’ve never bought any kind of special edition, unless it’s an older game and it comes with all the dlc bundled, like oblivion GOTY edition or something.
But I’m also a /r/patientgamer so I don’t really see a reason to buy something just because it’s new and shiny, unless it’s some kind of multiplayer. But most of them have become such a quick burn where the player base drops after a year when the hype train moves to the next stop, I don’t really see the point in buying them
What game has released for 100 pounds? In the States I can't remember anything over $70, unless you're looking for special collector's editions. Which is more than just a game and not really a fair comparison.
And also games absolutely used to be more expensive. On the N64, Killer Instinct and Turok both released at $80 in the US nearly 20 years ago. That's about $155 today. Virtua Racing was $100 in 1994- that's $210 dollars today.
Gaming's very roots are micro transactions: arcades. They were designed to suck quarters out of children's pockets. Then with home consoles it was the rental market: games like the Lion King and Battle Toads are famous for being reasonable experiences for the first couple of levels, then adding a ridiculous difficulty increase to prevent people from beating it in a single weekend and trying to get them to rent the game for longer.
What we call DLC today used to be called an expansion, and was seen as a consumer-friendly cost savings mechanism. The studio got to save money by re-using a lot of development from the base game, and that savings was passed along to the consumers who already purchased the base game. No one complained about the Roller Coaster Tycoon expansions.
That doesn't excuse micro transactions, but to say that wasn't happening 20 years ago is just plain wrong. Plus this post is specifically talking about Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. Skyrim definitively does not have micro transactions, and Fallout 4 I would argue does not, though I'll admit some of the smaller and cheaper DLC's are blurring the line.
And that's if you buy everything at full price on launch day. People who wait a month or two can often get a decent 10-20% off these days. If you wait a year or two you can get DLC's included for the same price. Right now Fallout 4 with all of the DLC is on sale for $10 on steam. Skyrim has different versions that have gone on sale for $5 at points, and is routinely under $20. So at this point I consider the launch prices to be adding in a heavy premium for impatience.