I feel like Bethesda built a neat mechanic into the engine, the in-game building, but then never did much with it. Yes, you can build a settlement, but the actual task is mostly pretty basic, not much integration or planning to it, and could be a bit grindy.The Sim Settlements 2 mod to which I assume you’re referring did a better job, though I still feel like one could do far more with player construction than has been done in any of:
Vanilla Fallout 4: layout matters very little, building is mostly a sandbox for aesthetic fun, not much by way of layout decisions other than making some more expensive things harder for raiders to hit. Does have the “The Castle” fight, but that’s short and about it for a real fight. Kind of grindy. Can get aid from the Minutemen if a settlement is nearby with th flaregun mechanic, though that’s pretty minor and I never bothered. Get some settler-produced resources which don’t matter. Get a sleeping spot, which can matter in hardcore mode. Not Sim City or Caesar in 3D.
Fallout 4 with minor mods: can remove more items in an area to get a cleaner look; some of these break precombines, which hurt engine performance. Can build anywhere, not just in settlements. Can break the restrictions imposed by vanilla Fallout 4 on number of items that can be built (which keep performance sane).
Fallout 4 modded with Sim Settlements 2. Does a better – albeit still kinda sketchy from a story standpoint – job of incorporating building into the game, has a storyline and quests. Eliminates the grind aspect – you can just take a settlement and let the settlers do almost all the construction, and get much-more-elaborate reconstruction of the Wasteland then I’d manually do. Does some rebalancing so that the weight on the Local Leader perk to make settlements trade, a major QoL improvement, is basically free. Gives me more of a feeling of progress. Plays reasonably well with people doing manual construction alongside the computer-driven stuff. More-substantial automated production. The randomized stuff malign what shows up something of a surprise helps keep it a bit interesting. Makes the game feel a lot more active. Still doesn’t have a lot of gameplay around layout.
Fallout 76: Player CAMPs are very important to the game, as they contain essential equipment, and defending them is important. Still not a lot to the layout in terms of gameplay. Some people (not me – I’m in the “floating platform” crowd) really enjoy doing realistic and aesthetic CAMPs, and it’s a way to help put a very limited form of player-driven content creation into a form where everyone can easily enjoy it. Player vending machines, scrapboxes, respec locations, and workbenches (to create scrapping locations for overloaded players) create a reason for other players to visit and see them. Extremely limited automated production of certain resources – if you want some very specific builds, like Nuka-Cola-based weaponry, automated production might be useful, but in general, it’s not worth your time.
There are player Shelters as well, “underground” or otherwise off-the-main-map mini maps that players can own and build freely in; there are entered from various entrances created in a player CAMP. I think that this was intended to leverage a survival aspect of Fallout 76 that was originally intended to be a lot more important – radstorms, and needing to seek shelter. These are so infrequent and weak, though, that by the time one gets to Shelters, they’re essentially ignorable. Nothing in a Shelter can be attacked by raiders, but automated production does not work in a Shelter.
With a subscription, there are placeable Tents that can be put on the map in places not one’s CAMP. These provide a resting, scrapbox, and scrapping location that can exist anywhere. Helpful QoL to stick near boss fight locations.
Bethesda sells cosmetic items, if you like that sort of thing (which based on EA’s sales of items for The Sims, I assume some people very much do like). Not very much potential for modding here, due to it being a multiplayer game with the servers run by Bethesda, so unless Bethesda gets and decides to plunge a lot of money into it, vanilla Fallout 76 is probably about as much as there’s going to be.
Starfield. Meaningful automated production system and resource-hunting system, with slightly more-interesting layout and defense. The problem here is that the only real gameplay reason to build bases is to…get lots of resources, which are only really useful to build large bases. It lets players who don’t like building skip that aspect of the game, but at least to me, made the building aspect feel kind of pointless and circular. We’ll see what happens with mods. The engine is good, and there’s potential for interesting things to happen, but if they don’t get created, well…
I mean, it’s fine as a stand-alone game, and selecting and setting up a collection of mods takes longer than I’d like. I kind of wish that the default starting point was to do something like what Wabbajack does, use a large curated set of mods, but then let one tweak it like the regular mod managers. But Skyrim and Fallout 4 have to be some of the most-modded games out there. It’s a lot of content and improvements from the community.
They also released some years back. Without mods, they look kinda old in present-day context.
I mean you do you, but Beth games are modding playgrounds, the only other games I can think of really is Rimworld. So for me, playing a Bethesda game modless is like eating a sandwhich of white bread and mayo
I’m picturing the number of messages they’d receive the day the update hit. People suck. Most will understand that they need to hold off on updating if they want to play the mod, some will seek support when it breaks. Some of those will say “that makes sense” and disappointedly wait for the mod to update, some of those will get angry. I certainly wouldn’t want an inevitable flood of angry emails a few days after the big release.
