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.
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.
The paid modding completely crashed and burned and it while it was an incredible move of not reading the room it did lead to the creation club, and while not all of it was great, did provide some fantastic assets and systems for modders to use. The "tiny patches" I think is a nonstarter because literally every other game has similar patches and other than the special edition and anniversary edition (which were years apart) mods truck along just find and don't break as much as you'd think. Other than that their mod support has been pretty incredible and like I said as long as they keep using Creation Engine they physically can't stop modding even if they flipped around tomorrow.
I'm not suggesting that, my point has been that hobby can just be a hobby. It is very cool that the tools and resources are there to make your own projects, but again I don't want to. Whether for money or fun is irrelevant to me, modding is simply a hobby for me to support the hobby of playing videogames. Learning Unreal and creating resources takes away my finite time, and to be frank I'd rather just be killing dragons or fighting off raiders in a Bethesda game.
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.
I would argue that even Godot 4 is more feature rich than a lot of these older engines and definitely more stable and fit for purpose when it comes to running on modern PCs and that engine is open source, this is why I advocate hard.
I disagree. Show me another game like Skyrim (which is 12 years old) where you can physically move every item around the environment, have a massive world with npcs living with schedules and who you can murder, steal, interact with every single one. Where there's seasons, weather, and the freedom to go and do anything. (And where the mod community have literally modded in every single facet of life)
Yes Unreal and Unity are powerful, but nobody has used those tools in the intervening 12 years to make a game like Skyrim. It is interesting to think why they haven't been able to.