Bethesda: Sony Won't Approve Mods for Fallout 4 or Skyrim on PS4

[RedDeadFred]

Good. Maybe now Bethesda will focus on making entire games, instead of just creating a map and saying "the users can make the content themselves if they want it so much".

How is Fallout 4 not an entire game? It may not be a particularly good game, it may not be the game you wanted it to be, but to say that it's not a complete game is kind of silly. There's a lot of content, but it's repetitive and there's not a lot of reason to replay. There is no way this is a good thing since all it does is deprive PS4 users of the huge amount of content that no Developer could ever hope to produce in that kind of time. The mindset of "why didn't the devs do this instead of modders" is ridiculous (barring bug fixes, but Fallout 4 has been their least buggy game in my experience) because where do you stop? Huge new areas of content, graphical upgrades, huge amounts of additional weapons and armors? The game would never come out if everything the modding community made (at least the stuff of quality) should be in the game.

I get it. You're bummed about Fallout 4. Plenty of people including myself are, but this is not a good thing for the people who don't get all this extra content.

 

[Baresark]

Wow Sony... You are stoooopid.

 

[sXeth]

Perfectly understandable. Question is, are they going to add select mods handpciked and approved by both Bethesda and Sony (Warframe on PS4 for example adding user created skins selected and approved by both developer and Sony). Or it's a no to any mods ever???
Personally, I never touched mods. I like pure game experience as devs intended, that kind of thing. That's why I moved to consoles - they uphold it for singleplayer and multiplayer too.

Since Sony has allowed heavily curated user content/mods before (Minecraft, Warframe, Rock Band on PS3, LittleBigPlanet as a whole), I'm guessing it boils down to them wanting more of a filter, and squabbles over the nature of restrictions and/or who's responsible for enforcing them.

Microsoft either doesn't have the same sensibilities in relation to these things, or was willing to put extra work in to faciliatate it, being a bit desperate as they try and catch up ground they lost in the start of the generation.

 

[Creator002]

I'd like to see if Sony comes back with anything. We've only got one side of the story so far, but Bethesda would be shooting themselves of it's not Sony's fault and they say it is.

 

[Cap'nPipsqueak]

I do blame them for promising it in the first place. Dick move, guys.

Bethesda were the ones that promised it, apparently without locking down the actual technicals of it or any sort of contract. Which is par for the course with Bethesda, promising the cart before the horse.

Well, that's not really fair. How could they have seen that Sony'd be this stupid? They're just mods for Christ's sake.

 

[sXeth]

I do blame them for promising it in the first place. Dick move, guys.

Bethesda were the ones that promised it, apparently without locking down the actual technicals of it or any sort of contract. Which is par for the course with Bethesda, promising the cart before the horse.

Well, that's not really fair. How could they have seen that Sony'd be this stupid? They're just mods for Christ's sake.

Well, analyzing some of the popular mods

UI - Relatively innocuous.
Various Animation and Textures - All potentially system destabilizing or overloading, would require assessment to determine compatibility with a console.
"Adult" content - Obviously out. But someone has to check for it, because its not all blatantly labelled, sometimes intentionally so.
Added Quests/Areas etc - Should work, but you have to verify they didn't toss one of #2 or #3 in on you.
Then there's various memes and parodies and stuff. Which are all harmless. I personally don't care and think they would fall under parody use (assuming you aren't rebuilding WArcraft in Skyrim or something), but the state of things we live in makes you potentially liable if you're hosting copyright infringing content.

There's multiple things that they might want or need to put a filter on, and Bethesda's statement basically says they didn't want any filters. There's no indication of what Sony's specific issue was, or how Microsoft addressed such potential concerns to make it work on there end.

Really, I think it'll be a hype letdown anyways. The single most popular mod is a UI designed for mouse/keyboard, then an unofficial bugfix. All the graphic enhancements and stuff are probably out, especially with the Remaster of Skyrim already upping the resource usage to the new gen's hardware. Similarly resource limits are gonna hinder any attempt to add too much new to the game (like, maybe one pack of weapons or whatever). So you mostly have custom quests left. Which're are pretty few and far between for quality.

 

[Vigormortis]

Modding is not in a good position on PC currently.

Uh...okay. The millions of available mods I can go and download, right now, off of any one of thousands of sites and services would probably beg to differ.

It is not dead, but it ain't like during the golden days in the late 90s and early 2000s.