Yup, if you use mods, it’s a good idea to set the game to update on launch through the game’s properties menu in its steam library listing.
Since a F4SE nodded game is going to launch through the script extender’s launcher, that keeps the game from updating automatically when starting a play session.
I also like to make a copy of my game folder and save it off in another drive so I have a backup.
Never heard of this project. I mean sounds like a cool mod, but why is this news, and why does a mod need to care about a release date? They’re not selling a product, they can release whenever lol.
The Fallout 4 script extender will be what breaks after the next-gen update, so the Fallout London team will have to just wait and see what happens and then change the framework before making everything compatible. These problems are why Fallout London’s release date got pushed back indefinitely.
They can’t release the mod until the Fallout 4 script extender gets updated to work with the update, since (like most mods) they rely on F4SE to add additional capabilities to the game.
I’ve had it for a couple of years but just never got around to playing it. Was excited to do that now after watching the show but after the update it just instantly crashes after clicking “play” on the launcher (completely fresh install, all drivers etc updated). This seems to be very common too, tons of posts about it on the steam discussions. Sadly not super surprised, it’s Bethesda after all.
I was disappointed in myself for buying it when it first came out. I hope there has been a LOT of patching, because at release it was boring AF. Especially coming from FO3 where dialog options and story branching actually mattered. In FO4 I remember purposely choosing the dumbest dialog options and the game just led me where it wanted me to go anyway.
This disappointment was compounded by me also buying Just Cause 3 at the same time… Holy shit what a garbage weekend that was. That was the day I vowed to never buy a game on presale again.
Pretty sure this was fully intended. You’re getting a bunch of band new buyers from the TV show. This can be a way to direct them towards their CC and away from free mods.
I doubt it. Most people seem to regard Creation Club content as something different than regular mods. You can check out the content that’s available here but a majority of it is closer to the paid skins found in online games than what people typically associate with modding and meaningfully altering a game.
I think Bethesda knows this and most people looking to mod Fallout 4 are probably going to continue working with what’s available.
I made sure to download my copy of FO4 from GOG since it hasnt updated yet. Shame London won’t release on GOG (who will be hosting it) still while they work on fixing it for the new version.
Yep, I had to grit my teeth and fork over those $10 in GoG for the 1.10.163. I think I will be buying from them first before Steam from now on. Glad they have auto updates disabled options too.
Every single time this happens, people act like its the first time. Game updates -> Script Extender breaks -> Mods reliant on it break too. Every. Single. Time.
I used to run a popular mod that made an indie beta game even more popular. Guess who almost all of the final testers were before release? My whole team. We were clearly the most devoted people to the game and knew best how to break it. It was nice to get a head-start on our new mod (which we pivoted to be the equivalent of Steam Workshop or an app store before those existed). Of course, the creator became a dickwad years later and we all ended the mod and the game is dead.
but this is a game that basically lives and dies by its mods, and this is an update that (arguably) changed nothing anyone who is still playing the game cares about after years of stability. why fix what isn’t broken?
Supposedly, the biggest change was simply removing the launcher. Because in order to be steam deck verified, it can’t have the intermediary launcher that interrupts the game booting.
But removing that apparently broke a lot of other things for a lot of people. Supposedly, doing a fresh install helps. Apparently the update fucks some stuff, but a completely fresh install will be buttery smooth. At least, that’s the scuttlebutt. But that doesn’t include mods which have been broken, (and many which aren’t being actively updated anymore, because why bother updating a mod for a game that hasn’t had an update in years?)
Can’t help but feel for the developers here. I get that Bethesda has no responsibility to keep 3rd party Devs updated, but surely someone on the team would have noticed the potential for community engagement and worked with those putting the time and effort into the IP.
My understanding is, they didn’t know what to get ready for. It’s like somebody saying “I’m going to change the game a lot, watch out!” So what do you do then? Sit around and not develop anything for 2 years because it might be based on code that will change?
It sucks that this was the outcome as it’s going to require a ton of work from the modders, but to expect that a major publisher would involve the unofficial modding community in the release of official patches feels insane, even if they do have a sizable following.
In fact, I prefer it this way. I want the publisher to keep their fingers out of what the modders do as much as possible. Things are their best when the publisher is ignorant of their work. Less chance that the Eye of Sauron that is their legal department starts checking over mods for potential copyright lawsuits
“This thing they announced for last year, then pushed back to this year and released to coincide with a massively hyped TV show was a complete surprise to us.” Is that really FO:London’s stance? I mean, I feel for them that it sucks, but to call it a surprise feels straight up disingenuous.
