Bethesda has long held its reputation as a developer friendly to modding communities. However, a recent report hints that even though Starfield boasts a substantial modding community, the process of creating mods for the game can be a rather vexing experience.
In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Starfield Community Patch (SCP) group founder Timothy “Halgari” Baldridge said that the reason they can manage to create mods for Starfield is their extensive experience with the game engine. However, many things were broken with Starfield when it came out.
“The only reason we can mod it already,” Halgari explains, “is because we’ve modded the other games using the same engine and we know what to do. But a lot of stuff is really broken compared to the other games.”
The interview also reveals that members of the SCP think Bethesda added modding to the game as an afterthought as they surmised after taking a look at the in-game files, saying:
It is evident from analyzing both the data structures in the provided module files and from decompiling game code that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now.
The observation is further reinforced by the lack of quality assurance testing for the modding functionality within the game. Halgari said that modding in Starfield is “incidental” and is present because of the “engine’s legacy code base.
The modder explained that Bethesda built the game with the intention of adding mods later on but didn’t implement it during release. Halgari thinks that modding, which is very big in other Bethesda titles like Skyrim and Fallout 4, will take off once the devs release official modding tools.
The observation by Halgari and the SCP team has been backed by Bethesda’s community manager Cartogriffi. He says that modding “was dead last for priority” and was placed on the back burner when the pandemic hit. The modding section in Bethesda’s website wasn’t given a UX revamp pre-pandemic which says a lot about the company’s priorities.
Halgari joked that he had more direct conversations with CD Projekt Red compared to Bethesda. “Companies do talk, but Bethesda don’t, and it’s the weirdest thing,” he stated. The modder expects a studio to engage its player base a lot more, especially with the contributions of mods to Bethesda titles.
This new revelation from veteran modders is interesting as it unveils Bethesda’s true relationship with modders. Don’t forget that these are the same people that rallied behind Starfield, creating, among other things, a DLSS mod, a fix for the UI inventory, and patching plenty of the issues that players found early on. Historically, Bethesda has also benefited from mods, officially adding popular community-created content to games like Skyrim. But, judging from what we just found out, it appears all of this has gone to Bethesda’s head.
For now, the SCP’s primary concern for the future of its project is how things will be handled once the community grows bigger. “We’re wanting to go with less centralized control and more just community consensus,” Halgari ends.