'Scuse me? "Golden days"? You mean those days where a few dozen mods were all you could ever find because it was a figurative 'wild west' and you usually only found out about a mod from a friend who was brave enough to risk downloading it? Those the 'golden days' we're talking about?

The very existence of things like ModDB, Desura, Steam Workshop, etc, kinda negates your claim.

I've taken part in the 'modding scene' since the early 90s when friends passed Doom mods[footnote]Many of which were just edits of the ingame sprites.[/footnote] around via floppy disks. Modding has never been as good, as easy, or as robust as it is right now.

Things. Are. Always. Connected.

Well, unless there's a power outage.

 

[loa]

major limitations.

Like what?

Christ, I don't know. I don't work at Sony or Bethesda. And we only have an obscure quote to go from.

Evidently, it's enough to stop the PS4 from receiving the same mod support the Xbox already has.

Again, I doubt you needed this explaining to you. This is just extremely basic logic..

Extremely basic logic is also that microsoft allows "anything" onto their platform since the article says this is bethesdas uncompromising standard and that has ben proven wrong.

 

[Parasondox]

And then people ask me why I despise consoles...

Killing modding, one of gaming's sacred things... such is life I guess.

Uh...'scuse me? How is Sony's decision to not allow mods for one game on their console going to kill modding in general?

Let me see if I can suss out the logic here: Modding grew and flourished on PC for decades, with nary a presence on any console. Now, Sony continues that trend of blocking modding, and suddenly modding's going to die?

Nope. Can't suss it out. Makes fuck-all sense to me.

:/

It's similar to my annoyance with those who say "R.I.P. Audio Jack", as if it has just been killed off entirely. Newsflash idiots, millions of other devices uses the audio jack and it's the damn norm. One company saying goodbye to it doesn't make dead.

Zero damn sense.

 

[Avnger]

Modding is not in a good position on PC currently.

Uh...okay. The millions of available mods I can go and download, right now, off of any one of thousands of sites and services would probably beg to differ.

It is not dead, but it ain't like during the golden days in the late 90s and early 2000s.

'Scuse me? "Golden days"? You mean those days where a few dozen mods were all you could ever find because it was a figurative 'wild west' and you usually only found out about a mod from a friend who was brave enough to risk downloading it? Those the 'golden days' we're talking about?

The very existence of things like ModDB, Desura, Steam Workshop, etc, kinda negates your claim.

I've taken part in the 'modding scene' since the early 90s when friends passed Doom mods[footnote]Many of which were just edits of the ingame sprites.[/footnote] around via floppy disks. Modding has never been as good, as easy, or as robust as it is right now.

Things. Are. Always. Connected.

Well, unless there's a power outage.

How many newer titles support real high end modding.
Even Witcher 3 did not release with the (promised) high end modding tools. DOOM has no modding, just a cool but low end editor.

Wolfenstein also has no modding support. Partially due to the engine (can be overcome), true.

How many old titles released with high end modding tools? About the same damn many.

You also seem to be greatly neglecting the fact that games have progressed since your 'golden era.' Back then, an entire PC game could fit onto 1/2 of a CD and were put together with the most basic of design tools. Developing full HD 3D games such as your example to Witcher is stupidly complicated. You have more than 1 engine running under the hood, sometimes on top of each other. It was stupidly easier to dig into the files that came on the CD and change things than it is to due something similar now simply because of those developments in tech.

Honestly, name as many titles as you can from your 'golden era of modding' that had an easily available robust modding scene, and I'll be able to name at least as many games from the past decade that are doing just as well if not better on that front.

edit: My guess here is that your nostalgia is getting the better of you, and your conflating what was done with games like wolfenstein, doom, and duke nukem as literally every game. As @Vigormortis pointed out too, getting those mods onto your machine *safely* and then getting them to work properly was a giant pain in the ass due to the lack of web 2.0 infrastructure.

 

[Laughing Man]

Well, while it is fine to blame Sony on this one the fact that the statement comes from that scum pond Bethesda does leave me to pause and wait until we get a more neutral opinion on just who is really at fault on this one. Remember this is the company that was more than happy to sit back and take a nice skim of the money off other peoples hard work. Sittin back and doing fuck all while users charged for mods irrespective of weather or not they created the mod, stole it from somewhere else, renamed it, used assets from elsewhere, weather it even worked and offering no QC or end user support to the scene from which they were skimming the cash.