How do you prepare for an update when Bethesda don’t tell you what is changing? It says in the article they had literally no correspondence from Bethesda until the update dropped, so the only thing they could do was keep developing and hope not too much broke in the process.
That being said, from what I understand is that the script extender broke, so they’re just waiting for an undefined time until that gets fixed for the latest update.
There’s a pretty extensive API, capable of more than most games that advertise modding support, but it can’t do literally everything anyone could think of, so people reverse engineer the game engine to make it possible to do even more things (hence it being called a script extender rather than the modding API). It’s the mod reliant on reverse engineering the executable that break, not the ones using the modding API.
Imagine if Bethesda actually really listened to and catered to their modding community instead of just trying to monetize them. They would be legend right now.
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Am I the only person who never installed a single mod for any Bethesda game?
Nah, I’m right there with you.
Agree with whay the other person said. Mods for these games are incredible, often better than the core game. Definitely do it
This marks you as having several personality traits. Do you vote or lean conservative?
Username checks out. Nope you’re way off
hah, yes it does. and good, glad to hear it ;)
Weird flex
Not a flex, just find it astounding to know how good the original games were and for people to say they suck without mods. I see that a lot.
you’re missing out hundreds and thousands of awesome fan made content, there’s even entire fan made dlcs
Don’t forget the hundred-hour-long minigame of “Which order do these mods need to load in so they don’t break again?”
Modding is a hobby, and just like other hobbies, tinkering is part of the fun.
That automated settlement mod for FO4 single handedly rekindled my interest in the game.
I’m not building one more goddamn water purifier for you lazy bastards 😤
… Unless I see you have a slight shortage in your build plan
I feel like Bethesda built a neat mechanic into the engine, the in-game building, but then never did much with it. Yes, you can build a settlement, but the actual task is mostly pretty basic, not much integration or planning to it, and could be a bit grindy.The Sim Settlements 2 mod to which I assume you’re referring did a better job, though I still feel like one could do far more with player construction than has been done in any of:
Vanilla Fallout 4: layout matters very little, building is mostly a sandbox for aesthetic fun, not much by way of layout decisions other than making some more expensive things harder for raiders to hit. Does have the “The Castle” fight, but that’s short and about it for a real fight. Kind of grindy. Can get aid from the Minutemen if a settlement is nearby with th flaregun mechanic, though that’s pretty minor and I never bothered. Get some settler-produced resources which don’t matter. Get a sleeping spot, which can matter in hardcore mode. Not Sim City or Caesar in 3D.
Fallout 4 with minor mods: can remove more items in an area to get a cleaner look; some of these break precombines, which hurt engine performance. Can build anywhere, not just in settlements. Can break the restrictions imposed by vanilla Fallout 4 on number of items that can be built (which keep performance sane).
Fallout 4 modded with Sim Settlements 2. Does a better – albeit still kinda sketchy from a story standpoint – job of incorporating building into the game, has a storyline and quests. Eliminates the grind aspect – you can just take a settlement and let the settlers do almost all the construction, and get much-more-elaborate reconstruction of the Wasteland then I’d manually do. Does some rebalancing so that the weight on the Local Leader perk to make settlements trade, a major QoL improvement, is basically free. Gives me more of a feeling of progress. Plays reasonably well with people doing manual construction alongside the computer-driven stuff. More-substantial automated production. The randomized stuff malign what shows up something of a surprise helps keep it a bit interesting. Makes the game feel a lot more active. Still doesn’t have a lot of gameplay around layout.
Fallout 76: Player CAMPs are very important to the game, as they contain essential equipment, and defending them is important. Still not a lot to the layout in terms of gameplay. Some people (not me – I’m in the “floating platform” crowd) really enjoy doing realistic and aesthetic CAMPs, and it’s a way to help put a very limited form of player-driven content creation into a form where everyone can easily enjoy it. Player vending machines, scrapboxes, respec locations, and workbenches (to create scrapping locations for overloaded players) create a reason for other players to visit and see them. Extremely limited automated production of certain resources – if you want some very specific builds, like Nuka-Cola-based weaponry, automated production might be useful, but in general, it’s not worth your time.
There are player Shelters as well, “underground” or otherwise off-the-main-map mini maps that players can own and build freely in; there are entered from various entrances created in a player CAMP. I think that this was intended to leverage a survival aspect of Fallout 76 that was originally intended to be a lot more important – radstorms, and needing to seek shelter. These are so infrequent and weak, though, that by the time one gets to Shelters, they’re essentially ignorable. Nothing in a Shelter can be attacked by raiders, but automated production does not work in a Shelter.
