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5 hours agoOne thing that annoys me about loading animations designed to conceal the game needing to load is that there’s no guarantee that — especially with PC games, as the game is played on faster computers — the bottleneck may become the animation completing rather than the actual loading.
Static loading screens don’t have this problem.
I kind of like Fallout 4’s approach of putting a single model up that you can rotate and look at while something is loading. It’ll add to the loading time a bit, but at least there’s something the player can fiddle with for a few seconds.
I generally agree that improving mod accessibility to the public is desirable.
I just stuck maybe a couple hundred mods into Starfield this week using Creations, including a number of paid ones. I’m fine with paid mods, but Bethesda still needs to deal with some basic issues.
While I had fewer problems than I had with installing mods on prior Bethesda games using third-party mod managers, the need to troubleshoot hasn’t gone away. I installed some high-resolution texture mods that crashed Starfield shortly after boot. Bethesda doesn’t detect crashes in that scenario and offer a way to “roll back” to a “safe mode” or anything like that. I poked around a bit, and, as with their prior games, Starfield has a plugins.txt containing a list of modules loaded, and one can just remove the leading asterisk to disable them. But that’s going to be unacceptable for general use if you want all players to have access to mods. Either troubleshooting has to be pretty idiot-proof, or not be necessary at all. You definitely can’t put someone in a situation where they effectively can’t access the mod manager.
For more-advanced users, troubleshooting tools still aren’t great. Bethesda would benefit from something that can at least do a binary-search for a breaking mod: turn off the latter half of a problematic mod list, see if the problem goes away. If it does, the problem is in the latter half; repeat for that half. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the first half; repeat for that half. Various tools that I’ve used in the past can do this, like
git bisect. Conflict Catcher on the classic MacOS had a particularly good implementation that could detect multiple extensions that conflicted with each other; I’ve never seen another tool do this.Bethesda doesn’t, AFAICT, do adult mods in their own mod repository, which are popular for a number of their prior games. Nexusmods carries things that Creations doesn’t. LoversLab carries things that Nexusmods doesn’t. I appreciate if Microsoft doesn’t want to be in the business of distributing adult mods. However, I am confident that a lot of people would like to use those, as with prior Bethesda games. If one wants a lower bar to use, not requiring use of external mod managers would be desirable. I do think that extending the in-game mod manager to support external mod repositories would lower the barrier there. If Bethesda wants their game to be a platform, then that means more stuff strengthens the platform.
Loading time still increases as mod count rises, as with prior Bethesda games. It can easily take minutes. It should be possible, at bare minimum, to have a progress bar up showing about how long it’ll take to complete load based on prior loads, if the mod list hasn’t changed. Personally, I’d like to see the load time reduced. If they have to validate content or something or build an index, only do it the first time a mod list changes and then cache the index.
It’d be nice to have a “recommends” option. That is, if a mod requires another mod, when installing the first mod, ask the user if they want to install the latter mod. Nexusmods can do this. Bethesda’s Creations can’t — they will keep one from enabling an installed mod with missing dependencies, but the user basically needs to read mod descriptions and install appropriate dependency mods. That’s a barrier to use.
Bethesda’s Creations store just has abysmal filtering options. I get that it’s for a single game, and so it’s hard to amortize costs, but browsing through what’s there is just atrocious. You don’t have the ability to apply multiple criteria when searching for games.
The Creations store always re-downloads the list of Creations, instead of caching it. Exit Creations and go back in and everything gets re-downloaded again. This is obnoxious.
I understand that there are some technical limitations associated with the Creations mod manager. The Dark Mode Terminal mod, for example, says that the Creations release cannot work around a bug associated with changing mod load order that the Nexus release doesn’t have a problem with.
One popular thing to make as mods in many games is skins or cosmetic changes, like to clothing or the like. Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 had “cinematic kills”, where sometimes the camera would pan away, allowing one to see one’s own character. Starfield doesn’t do this, which means that there are few opportunities to see one’s character, unless one leaves the camera in third-person (which is generally not great from a gameplay standpoint). This is an issue that I also would say applies to Cyberpunk 2077’s clothing options — lots of work went into creating many clothing options, but one so rarely actually sees oneself in the game that it has little impact. Ditto for a number of cosmetic options, like hairstyle and the like. I think that it’d be beneficial if they could work some way to see oneself more frequently into the game in terms of people reskinning things.
For Fallout 76, Bethesda made money by mostly selling cosmetic items used by people who want to build themed player CAMPs. I was never personally very interested in building elaborate CAMPs just for the sake of looks, though clearly there are some people who are. However, my take is that these items were generally quite expensive compared to the cost of assets in the base game, though I’ll admit that I don’t know what volume they sell at. At least for me, the idea of paying for more content and functionality, to keep expanding that aspect of the game, is interesting. Buying cosmetic clutter items isn’t terribly interesting. I’m sure that they gather statistics on what players actually get, and Starfield’s Creations seem to me to have a different focus than the Fallout 76 Creations, so that’s good so far as it goes from my standpoint. My own interest would be in, say, getting new handcrafted cities and quests and the like. Getting a new player home or a different style of couch to put in it doesn’t really interest me nearly as much.
I am pretty convinced that if Bethesda wants to have a low bar to extensively-modded games for the general playerbase, they’re going to have native support for something like Wabbajack. That lets one player or team assemble a curated mod collection, and then lets other users install it en masse. I’m not saying that using mods should end there, but my experience is that, years after a Bethesda game has come out, there are many different mods in similar areas (e.g. relighting mods, say). Some of those are successor mods. Some have advantages and drawbacks. Trying to evaluate what the best “current” choice is for a wide variety of mod types is a large task. Letting someone just choose from a list of “mod collections” and easily install all of the mods in a collection would, I think, greatly reduce the bar to get players able to use many mods at once.