Howard says Bethesda Game Studios is looking to keep expanding its support for the modding community with the upcoming space-faring RPG.
Howard says Bethesda Game Studios is looking to keep expanding its support for the modding community with the upcoming space-faring RPG.
My #1 desire for a new Bethesda game is for them to figure out how to make console modding good, and to do it early. Would love for the next generation of nexus mods to have console stuff from the get go, and for the missing tools to immediately be good enough to not require PC specific tools to expand it like SKSE.
Hopefully they’ve already looked at SKSE, and made sure Starfield supports that stuff natively.
I think it’s not possible for them to make modding tools that are as powerful as DLL plug-ins like SKSE. While they can try to cover their bases with modding hooks, the reality is that they can’t think up everything that a modder might want to do and so DLL mods will still exist. And because DLL mods involve modifying the game code to do literally whatever (including potentially turning it into a completely different homebrew game, hacking the console, or even booting an OS), the problem with that and consoles is that the console makers do not want arbitrary, unsigned code to be running on their consoles.
No matter how many official hooks are added for modders to use, the PC platform will always have strictly more powerful mods.
A lot of the DLL stuff had to exist to work around limited support in the game for modding using the game’s environment, though. I think that a lot of classes of things could legitimately be done in a sandbox.
I think that there are certain things that can be modded on consoles, but console modding is inexorably going to run into a large limitation – games tend to push consoles closer to their limits than they do PCs. If you’re a game developer, you know what a console user has and can consume resources up to that point. On PCs, you don’t, as different users have different computers, so you have to have a somwhat-soft resource usage cap and have some headroom for some users even at release time.
Not all mods eat up memory or CPU time or GPU cycles. But a number do.
With PCs, one major thing that modding has done for Skyrim or Fallout 4 is to just update the game with higher resolution textures and models to reflect what current hardware can handle, as PCs continue a more-incremental march forward. Throw shaders, ENBs into the mix to leverage more-plentiful GPU cycles. That’s directly-tied to there now being more headroom to work with. Can’t really do that on the consoles in the same way.
There are certainly some major areas that modding has explored that mod authors could do, like adding new areas or the like. But what could be done on consoles is always going to face that limitation. And you can’t fix it by making consoles upgradeable or something, or you lose the benefits of the console in the first place, the fact that it’s a consistent, fixed system.
Another issue – consoles are designed to be easy to set up and hard to break. A number of tools that have existed for past Bethesda games act on the game in ways that could break it in confusing ways. I’m not saying that safer analogs couldn’t be built for at least some of these – and even on the PC, I wish that there were better tools for identifying issues and rolling them back. So this isn’t a fundamental limitation like the above. But I think that to some degree, the aim of a console vendor, to create an easy-to-use, reliable, cannot-dick-it-up environment is going to conflict with at least some of the tools that exist on the PC.
For at least some users, I think that it might be easier to provide a way to just use their PC to game on a TV. Steam has tried to do that to some extent, with Big Picture Mode and such. some people don’t want to have a dedicated gaming PC in their living room, though. Maybe you could facilitate that with hardware. Like, okay, if you’ve got a computer in one room and Ethernet between the TV and the PC, have a little device in the living room that:
That doesn’t solve the issue for people who want a console because they want to avoid PC-style upgrades or troubleshooting, but I think that those people may tend to hit the more-fundamental issues I mentioned above of console vendors aiming for more of a plug-and-play experience on a predictable device clashing with modding.