Why is Bethesda the only company that provides proper modding tools?

[Schrobes]

I haven't played every game on the market but it seems like Bethesda is the only bigger named company that actually builds their games around a system that has an unmatched in the industry capability in modding. If these corporations are worried on losing money from outside influences on their properties, why not just sell the tool at a reasonable price...

[Aachen]

Have you asked any of them?

[Crazy Tiger]

Considering that Bethesda games always are bug ridden messes, it seems they're relying on the community to provide mods to actually fix their games.

[Satoru]

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/

Uhhhhhhhhh have you looked here?

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Crazy Tiger:

Considering that Bethesda games always are bug ridden messes, it seems they're relying on the community to provide mods to actually fix their games.

I mean people seem to forget that Skyrim mods are 99% dependent on a 3rd party closed source program that exists because you can’t do 99% of the things in Skyrim because it doesn’t have the mod tools to do it

Skyrim is one patch away from breaking all mods if the SKSE devs decide to screw everyone over

[Haruspex]

That is an excellent question.

Perhaps other companies simply don't want to put in the effort to release modding tools. Bethesda strangely embraces it, ever since Morrowind came packaged with a 2nd CD for just the construction set. They found it worked for them I think, so they keep it up. People are still playing and talking about Bethesda RPGs even 20 years after release thanks largely to modding.

Actually, pre-Morrowind, releasing modding tools along side your game was de rigueur for a lot of games. Doom offered an editor. Duke Nukem 3d had the Build editor packaged in the CD. Unreal games offered UnrealED. The old Tomb Raider games offered an editor. Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Descent, Quake, Jedi Knight... I could probably go on. All offered editors, sometimes packed right on the disk.

For some reason, including editors kind of fizzled out, with a few notable exceptions with limited editor modes like in Halo and Doom 2016.

[76561199223588030]

Engine restrictions. Some engine licencors do not allow their licencees to furnish mod tools to the end user. It's really anti competitive and needs to be dealt with. Personally I hate Epic and the unreal engine for popularizing this trend. Without mod tools new talent can not learn, discover and grow.

On a personal note: Some of the best, most skilled people, who I've ever worked with, were all home grown and self taught. And in contrast some of the worst and most incompetent people, had degrees from prestigious 50,000$ a year universities and could not think laterally. They only know one way of doing things. The institutional way.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Croteam getting no love from the OP.

[Tristin]

Because game requires it, and they kinda pushed it to players to get their product fine tuned. Without it, game don't feel very good.

[Schrobes]

Originally posted by 8bitbeard:

That is an excellent question.

Perhaps other companies simply don't want to put in the effort to release modding tools. Bethesda strangely embraces it, ever since Morrowind came packaged with a 2nd CD for just the construction set. They found it worked for them I think, so they keep it up. People are still playing and talking about Bethesda RPGs even 20 years after release thanks largely to modding.

Actually, pre-Morrowind, releasing modding tools along side your game was de rigueur for a lot of games. Doom offered an editor. Duke Nukem 3d had the Build editor packaged in the CD. Unreal games offered UnrealED. The old Tomb Raider games offered an editor. Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Descent, Quake, Jedi Knight... I could probably go on. All offered editors, sometimes packed right on the disk.

For some reason, including editors kind of fizzled out, with a few notable exceptions with limited editor modes like in Halo and Doom 2016.

I completely forgot about all of those titles and the general principle of providing editors or tools alongside them. It hurts even more!

[RamiroRa]

Two big things:
AAA games have become incredibly complex, and making mods could risk the stability of the software, not to mention the classic of inapropiate mods that could give the game a bad name.
Second, as games become more complex, their code is behind rights and legal stuff, so most developers just dont want to deal with suing customers.

[Schrobes]

Originally posted by RamiroRa:

Two big things:
AAA games have become incredibly complex, and making mods could risk the stability of the software, not to mention the classic of inapropiate mods that could give the game a bad name.
Second, as games become more complex, their code is behind rights and legal stuff, so most developers just dont want to deal with suing customers.

Yeah, i hear you there. But i think that is just an excuse. The Creation Kit for Bethesda games is robust enough to provide vanilla manipulation without causing a fuss over the issues you stipulated. Enough so where the console platforms have accepted the modifications that are done on the Kit. That ultimately is what i am talking about with the topic at hand. I wasn't expecting an absolute dissection of every last variable of games. Just a general tool we could use to make our own worlds, or change already established variables of the game, or add our own ideas to the worlds. An editing tool :D

[ReBoot]

There's other games with robust nodding tools. But sure, let's put on blinders & pretend there's none others out there...

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Originally posted by Schrobes:

I haven't played every game on the market but it seems like Bethesda is the only bigger named company that actually builds their games around a system that has an unmatched in the industry capability in modding. If these corporations are worried on losing money from outside influences on their properties, why not just sell the tool at a reasonable price...

Its due to the fact how simple their game is, in reality modding Betheseda's games is not complex, if anything since the days of the early GECKit for Fallout 3, the modding community of Nexus breezed in with landslides of mods.

Thing is, its not that they base anything around modding, its just that their titles are well known for being modded because their base games are boring as hell and have been modded to hell and back. In this modern day, almost hundreds of games got mods, we all know the workshop for Steam exists, Nexus mods is massive right now but lets not forget the older school websites like moddb and many other forum sites.

In this case, ya Fallout, Skyrim and Oblivion are huge titles and as such their modding community is well known. Heck if I were to say the term "Wabberjacked" and imply that I DO NOT speak of the staff from Elder Scrolls but rather a special mod, most will instantly know I speak of the Randomizer mods for those games.

