Being that Skyrim is such a big thing around the veritable Gameranx offices (Ed: we don't actually have offices), we wanted to take the time and look into how the developers at Bethesda were seeing the future of modding in Skyrim via the Bethesda Podcast. Read on as we bring you all the juicy tidbits!
Valve’s Dave Sawyer and Bethesda’s Joel Burgess join the podcast and discussion concerning Skyrim begins with the community’s involvement in modding. They note how there were so many players issuing models and using the development tools that it was impossible to keep up at some times. Sawyer and Burgess then talk a bit about how they met and how they began collaborating together concerning Skyrim and its place on Steam via Valve.
They are then asked about how they dealt with the huge user response to the Valve Workshop. “We want to give them as wide an audience as possible for their work,” says Sawyer, noting how he wants the community to thrive more than ever. Burgess then went on to talk on game developers and their resistance to allowing a mod community: “It’s mysterious to me why more studios don’t embrace it.” Sawyer agrees, and conversation flows to the next subject.
They talk about “collections” next, which allow you to make subscriptions to a group of mods that “work well together.” They note that there are “five-million subscriptions” and over “fifty-thousand mods” on the Valve Workshop already.
The conversation over the next few minutes is relegated mainly to banter concerning personal experiences in the office during development, and some of the interesting quirks that came about when Sawyer and Burgess began trying to merge their development ideas. They talk on the fact that because one was coming from development of Portal 2 and another on Skyrim they were both in totally different mindsets, but the modding tools and Workshop brought them together.
They then spend a good deal of time talking about the community-at-large, noting that without the creators and curators, many of the bug-fixes would not exist today. “The thing with Skyrim is, more than any of our other previous games, we want to keep up with it over time,” says Burgess.
The main part of the podcast then ends, and Burgess is entered into the “Lightning Round”, where he is asked questions one after the other in quick succession. Head on over and listen to the podcast yourself at BethBlog. If you want to listen only to the Lightning Round, skip to the 26:30 mark. There is a ton of information there, and it’s a crime to miss it!
