Modding has been one of the unique “genre definers” in video games. It started out small and technically during the days of the arcade cabinet. Then it slowly grew to something where whole communities of programmers have come together to make unique things and put them into titles that weren’t meant to have this stuff. To those modders’ joy, certain companies, like Bethesda, have embraced the modding community and have made their games easy to mod so that they can have fun with them. However, with Bethesda’s latest release, Starfield, things are a bit different according to one new modding group.
Now, to be clear, there is already modding going on in the title. You might have used one not to have a limit on your gear-carrying capabilities, and some people have even been able to do stuff with space travel and graphical quality. However, for the team at the Starfield Community Patch group they’re trying to improve the overall game by helping remove the bugs that players keep noticing, and Bethesda isn’t fixing. One of the heads of that group, Timothy Halgari Baldrige, noted to Eurogamer that right now, the group is having a hard time doing things because Bethesda clearly didn’t have “modding in mind” when they did parts of the game:
“It is evident from analysing both the data structures in the provided module files and from decompiling game code that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now. This can also be inferred from the fact that there has been no quality assurance testing of modding functionality from Bethesda, as various current engine bugs that appear in the context of using mods would have been obvious showstoppers. Any existing modding capabilities appear to be incidental, stemming from the engine’s legacy code base and the required work needed in that context to maintain functionality within the confines of editing Starfield.esm using the internal version of CK2.”
Or, in other words, instead of modding the game, people have had to “hack” the game. That’s why you haven’t seen numerous amounts of mods in the title when you compare them to past Bethesda titles. The team also was able to get some things working simply because they’re experienced and know how to work code. However, as stated, Bethesda didn’t have teams like theirs in mind so soon after launch, which hurt their efforts to help make the game better.
Official mod support is intended for next year, but no definitive release date has been given.
