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
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 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.
I’ve asked the skywind community for their view on
ita 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.
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.
Gotta love GOG’s patch rollback.
Honestly, that’s the real problem here. No one would complain about a patch, if they could freely decide to play with it or not…
Why can’t they (genuine question) ?
Because Bethesda doesn’t provide the legacy versions on steam, unlike other mod focused games, afaik. Once you’ve updated your game, you are stuck with whatever version you have.
Sure, you can always download the right version from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t count piracy + the risks coming with it as a viable excuse for their fuckup.
Steam desperately needs to allow you to NOT update a game.
Isn’t there a “disable automatic updates” button in Steam?
So far as I know, you still need to update to launch the game, so you need to disable automatic updates and play offline.
Wait… Can’t you just pick a version in steam?
Steam has support for this (and many games use it). As far as I know it’s just a matter of the developers using it.
Steam has limited rollback support from the command line which we had to do plenty of times for Starfield when working on Luma. Sometimes updates are small. Sometimes the entire exe gets reshuffled so you have to find where to patch the exe all over again.
All the versions are apparently there. You just need to download the “depot” and it’ll dump into a folder. From there you copy that folder over your game directly.
It also works the other way around. I can download the depot for the latest version and stay on the version I’m at. It’s useful to pick apart and diff what was actually changed.
Why they can’t add that as an option I’m not sure. That seems more of a UX/UI issue rather than a technical one (like avoiding people using old versions on the web server).
Hosting costs probably. Rolling back a patch is a rare scenario and Steam would have to host every version of every game in their store on their servers indefinitely.
Afaik that’s actually something steam does though, tools like Depot Downloader combined with SteamDB to get the metadata for a target version totally work, I’ve used that in the past to downgrade Skyrim before disabling auto updates. You can do it through the steam console as well.
The game is 9 years old, and the update hasn’t even been released yet. Everyone complaining in here that all mods break is just making assumptions without any knowledge of what the update is actually gonna do to your mods. High chance it actually breaks a lot, but nobody can know that at this time.
Edit: I read an article from Nexus mods and the only mod guaranteed to break is F4SE, which will probably be updated to work on the updated soon after release, maybe the Mod Team can even get a preview of the version to get some work done ahead of time.
Everything else will have to see after the update is out.
they’re probably assuming it will be like every skyrim update released in the past 10 years, which is a fair assumption.
and this update has also caused the widely anticipated fallout london project being indefinitely postponed. in the article linked, you can see the fallout london project lead saying:
“But with the new update dropping just 48 hours [after Fallout London’s original release date], the past four years of our work stand to just simply break.”
i don’t really see what good it does to say “nobody can know that at this time”, when people have every reason to think that it will break their mods. i mean sure, nobody knows the future, but you can say that about literally every single prediction made about anything in the future. it’s a tautology. are you trying to imply people shouldn’t make predictions about anything?
If it’s not from the Delphi reigion, it’s not a proper prophecy, just a guess
It would then be a sparkling vision.
…do you know how modding works? This will 100% break our mods, it’s going to be a new version and new version patches ALWAYS kill mods, that’s how it works
Edit: And would you look at that? The update killed a shitload of mods, just like I said it would.
Mods don’t care about a higher version number. They break if the stuff that got modded is changed. So mods that dont touch any of the updated stuff wont break. I was able to keep using mods of old versions in other games often already. Not every mod has to break everytime.
The game uses archive files to package the game files and if one file changes then that breaks all the mods, and since there are several key files it essentially breaks that entire category of mod. So they aren’t as crazy as they sound even if you are correct.
If applying a patch extracts and repacks the archive, then unrelated files can definitely be changed. See for example Minecraft jarmodding, which is just merging two zips.
Confidently incorrect.
Yes… you are.
I mean they have a track record of breaking things with updatea consistently
They did the same thing with Skyrim a few weeks ago and destroyed my mod loadout. They’re updating the game to attract new purchases. They don’t care what happens to everyone who has the game and all dlcs already.
Sorry, I absolutely care about proper Ultrawide support. Currently the game is dogshit on an Ultrawide, with interface and mouse input being all kinds of screwy.
Bethesda games are the only games I’ve ever played that don’t support ultrawide. Don’t get me wrong I’ve played other games that were released without it or it was buggy but in each case I put in a bug report and within a week or a month they patched it. Bethesda must have so much technical debt and spaghetti code that they can’t do it and they don’t care enough about their players to even try.
slightly off topic but I’ve been disappointed with ultrawide support and really advise against it for most people. Many single player games that do support it clearly weren’t designed for it and just give you a prettier pillarboxed 16:9, like Hades adding some art on the sides.