With a subscription, there are placeable Tents that can be put on the map in places not one’s CAMP. These provide a resting, scrapbox, and scrapping location that can exist anywhere. Helpful QoL to stick near boss fight locations.
Bethesda sells cosmetic items, if you like that sort of thing (which based on EA’s sales of items for The Sims, I assume some people very much do like). Not very much potential for modding here, due to it being a multiplayer game with the servers run by Bethesda, so unless Bethesda gets and decides to plunge a lot of money into it, vanilla Fallout 76 is probably about as much as there’s going to be.
Starfield. Meaningful automated production system and resource-hunting system, with slightly more-interesting layout and defense. The problem here is that the only real gameplay reason to build bases is to…get lots of resources, which are only really useful to build large bases. It lets players who don’t like building skip that aspect of the game, but at least to me, made the building aspect feel kind of pointless and circular. We’ll see what happens with mods. The engine is good, and there’s potential for interesting things to happen, but if they don’t get created, well…
Yeah probably
I mean, it’s fine as a stand-alone game, and selecting and setting up a collection of mods takes longer than I’d like. I kind of wish that the default starting point was to do something like what Wabbajack does, use a large curated set of mods, but then let one tweak it like the regular mod managers. But Skyrim and Fallout 4 have to be some of the most-modded games out there. It’s a lot of content and improvements from the community.
They also released some years back. Without mods, they look kinda old in present-day context.
I mean you do you, but Beth games are modding playgrounds, the only other games I can think of really is Rimworld. So for me, playing a Bethesda game modless is like eating a sandwhich of white bread and mayo
Why do they need to release for the newest version? If they were going to release soon anyways, just release for the old version of Fallout.
deleted by creator
I’m picturing the number of messages they’d receive the day the update hit. People suck. Most will understand that they need to hold off on updating if they want to play the mod, some will seek support when it breaks. Some of those will say “that makes sense” and disappointedly wait for the mod to update, some of those will get angry. I certainly wouldn’t want an inevitable flood of angry emails a few days after the big release.
Yeah it doesn’t help that the Steam version would likely try to auto-update and I don’t believe there is an easy way to downgrade.
I could be wrong about that latter point. There might be an option in the properties menu similar to how you can opt into betas.
Yup, if you use mods, it’s a good idea to set the game to update on launch through the game’s properties menu in its steam library listing.
Since a F4SE nodded game is going to launch through the script extender’s launcher, that keeps the game from updating automatically when starting a play session.
I also like to make a copy of my game folder and save it off in another drive so I have a backup.
I know it’s been possible to downgrade Skyrim after updates, but not through any official means, might be the same with FO4, not sure though.
You have to disable automatic updates manually but it is possible.
Seriously, especially if it really screwed them over. And I thought he was just celebrating this?
Never heard of this project. I mean sounds like a cool mod, but why is this news, and why does a mod need to care about a release date? They’re not selling a product, they can release whenever lol.
Do you think under a communist gift economy, release dates for media wouldn’t matter?
It’s in the article, dude:
They can’t release the mod until the Fallout 4 script extender gets updated to work with the update, since (like most mods) they rely on F4SE to add additional capabilities to the game.
I’m disappointed in myself for buying FO4 recently.
If you just bought it, just play it. You don’t need mods.
I can’t play fnv without wmx anymore. I’m spoiled. Does fo4 weapon mod good?
FO4 has built in modding for weapons and armor. There are some great expansion mods that add mods too.
Dammit I just gotta buy this game already.
I’ve had it for a couple of years but just never got around to playing it. Was excited to do that now after watching the show but after the update it just instantly crashes after clicking “play” on the launcher (completely fresh install, all drivers etc updated). This seems to be very common too, tons of posts about it on the steam discussions. Sadly not super surprised, it’s Bethesda after all.
This is untrue. Without the boner points to nearest valuable loot mod the game is unplayable.
I was disappointed in myself for buying it when it first came out. I hope there has been a LOT of patching, because at release it was boring AF. Especially coming from FO3 where dialog options and story branching actually mattered. In FO4 I remember purposely choosing the dumbest dialog options and the game just led me where it wanted me to go anyway.
This disappointment was compounded by me also buying Just Cause 3 at the same time… Holy shit what a garbage weekend that was. That was the day I vowed to never buy a game on presale again.
Just Cause 2 was so much fun!
And nothing will ever beat FO:NV.
4 has been ok.
