Starfield is going to be open to mods, and you’ll be able to do things with it that seem to have not been enabled by other space exploration games before.
As reported by MP1st, Pete Hines was on the Bethesda MainStream Special about Women in Gaming Twitch stream. Pete said this about modding on Starfield:
“There’s a lot more coming and when you start to think about the kind of community that comes around Bethesda Game Studios games and putting a tool like that in the hands of people that go, “how would you like to make a planet?”
Like, all of that is going to just be off the charts. When you start getting your community come in and add all the different things that they want to bring to it. Their own stories they want to tell.”
Bethesda, of course, has a rich history of modding for their games. To this day, the number of mods for both Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim keeps on increasing, and gamers do still download and play them.
Bethesda has come to understand that modders making their own content is not about wanting to replace their own stories, or content. It’s an expression of passion from their own audience, that they want to make their own modifications to better fit things that they want in it, big and small. Bethesda also isn’t the only company who has come to acknowledge and tolerate this, as Rockstar has demonstrated a lot of tolerance for their modders running roleplay servers, in spite of their work blatantly breaking their own terms and condition for playing Grand Theft Auto 5.
But with Starfield we are entering a new era. As Bethesda has confirmed that it will allow Starfield mods, this will be the first such game to do so after Microsoft acquired the studio. Now, we have seen that Microsoft gives their studios freedom to do what they want, to a fault.
So who knows what will be possible with Starfield modding? I’m sure I’m not the only one already thinking about running Starfield mods on Xbox, or even Game Pass on the cloud. How would that even work? And would Microsoft really clear everything to make that happen? But it would be exciting to see, too.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
