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Update 12 May 2022: Bethesda has announced on Twitter that Starfield has been delayed until the first half of 2023.
If you haven't heard about it yet, Starfield is going to be the debut entry in an entirely new franchise and marks the first single-player RPG released by BGS since Fallout 4 all the way back in 2015. The details of the new game world and story have not been fully revealed yet and we've been eagerly following the "Into The Starfield" video series as it teases more and more information about the upcoming title.
What we do know is Starfield will be using an updated version of the Creation Engine which has been used to power Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 (which is in itself an evolution of the Gamebyro Engine used by older titles). Todd Howard has also confirmed in an AMA on Reddit that Starfield will have full mod support, which is great news for our community!
So what are we doing to prepare for Starfield? Glad you asked! We're slowly ramping up our efforts to create a community space for Starfield. This is comprised of a few parts:
- Starfield Modding Discord - We could have simply added Starfield channels to our main server, but this time around we felt it would be far better to separate the Starfield discussion into its own server. There are already some interesting conversations happening there, including early planning of a Community Patch for the game. If you're interested in modding Starfield, please do check it out.
- Starfield Modding Forums - We've created a new forum category where you can talk about the game, modding or even share your ideas for mods.
- Starfield Modding Wiki - While it's pretty barebones right now, we plan to use the Modding.wiki site for Starfield to serve as a hub for important information about modding which would otherwise be lost to obscurity in forum posts, Discord servers or Reddit threads.
- Starfield Game Section - Coming November 2022. We'll be opening the doors on the site section to share your mods, images, videos and collections for Starfield.
That's not all, we're also actively engaging with our friends at Bethesda to learn more about the game and get more modding-specific information that we can share with mods authors, tool developers and the community to allow us to work together to create a modding community that could rival the ones for their previous games.
Are you as excited as we are for Starfield? What kinds of mods would you like to see? Join the discussion on the forums.
Don't forget to wishlist Starfield on Steam or join Constellation on Bethesda's website to stay updated.
473 comments
BOOM! best of both worlds.
No decent follower mods. Because when your only dialogue is "WhAt DoYoU tHINk aBoUT OuR rELAtIONsHIP?"
There's clearly not much room to work with.
Compare quest and follower mods of fo4 with those of skyrim and new vegas. Yeah big difference.
I believe we are playing RPGS, role playing games.
Where is the role playing with A VOICED PROTAGONIST??
When you choose to make your protagonist voiced, you immediately restrict creativity for your quest creators.
You now have to record the voice lines for the NPC's related to the quests as well as the protagonist, male and female voice.
This makes it so that you might have a quest take almost 3 times as much work for the recording of voice lines as well as restricting the creativity of the author. No longer can the writer simply write dialogue that can be chosen depending on a variety of things such as certain quests being done before it, "high or low" karma, wearing of certain gear, etc.
Now you have to voice all of these options making the work indefinitely harder.
(This is my #1 criticism of Fallout 4 and why I think many of it's quests fell flat.)
It is also incredibly bad from a roleplaying perspective, because a voiced line from your own character is rarely done in the way you expect the voiced line to be done. Now I have no problems with series games from The Witcher series or Mass Effect but those characters are mostly set and written. Player created characters are not, they are blank and created so that the player writes their story. This is what I think is one of the unique things about BGS games.
From a mod authors perspective, like I said, it's horrible. Making towns and small areas in Skyrim is fairly easy as a small mod author because you can simply copy and paste existing general dialogue and write your own dialogue for the player. You can make very complex quests using a very limited amount of voice dialogue, as long as the written dialogue from the player is unique it all connects and fits well.
This has been done a ton and is a proven concept. Something like this doesn't work and can't really be done as soon as you have a voiced protagonist.
I very much hope that the character is unvoiced in Starfield for these and a few other reasons.
Added: Don't get me wrong, I can't wait for the game to come out and try it.
@random...
being lazy and bad writers was what held back story mods at FO4. You know. You can just do without voice. It's the argument of the lazy for the dumb.
No modder was held back. As there are modders who just did it without voice. And if you would know what you are talking about...there are a lot of great mods with voice out now.
I want to thank in advance the community and the modders for their work ;)
1) At least they are making a game.
2) If the game or game type is not for you, then don't buy it.
3) You have not spent any money on the game or any time making a mod for the game.
4) The game is not even released yet, and all you can do is b&@*$ and complain. If all that you want to do is take out your frustrations and complain, then do it somewhere else.
5) If you think that you could do a better job then go for it, otherwise shut up and grow up.
I personally want a space vampire. No lie. I always thought it would be a neat concept to fuse into SCI-FI. A galaxy where vampires are the dominant race. Being nearly immortal? They would make for the most advanced civilization. They just gotta breed blood bags on their ships haha
stargate atlantis...
Not trying to bait fights, I really mean that, I just think 'cautious optimism' is a good middle ground. I'll even edit if I know a more diplomatic/friendly way to put it.
Anyway, I'll sure be modding Starfield no matter what rating out of 10 it has. If it's good we'll mod it, and if it's somehow bad, well, we'll just mod it until it's good! Very excited for the next CK iteration, and exploring what the Nexus community can do - I know I'm not the only one who wanted to design my own little worlds since Morrowind. Helpful article and links.
(Oh, and I'll give it maybe a year before Starfield is overhauled into a fanmade Star Wars, Star Trek or 40K game.)
Why bother fixing physics glitches, when they generally only happen every once in a while? It's not like it adversily affects the game, just looks dumb\silly(no other havoc game has the physics glitches that oblivion and Skyrim has, this is a shoddy implementation by Bethesda, probably done in Oblivion and not touched for Skyrim)!