“The new book has, for lack of a better term, completely screwed over my fanfiction”
“These books live and die by their fanfiction. For the authors not to coordinate with the fanfic writers is a disgrace”
My dude, we’re talking about Bethesda. The community fixing their broken-ass games is a time honored tradition.
Pretty sure this was fully intended. You’re getting a bunch of band new buyers from the TV show. This can be a way to direct them towards their CC and away from free mods.
I doubt it. Most people seem to regard Creation Club content as something different than regular mods. You can check out the content that’s available here but a majority of it is closer to the paid skins found in online games than what people typically associate with modding and meaningfully altering a game.
I think Bethesda knows this and most people looking to mod Fallout 4 are probably going to continue working with what’s available.
BGS: because fuck you, that’s why.
I made sure to download my copy of FO4 from GOG since it hasnt updated yet. Shame London won’t release on GOG (who will be hosting it) still while they work on fixing it for the new version.
Yep, I had to grit my teeth and fork over those $10 in GoG for the 1.10.163. I think I will be buying from them first before Steam from now on. Glad they have auto updates disabled options too.
Every single time this happens, people act like its the first time. Game updates -> Script Extender breaks -> Mods reliant on it break too. Every. Single. Time.
I used to run a popular mod that made an indie beta game even more popular. Guess who almost all of the final testers were before release? My whole team. We were clearly the most devoted people to the game and knew best how to break it. It was nice to get a head-start on our new mod (which we pivoted to be the equivalent of Steam Workshop or an app store before those existed). Of course, the creator became a dickwad years later and we all ended the mod and the game is dead.
but this is a game that basically lives and dies by its mods, and this is an update that (arguably) changed nothing anyone who is still playing the game cares about after years of stability. why fix what isn’t broken?
Supposedly, the biggest change was simply removing the launcher. Because in order to be steam deck verified, it can’t have the intermediary launcher that interrupts the game booting.
But removing that apparently broke a lot of other things for a lot of people. Supposedly, doing a fresh install helps. Apparently the update fucks some stuff, but a completely fresh install will be buttery smooth. At least, that’s the scuttlebutt. But that doesn’t include mods which have been broken, (and many which aren’t being actively updated anymore, because why bother updating a mod for a game that hasn’t had an update in years?)
Can’t help but feel for the developers here. I get that Bethesda has no responsibility to keep 3rd party Devs updated, but surely someone on the team would have noticed the potential for community engagement and worked with those putting the time and effort into the IP.
I remember hearing about the current-gen upgrade a long time ago. Why is this a surprise?
it was announced quite literally 2 years ago. that is plenty of time to get ready for
I have no idea how modding works, but how would they get ready for a patch without having the files in advance?
My understanding is, they didn’t know what to get ready for. It’s like somebody saying “I’m going to change the game a lot, watch out!” So what do you do then? Sit around and not develop anything for 2 years because it might be based on code that will change?
It sucks that this was the outcome as it’s going to require a ton of work from the modders, but to expect that a major publisher would involve the unofficial modding community in the release of official patches feels insane, even if they do have a sizable following.
In fact, I prefer it this way. I want the publisher to keep their fingers out of what the modders do as much as possible. Things are their best when the publisher is ignorant of their work. Less chance that the Eye of Sauron that is their legal department starts checking over mods for potential copyright lawsuits
“This thing they announced for last year, then pushed back to this year and released to coincide with a massively hyped TV show was a complete surprise to us.” Is that really FO:London’s stance? I mean, I feel for them that it sucks, but to call it a surprise feels straight up disingenuous.
How do you prepare for an update when Bethesda don’t tell you what is changing? It says in the article they had literally no correspondence from Bethesda until the update dropped, so the only thing they could do was keep developing and hope not too much broke in the process.
That being said, from what I understand is that the script extender broke, so they’re just waiting for an undefined time until that gets fixed for the latest update.
The script extender breaks with every update and is usually fixed within a week.
Have they never had to deal with a Bethesda patch before!?
For a company that relies 100% on modders for their games, you’d think they’d have an actual modding API built into their games by now.
if bethesda relied 100% on modders then fo3 and new vegas and morrowind and oblivion and skyrim would have completely failed on console. did they?
There’s a pretty extensive API, capable of more than most games that advertise modding support, but it can’t do literally everything anyone could think of, so people reverse engineer the game engine to make it possible to do even more things (hence it being called a script extender rather than the modding API). It’s the mod reliant on reverse engineering the executable that break, not the ones using the modding API.
Imagine if Bethesda actually really listened to and catered to their modding community instead of just trying to monetize them. They would be legend right now.