And multiplayer games just crop your vision down so you have a weird FoV and see the same amount horizontally as a 16:9 user, but can’t see as much above or below you as they can. Proper support would let you see more horizontally than 16:9 players and since that’s the vast majority of players it’s understandable… but then anyone who does buy an ultrawide has to run it in 16:9 with pillarboxing or be at a disadvantage.
TruBy9 worked well, I didn’t expect ultrawide support so thats actually great.
On windows I’m guessing?
What game?
Fallout 4, Fallout London MOD was about to drop and Bethesda dropped random update. Sabotaging(unintentionally?) the most anticipated mod in Fallout history.
Whoa, I might get Fallout again just to get that mod… after they fix it.
Piracy is free
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i was so excited to play FOLON once it was about to drop but ol’ Todd decided against that.
creator of fallout london is actually excited for the update, since itll mean fallout london will play even better than it originally would have
I think The Frontier was more anticipated, before it came out at least, but London will gain in popularity especially with the TV show coming out
Do it 2 days before highly anticipated mod drops
I can almost guarantee that more people care about the free next gen update of Fallout 4 than will ever play the Fallout London mod.
I’m legitimately excited for the Fallout London Mod, so this isn’t meant to minimize it, but modding, even in Bethesda games, is a much smaller niche than people on here seem to think.
Bethesda is legitimately doing something good for the game, for free, and they announced it two years in advance.
The only upsetting part of this is that they recently announced a launch date and it is coincidentally close to when Fallout London was planning to release.
If that one coincidence wasn’t happening, then nobody would be complaining about this pretty cool free update.
At least not until after it releases.
I think from a wider market stand point sure… But for people who have e stayed invested this whole time its a slap. The Patch is mostly fluff… Adding workshop items,Halloween content and performance shifts. The main problem is with the performance shifts they may alter variables such as delta, gravity and physics. Previous mods that have been worked on and polished with the intention of using the existing variables will be broken.
As the London devs even said, they are really excited for this new content and performance update, and they asked you to put down your pitchforks.
This is going to be a setback for the modding that has been done, for sure. That is the contract the mod community understands when they build their creations. It’s very evident at every step of the way that you are not using consumer grade products with ABI guarantees.
But Bethesda has publicly stated they went out of their way to try to reduce breakage of mods this time compared to the skyrim anniversary version. So we have to wait and see what that means.
But if you want to hold back performance improvements for everyone because a small niche within the modding scene will have to update their mods to work, that’s not a reasonable ask.
Booo, misinformation. I legit thought I was just getting old for a sec but fo4 is like 8 years old. Although that does still hurt to think about.
So it was released in 2011
2024-2011=13 fuck your right its even older
Wait, let them keep thinking it’s 2020
Skyrim is 12 years old…
(It will be 13 in November, a teenager…oh god, get ready for the rebellious phase.)
Edit, I did not watch the video, which is about Fallout. The meme was made for Skyrim.
Yeah but have you tried actually playing the PS4 version on a PS5. It hurts to look at that frame rate.
That dude’s face is messing with me. Was it shopped?
Kinda looks like Todd Howard’s face on Henry Cavill’s body and skull.
I don’t think those ears belong to the same person.
deleted by creator
yeah it has. it’s a photoshopped picture of todd howard
I was about to mod the game for HDR and then found out news of FO4 getting updated.
Updates break mods. Just how it is. Though, after seeing the work needed for modding Starfield after each exe change, I’m doing shader replacement now. As long as they don’t change from DirectX, I should be good.
Edit: Nevermind. Somebody asked me for help and got roped in. Got HDR working. Let’s see if it actually lasts.
Edit2: Just gotta fix TAA. Source
GTA just did this to me… 2 and a half days after I was happy with my LSPDFR install.
Aktualleee… It’s been almost 9 years.
I mean I care it can play natively on UW.
If it breaks mods, can’t you just play a previous release via an option in Steam?
Fallout London is about to release and it’s a massive under taking. They are hoping to attract people who haven’t played in years. Trying to get them to install the right version because Todd Howard isn’t as easy as your dismissal suggests
As far as I know you cannot choose to roll back, only not update, but I may be wrong. I’m hoping to be corrected.