We want Bethesda to change, because Bethesda once upon a time cared about making great games, making quality games that stood for something(but often just didn't have the funds to finish it up enough). People rag on EA for far minor stuff than what Bethesda has done towards their fans. All backlash is deserved.
This was originally pretty harsh but I'm editing it to avoid unnecessary arguments. Also we're about to get buried so doubt many would read this comment chain anyway.
Also I exclusively mean this comment as a defence against "game bad" or the uncomfortable bleed over into implying those who like them are damaged in some way, because the engine *is* jank and the publishing arm *is* greedy, so this genuinely isn't targeted at most the people above. That said:
People always talk about how their games became bad, how each is worse than the last... But even ignoring the quiet majority that adore them all even unmodded, I've played all the mainline TES games, and frankly I prefer Skyrim to Oblivion overall, and even Morrowind in more than one aspect. It feels like many see no difference between "it's not for me" and "it's not for anyone". Personal preference is not objective fact. Alas, they don't have Daggerfall's depth any more, but no game ever does sadly. I recommend Kenshi for depth though.
I also think Fallout 3 gets an unfair nostalgia advantage when compared to Fallout 4. (Don't crucify me, my favourite is New Vegas.) Going back into it again in literally the last few days, you're railroaded hard into the Brotherhood of Steel, the open world has an annoying number of linear areas (yay for going through five grey subway tunnels in a row), the infamous ending, the illusion of choice is everywhere, and almost every main or side quest alike is a fetch quest. Yet people say Fallout 4 is nothing more than a grim shadow of Fallout 3.
Their last singleplayer content was the Fallout 4 DLCs and Far Harbor's writing is some of their best work period, with high reactivity and diverse outcomes. Might I add that Will Shen, the lead designer of Far Harbor, has been promoted to the lead quest writer of Starfield.
Now, the engine's jankness can't be debated. I'm optimistic not blind. But still, Creation Engine is being significantly rewritten and just one of the things changed is the animation system. Plus things carried from 76 like FOV slider and uncapped FPS. So like I said, it's best to be cautiously optimistic, nobody is forced to preorder.
Even the worst Bethesda games to date can be bought on sale for $25, and with a little Nexus love can provide literally hundreds of hours of enjoyment. And isn't that why we're here? So however this goes I'm excited for Nexus' direction and have faith in our modders.
Eh..... The only reason I've ever played Skyrim is because of the modding community, which just keeps getting better as time goes on. I've always found the vanilla game bland and mediocre as all Hell, and I've never understood the fuss. With mods, though… it transforms from maybe a B grade (if I'm feeling generous) to an A.
Game --> Fallout4
Files ----> Fallout.ESM (The core off all the game)
Record > Pipboy just necessary for game HUD ;)
<Error: Unknown lstring ID 000367B8>
cc_mod_PipBoy-Null "<Error: Unknown lstring ID 000367B7>" [OMOD:0024A0BA]
Never corrected by Bethesda ..... LOL
So = Bethesda = Look elsewhere
A Few more words :
By digging through the records of the game files,
we realize how much it was made using the techniques of beginners, who know the engine but do not understand its subtleties.
When you see several thousand redundant records just to simply manage NPC armor and outfits, you laugh.
It's apprentice work, exploited excessively by this type of software publisher.
A game's problem isn't its game engine.
It's the one who uses it to create the game that's the problem
Problems that quickly become unsolvable and often hilarious
Mass Effect Andromeda style, a beautiful game, but at first just a prank
Much easier and safer to say that Bethesda games are terrible, you get more people agreeing with you. Its even worse when you see these people on Nexus downloading mods for Bethesda games.
Been modding their games for years now and I still say vanilla Bethesda games are great, and nobody will ever change my opinion on that.
I think you're attributing a lot to malice what can sufficiently be explained by inadequacy, to misquote Hanlon's Razor. EA's practices are criticised because it's very obvious that they're vapid, board-decided business decisions that have ruined the efforts of the dev team; whereas most of the criticism of Bethesda is of the failings of their own development choices and implementation (okay Fallout 1st needs to be burned in a ditch).
Bethesda Game Studios is a small development studio with very little turnover - many of the team from Skyrim are still working on Starfield. If they've not fixed something engine-wise that is causing issues, it's probably because they've got, what? A half dozen engine programmers, who are trying to chip away at everything the rest of the team needs implementing. They only fix what is absolutely essential to be fixed, like the above 60fps physics speed glitch, since that was a huge issue for an online title like FO76.
The solution to this is team upscaling, which is what they've been doing for the last little while, since Fallout 4 released. Hopefully we see dividends paid off in Starfield, and I think it's a little premature to complain that they've done nothing so far. We'll see - ultimately all gamedev teams make compromises and it's up to you, the consumer, to decide whether or not to tolerate it for the end product you're receiving. As Cyberpunk 2077 has proven, no amount of reputation and goodwill can save a sh*tty product from criticism.
The other thing is the idea of Bethesda moving to UE5 and implementing a plugin system there instead. As you rightfully stated, it would probably introduce just as many issues to that engine, and would require a complete retooling of the default developer environment to allow for export and editing of game plugins, so probably not worth the effort. To counter that, UE5 has a lot of desirable features for open-world games, such as the cell-based loading that BGS prefers, which could likely be tooled to be persistent. This, combined with the scalability, may finally allow for BGS-style games that can tolerate the player moving in a vehicle(!).
I feel like such a shift would be seismic for the modding community, cut the collective knowledgebase in half, and ultimately I don't think BGS has the technical chops to be able to create something like CK for UE5 or any other engine, to be brutally honest.
Wait.....what did I just say???
If Bethesda is pushing back a game close to a year now, that's a terrible sign, and these guys are the same people that released Fallout 76 and thought that it was a complete and functional game back in 2018, hell it isn't even complete and functional game now