168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield just can’t catch a break. I’d feel bad for it if Bethesda wasn’t the one busy stepping on space rakes dotted across its intergalactic garden, but it is, so here we are. Days after an impressive showing for the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shattered Space expansion ♌at Summer Games Fest, debuted Creation Club on Xbox and PC which allows players to purchase and download official mods and community-made. Like ❀c🎃lockwork, fans have commenced the review-bombing.

When console mod support for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout 4 was first announced ahead of its release way back in 2015♚, it was a big deal, and𓆉 felt like a fundamental evolution for open world video games. But by turning that passionate community effort into a means for triple-A titles to make even more profit, it feels like creativity is being cast aside in favour of something more sinister.

Mods Should Be By Fans And For Fans

Mods, a feature previously locked behind PC versions and technical knowledge, was brought to hom🌼e consoles. In theory, you could take the base experience o🌜f Fallout and Skyrim and kit them out with mods both beneficial and absurd. Turns out it was too good to be true, because, of course, Bethesda saw it as an opportunity to make some extra profit.

Much like Fallout 4 and Skyrim did, Starfield’s Creation Club offers paid and free mods made by Bethesda and players, with the majority of the former coming in the form of cosmetic additions and other additions that players believe should be adde𓃲d for free, especially considering how lacking Starfield is in its current form. Instead of pushing content out to fans that deserve a break, it wants to nickel and dime them. This is a large reason why Fallout 4 and Skyrim were so badly received after introducing similar practices, but it seems Bethesda is not interested in learning from its past mistakes, even with a game that needs a public win.

Art for Starfield's Shattered Space DLC, showing a purple sky full of stars. A character walks towards a strange tower.

The anger is justified, as the corporation takes a grassroots component of gaming - mods - and tuꦬrns them into yet another product to be exploited. Certain mods are free, but charging for any of them at all is enough to set alarm bells ringing. Mods are a product of player passion and creativity, and in the case of Bethesda titles, frequently solve many of the problems the developer overlooked during core development.

Mods would fix bugs, refine inventory systems, improve mechanics, and make games better over the course of months and years, while grander efforts like Skyblivion and Fallout 2 are fully-fledged remakes that use the foundations Bethesda provided to create something new. Bethesda should take pride in how its games are valued not just as intꦛeractive experiences, but as the bedrock of creativity for thousands of budding developers. Instead, the Creation Club feels like a way to not just take advantage of mods, but undermine those who create them.

Bethesda’s History With Mods Can’t Be Forgotten

Surviving the post apocalyptic Boston in Fallout 4

User-created mods have been a core part of video games for decades, especially on PC where large൩r, more ambitious titles ripe for experimentation used to be more commonplace. I remember building my first PC in 2012 and spending the following summer playing through games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim, but stopping constantly to play around with all the console comm🌠ands, installing mods just to see if they’d change my playthrough or break it apart. Part of the joy came from jumping into forums and interacting with creators, or letting a tiny little Google search lead me down a rabbit hole of mods I would stay inside for hours.

Starfield’s behaviour feels doubly egregious when you consider that La𝓰rian will be introduci♕ng official modding tools for Baldur’s Gate 3 soon, and won’t ask for anything.

With Creation Club, 🌃Bethesda wanted to make mods more approachable fo♐r mainstream audiences and console players, millions of whom picked up Fallout 3 and Skyrim yet had no way of interacting with this core part of Bethesda’s identity. To make this possible, it had to create a centralised storefront where mods could be downloaded, uploaded, and curated, so the very best inventions rose to the top.

And so Creation Club was born, and soon after came opportunities to introd♈uce paid mods where money could be made. It would have been fine if, like Fortnite or something, you could support indꦉividual creators by going to their mods and interacting with them, but Bethesda’s intentions here are woefully obvious.

The player fighting a Frost Troll in Skyrim

Bethesda games 🍒have always grown, improved, and been gradually iterated upon thanks to mods, so much so that fans fixing games like Fallout 3, Skyri♏m, and now Starfield long after launch has become a well-worn joke. But we never used to hold that against it, knowing that to create games this vast and ambitious means not everything can be perfect.

Things have changed though, and still charging for mods for games which have refused to change in the modern era only serves to highlight how out of touch Beth𓂃esda really are.

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Your Rating

168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Starfield
Action
RPG
Systems
4.0/5
Top Critic Avg: 85/100 Critics Rec: 83%
Released
September 6, 2023
ESRB
M For Mature 17+ Due To Bl💞ood, Suggestive Them🔥es, Use of Drugs, Strong Language, Violence
Developer(s)
Bethesda
Publisher(s)
Bethesda
Engine
proprietary engine

WHERE TO PLAY

SUBSCRIPTION
DIGITAL
PHYSICAL

Starfield is the first new IP from Bethesda in a quarter of a century, launched for the next-gen Xbox Series X|S and PC. Taking place outside our own Solar System, you play a member of the Constellation, a collective of explorers set on discovering𒊎 new worlds.