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.