Just out of curiosity and knowing Bethesda's history here folks what if it turns out that Sony gave the go ahead for the mods but specifically told them that THEY would have to QC the mods THEY would have to veto the mods for content THEY would have make sure they worked and were stable and that if THEY ever decided to charge for the content they would have to pay Sony a lump sum for the right to do so and it turns of Bethesda refused because they believed that mods should be

'where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition.'

i.e we don't have to do any work on making sure the mods conform to any basic level of QC control, standard, content, or stability.

Besides who the fuck ever bought Fallout on a console for modding reasons. The game was released long before mod support for console was ever announced, no one bought the game at that time for that purpose and if they had they would have bought it on PC anyway. This sound a lot like Bethesda deflecting a promise they made long before making sure they could actually pull it off (again another Bethesda mainstay.)

 

[Strelok]

Should I be happy or sad about this?
If I really wanted mods I'd be a PC Gamer.
But if I got mods for Consoles, well, I'm not immature enough to say I'm too mature for nude mods.
....

Mods on console are heavily censored, you would never find mods like that.

I probably shouldn't have wanted ESO.
And I should've stayed away from PS4 until PS5.

There may not be a Playstation 5 or another XBox for that matter.
http://www.recode.net/2014/4/11/11625510/sonys-shuhei-yoshida-reflects-on-two-decades-of-playstation
http://segmentnext.com/2016/08/18/last-console-generation/

On topic, now that Sony realizes their competition is not the XBox but is the PC, the decision to remove mods is a bad move.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/281048/Andrew_House_PS4s_main_competitor_isnt_the_Xbox_its_the_PC.php

 

[RJ Dalton]

Well, I guess Bethesda will have to fix their own bugs for a change.

Pfft! Ha ha ha! Who am I kidding?

 

[DaCosta]

Good. Maybe now Bethesda will focus on making entire games, instead of just creating a map and saying "the users can make the content themselves if they want it so much".

How is Fallout 4 not an entire game? It may not be a particularly good game, it may not be the game you wanted it to be, but to say that it's not a complete game is kind of silly. There's a lot of content, but it's repetitive and there's not a lot of reason to replay. There is no way this is a good thing since all it does is deprive PS4 users of the huge amount of content that no Developer could ever hope to produce in that kind of time. The mindset of "why didn't the devs do this instead of modders" is ridiculous (barring bug fixes, but Fallout 4 has been their least buggy game in my experience) because where do you stop? Huge new areas of content, graphical upgrades, huge amounts of additional weapons and armors? The game would never come out if everything the modding community made (at least the stuff of quality) should be in the game.

I get it. You're bummed about Fallout 4. Plenty of people including myself are, but this is not a good thing for the people who don't get all this extra content.

Fallout 4? Never played it. Learned my lesson from Fallout 3. This behaviour is nothing new from them.

 

[RedDeadFred]

Good. Maybe now Bethesda will focus on making entire games, instead of just creating a map and saying "the users can make the content themselves if they want it so much".

How is Fallout 4 not an entire game? It may not be a particularly good game, it may not be the game you wanted it to be, but to say that it's not a complete game is kind of silly. There's a lot of content, but it's repetitive and there's not a lot of reason to replay. There is no way this is a good thing since all it does is deprive PS4 users of the huge amount of content that no Developer could ever hope to produce in that kind of time. The mindset of "why didn't the devs do this instead of modders" is ridiculous (barring bug fixes, but Fallout 4 has been their least buggy game in my experience) because where do you stop? Huge new areas of content, graphical upgrades, huge amounts of additional weapons and armors? The game would never come out if everything the modding community made (at least the stuff of quality) should be in the game.

I get it. You're bummed about Fallout 4. Plenty of people including myself are, but this is not a good thing for the people who don't get all this extra content.

Fallout 4? Never played it. Learned my lesson from Fallout 3. This behaviour is nothing new from them.

Even if I agreed with you on Fallout 3, it doesn't change anything as far as the point I was making. Whichever game caused you to dislike Bethesda isn't relevant.

You mindset is essentially "I don't like their games, so I'm glad that their customers aren't getting a cool feature." The only real benefit you could gain from this is that it somehow causes so many people to dislike Bethesda (even though it's Sony on this issue), creating such horrible losses for the company that they never make games again. This would I guess free up space for games to be made from developers who you like more. Alright... seems like a rather destructive position to have, but you do you.