When you have a nickname for a mod of a game, that shows how massively known the game is, and yes while other games have mods, not many are known on par with Bethesda, heck I could point out if we remove Bethesda, that still honestly leaves the already prior known game studies that had them.

Hell if we look at Dota on Steam, ironically few know that it started its birth from a Modded Warcraft 3 MMO map mode and now is not just its own game but also its own style of game entirely with spin offs all over.

Originally posted by ReBoot:

There's other games with robust nodding tools. But sure, let's put on blinders & pretend there's none others out there...

There's really not however any on par with the community modders for Fallout, the fact that many mods are so large under Fallout that they are classed as Mod DLC's and these suckers go as far back as Fallout 3 early on with the GECK says how long this community has been around modding for.

Still even then, what deems a tool, and a modding kit is not the same. Some games do not use the same modding kit, I personally cant use the Creation kit from Bethesda on any other game as far as I'm aware, I cant use the Irony tool on anything other then Paradox games, nor could I persay use Nexus mods tool kits on any game that is not on Nexus.

And out of all of them, I still gotta hand it to the Creation Kit for being well cared for, but I think that still comes from the fact of its birth from the GECKit: https://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Which was dropped in 2017 for the Creation Kit, at a impressive 2k+ threads of kit discussions when it went down, thats 5 years ago since Fallout 4 does not use the same engine as Fallout 3 and NV does so it was not updated in a while.

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Empty Head - No Thoughts:

Originally posted by Schrobes:

I haven't played every game on the market but it seems like Bethesda is the only bigger named company that actually builds their games around a system that has an unmatched in the industry capability in modding. If these corporations are worried on losing money from outside influences on their properties, why not just sell the tool at a reasonable price...

Its due to the fact how simple their game is, in reality modding Betheseda's games is not complex, if anything since the days of the early GECKit for Fallout 3, the modding community of Nexus breezed in with landslides of mods.

Thing is, its not that they base anything around modding, its just that their titles are well known for being modded because their base games are boring as hell and have been modded to hell and back. In this modern day, almost hundreds of games got mods, we all know the workshop for Steam exists, Nexus mods is massive right now but lets not forget the older school websites like moddb and many other forum sites.

In this case, ya Fallout, Skyrim and Oblivion are huge titles and as such their modding community is well known. Heck if I were to say the term "Wabberjacked" and imply that I DO NOT speak of the staff from Elder Scrolls but rather a special mod, most will instantly know I speak of the Randomizer mods for those games.

When you have a nickname for a mod of a game, that shows how massively known the game is, and yes while other games have mods, not many are known on par with Bethesda, heck I could point out if we remove Bethesda, that still honestly leaves the already prior known game studies that had them.

Hell if we look at Dota on Steam, ironically few know that it started its birth from a Modded Warcraft 3 MMO map mode and now is not just its own game but also its own style of game entirely with spin offs all over.

Originally posted by ReBoot:

There's other games with robust nodding tools. But sure, let's put on blinders & pretend there's none others out there...

There's really not however any on par with the community modders for Fallout,

Yeah, sure... There's no game devs whatsoever providing that ability to entirely rewriting the game. I must have hallucinate when TFC came along for Half-Life and mods not breaking when a game updates must be a fever dream anyway.
And the last time I saw a game dev to release their internal development tools Daym, I really need to la yoff the drugs and go I to therapy for Schizophrenia. Yup checks out.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Originally posted by ReBoot:

Originally posted by Empty Head - No Thoughts:

Its due to the fact how simple their game is, in reality modding Betheseda's games is not complex, if anything since the days of the early GECKit for Fallout 3, the modding community of Nexus breezed in with landslides of mods.

Thing is, its not that they base anything around modding, its just that their titles are well known for being modded because their base games are boring as hell and have been modded to hell and back. In this modern day, almost hundreds of games got mods, we all know the workshop for Steam exists, Nexus mods is massive right now but lets not forget the older school websites like moddb and many other forum sites.

In this case, ya Fallout, Skyrim and Oblivion are huge titles and as such their modding community is well known. Heck if I were to say the term "Wabberjacked" and imply that I DO NOT speak of the staff from Elder Scrolls but rather a special mod, most will instantly know I speak of the Randomizer mods for those games.

When you have a nickname for a mod of a game, that shows how massively known the game is, and yes while other games have mods, not many are known on par with Bethesda, heck I could point out if we remove Bethesda, that still honestly leaves the already prior known game studies that had them.

Hell if we look at Dota on Steam, ironically few know that it started its birth from a Modded Warcraft 3 MMO map mode and now is not just its own game but also its own style of game entirely with spin offs all over.




There's really not however any on par with the community modders for Fallout,

Yeah, sure... There's no game devs whatsoever providing that ability to entirely rewriting the game. I must have hallucinate when TFC came along for Half-Life and mods not breaking when a game updates must be a fever dream anyway.
And the last time I saw a game dev to release their internal development tools Daym, I really need to la yoff the drugs and go I to therapy for Schizophrenia. Yup checks out.

So your just ignoring that Half-life was just a modded Doom engine clone then, gotcha, not all that impressive when after Doom went out, as did its engine, that number of people that took it and remade the original doom engine

Here's a list of PLATFORMS that took it actually: DOS, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, Amiga Workbench, NeXTSTEP, Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, NeXT, Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Sony PlayStation, Panasonic 3DO, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo Switch.

Note how literally that its not that impressive that everyone and their grandma modded the Doom Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc Here is GoldSrc, as it states, a heavily modded quake engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_engine AKA the Predecessor of the Doom engine.

I'm impressed your unaware how many people use the ancient doom engine, the fact that one of the platforms above is a freaking Kitchen appliance company says just how wide spread it is.