Some people were looking for less pozzed mod hosting sites than places like Nexus Mods. I came across this place:
I haven't gone through everything there but it does have, for example, "Hogwarts Legacy, Historically accurate 1800's Hogwarts," "WoW Wrath Classic Gender Icons," and FO4 Grounded Commonwealth.
If and when Starfield starts getting modded I am sure you can imagine what it will host.
In your case that's where I think it would probably a decent idea to pay for assets, then the workload would be much lighter and you'd probably get quite a bit of interest if you're upfront about how it's all done. The thing is I get where you're coming from but at the same time with the amount of work I've seen them do in order to reverse engineer a game without even really having access to the proper engine and source code is pretty ridiculous.
But again I have zero interest in that. I don't want a "workload" period, I just want to slay a couple dragons with some sick custom magic or sword I made. And that's why I brought up translation patches. It is absolutely a lot of work but if that's how they want to spend their free time who are you or anyone in a position to judge.
It really applies to any hobbies. Would you go up to someone who likes watching football and be like "What are you doing? You could be outside practicing with a ball and make money off it!". Why would you? Dude might just want to watch football and that's the same for someone who wants to reverse engineer a game in their free time.
I bring it up because the modding support for these games is always trash and I suspect that Bethesda are probably going to fuck over modders in Starfield some way because they always do. As we've seen as well if anybody tries to mess around with a significant project Bethesda haven't exactly been friendly about it, they clamp down hard on their IP and that's all your stuff just fucking gone.
I'm in a position to judge because I'm making my own game(s) and I can tell you now with my projects the level software is at is incredible and it makes stuff like the creation engine look like an excel spreadsheet by comparison. Even if you're just doing it for free and being a hobbyist you could make use of Unreal Engine for example since you wouldn't owe anyone money if it was completely available and go to town with it.
There are loads of resources now for doing this as well which is why I keep stubbornly trying to nudge people in that direction instead of massively coping all the time about a company that clearly hates their own fanbase. People don't understand how far back end software has come when it comes to the games industry.
How is the modding support trash and how have Bethesda fucked over modders in the past? I'm honestly curious because I've been modding since Oblivion and Bethesda provides the easiest and open set of tools to mod their games. Hell even things that are engine bound eventually get cracked open and are fixed or modded. They physically couldn't stop Starfield modding if they wanted to because it's still running gamebryo all the way down in the hood and that's been broken open for over a decade now.
It's admirable that your making your own game but I think stubbornly trying to nudge people into game creation is misguided, because again people sometimes just want a hobby and telling them "but you could turn this into a job and make money" is silly. So what if the company hates me, are they magically going to make my 12 year old skyrim install and mod directly unusable? They can't so I don't care.
Well I mean two classic examples are their attempts at putting in paid modding type content that didn't really fly in order to try and compete with the modders and then there's the way they keep releasing 'editions' of the game with tiny patches that modders keep having to fix every now and then to make it all work.
You seem to be suggesting constantly I'm writing about making money off your projects, far from it. You could do all this for free and there's a now pretty large database of open source or copyright free assets out there for people to play around with and try out. An example of what I'm poking around at with in Blender are HDRIs which are required for lighting and there's a website called PolyHaven which takes care of this problem and people upload their work that's free to use.
As it turns out the site also has models and textures available, now I personally wouldn't use them, because I'm looking to make a commercial project so I'm making sure I do most things from scratch. However I have used the HDRIs of that site for rendering my materials in Blender. I don't think you guys appreciate at all how many tools there are out there publicly available that would allow you to completely bypass Bethesda.
https://polyhaven.com/
You could for example take polyhaven assets and use Unreal Engine to make your own RPG or something like that, that's what I would do if I was doing it for fun.
https://polyhaven.com/a/sledgehammer_01
Oh look, a sledgehammer just like in Fallout. You know something, I think I'm going to have to do a thread on asset libraries and such precisely because of this lol.
Compare Gamebryo/Creation Engine to Unreal Engine or Unity and it's obvious how much this tech holds their games (& subsequently mods) back. Gamebryo/Creation engine tools suck in comparison.