this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don't know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn't this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don't care about steamrolling modders' work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol
The mods that weren't backwards compatible were primarily the ones that depended on the script extender. This was an unsupported executable that expanded on the commands available to the scripts in the mods.
Not to say unsupported is bad, but everyone was well aware that if they depended on the script extender, they would break if the game updated at all. The biggest mods avoided that dependency for exactly this reason, and really didn't have any trouble. (Sim Settlements still worked the entire time, for example)
And like usual, the community stepped up and updated their unsupported extension quickly, ready for this outcome.
If you made a mod that depends on the script extender and then quit playing the game or supporting your mod, that was a choice you made as a modder. Meanwhile there's mods that haven't seen an update in 8 years that continue to work without issue.
People act like mods breaking after an update is new. Bethesda (and every other dev team) has been doing it since Morrowind (and long before that) The MWSE and everything else were fine back then, too.
I mean, the issue is that the updates fix nothing of value and break mods in this decade old game. Passable update for console, “why did you even try?” on pc.
They add plenty of value, people just haven't really read into it. I.e. widescreen support, performance optimization, etc.
You mean things that mods had fixed almost a decade ago?
Yeah, but let's be real - modding isn't for everyone. The show was a mainstream hit, so a lot of eyes were on the game again. Adding native improvements like that are a benefit to the game overall and to the people who don't know how to mod or care enough to do it. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. But at the end of the day, hooking to a binary is just a hotfix away from being broken till someone fixes it again.
Bethesda offloads bug fixing to modders altogether too frequently to simply handwave modding as niche on PC. Over a decade on, comprehensive bug fixing mods are still amongst the most frequently downloaded files on nexusmods for Skyrim and even Fallout 4. They can’t have their cake and eat it too, and then complain that they urgently had to eat it.
Their actions don’t exist in a vacuum. Had they done this 5 years ago, it may have been received with confused appreciation, as it was with Skyrim. Now? After those mod creators have long since abandoned the game? It’s no longer welcome.
Personally, I still think Gamers (capital G on this one) are really stupidly entitled when it comes to shit like this. I agree with the other person, it's not on the company who made the game to stop the work they're doing on it, just to make sure third-party modders are okay with the update. They don't have to, and they technically shouldn't have to either. In a perfect world, yes they would communicate with the mod authors and all, but this ain't a perfect world.
In a perfect world, Bethesda would produce a whole game and rely not on free labor but themselves to create something. They went the Reddit route, instead opting to do as little as possible until it was inconvenient or even actively antagonistic toward their audience. They cannot have their cake and eat it. Their company is as much their modders as their employees. But they didn’t rerelease it under another edition, so I guess I can compliment their finite capacity for greed.
You lost me there, lol. Just because I go to eat at a restaurant every single day for years doesn't mean the restaurant is partially mine, nor does it mean I work there if I just decide to help with the dishes some time.
This is a bad take.
If you solicit teams of vagrants to roam your restaurant, mending the walls and supports to prevent its imminent collapse, it’s a bit different. I’ve already given up on modders, their dysfunctions are as nonsensical to me as defending the company that takes advantage of and discards them.
The mod-supported ultra-widescreen option was not good. Bethesda's update is definitely better than it was, and since that was the only Fallout mod I used these updates are all good to me.
Yeah, Minecraft updates break mods all the time but there it is just something the community accepts as normal and lives with. The huge update rage is something I only see with Bethesda game modding.
Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a "beta" or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the "every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you" hill there wouldn't be any outrage.
Turn automatic updating off for the game in question in Steam, and then set the download rate for Steam to 0 so it can't update when you start up the game.
Right, that's really more of a Steam issue than a Bethesda issue. I get why Valve and Bethesda don't want to provide customer support for old versions, but they don't have to. People have been figuring out their own problems when using obsolete systems or software for a long time.
I have no issue with Steam pushing the updates and encouraging you to take them, but giving no way to decline is a pretty poor user experience. Especially when we already know they keep old versions on their servers, as people have made guides on how to downgrade with Steam
So you say that you want the gog.com version of the game then?
Without having to re-buy the game, yes. I'd even be willing to pay GOG a bit of money for the cost of hosting the files etc, but I'm not paying Bethesda twice. That's just rewarding bad behaviour.
People have whined about this for twenty years. Yawn
Then perhaps it is an issue that should be remedied?
They've got top men working on it as we speak.
Top. Men.
I prefer my men bottom.
Technical question - does the script extender use signature/pattern scanning at all?
It sounds to me that it may have broken because it doesn't use it.
You could say "oh they recompiled it so the registers changed" but I highly doubt they changed the code that much or touched optimization flags.
The next gen update used a completely different compiler, and that created a highly different executable, that's why the update for script extender took so long and that's why the script extender for next gen edition is unable to load "old" script extender mods.
It is the same that happened with Skyrim Anniversary Edition.
Oh this is the "next gen" update? That would explain things.
Oh well...
They actually do fuck up the memory registers. It's essentially the same problem DFHack has whenever Dwarf Fortress gets an update.