Are Skyrim Mods Doomed?

As should have been said by Easy Pete when Bethesda asked for the Skyrim code: "Too dangerous. Gonna kill all yourselves if I let you touch it. Better to leave it buried - safer that way."

I'd say that the Bethesda company is on thin ice with it's community right now. In fact, I'd predict we're exactly one more Skyrim rerelease away from actively spitting in their faces in the same vein that the Grand Theft Auto 5 fanbase are currently doing to Rockstar. That's because we're still currently at the phase where things can still be added to Skyrim here and there in order to make things a tiny bit more fresh, (Or as fresh as you can make an 9 year-old corpse) either because of the upgradeability of the engine in use here or simply because of the ever thriving modding community. I mean, that's like an evergreen font of never ending content that can keep the average joe coming back for ever... right? The answer to that rhetorical is no. The font is not never ending. And we may have already crossed the line for how much the community can support Bethesda's game with the announcement of Anniversary Edition.

First of all it's important to establish what it is that Anniversary Edition is, because in typical Bethesda fashion the higher-ups have played things nauseatingly shy when talking about something we may, or may not, have to cough up money for. Call it Fallout 76 syndrome, only we hope the team have a slightly better understanding of what they're doing here than they did with 76. (No NPCs! Wait- I mean YES NPCs! Battle Royale- now Battle Royale gone!) As far we can tell, Skyrim Anniversary Edition will indeed be a paid for new version of Skyrim that comes alongside a plethora of graphical improvements, every small mod from the now-defunct creation club project and some new extras that have been pumped out in the meantime, and an improvement to the engine version that switches this game to a 64 bit program. It's that last one which is the issue.

You see, back when Special Edition launched for Skyrim it bought a similar evolution of engine which knocked the core systems that ran Skyrim just far enough ahead to make practically every substantial Legacy edition mod defunct. This is because the Skyrim Script Extender, an essential modding tool which opens up the range of custom scripting functions within Skyrim, needed to be entirely rewritten for this new version of the game. With that came a change to how Skyrim looked at modding files which meant that little tweaks had to be done to script-utilising mods in order for them to function on this new engine and with that new Script Extender, usually tweaks that had to be performed on the end of the original creator. (Script mods are essentially any mod that runs something through the engine such as to create an effect, run a custom event, load a custom menu or really do anything cool and new with the game.)

The problem this opened up was simple, the original Skyrim had come out so many years previously and people had grown up and/or moved on from their modding pasts. Many original Mod creators were no longer active in the community in order to touch up their old mods, and people were lucky that enough modders were still around to step in and adopt forgotten mods for these purposes. Such really is the unique collaborative spirit which erupts from a world like the modding community fosters, because were else, except for a community that lionises creation of high-quality gaming content for free, would you find people willing to treat the works of strangers purely for the enjoyment of themselves and others without charge? Truly, modding is an unexplainably strange phenomena in the gaming ecosystem which is never given the respect it deserves.

But those were the growing pains of the past surely this time there's not going to be- huh? Bethesda have been so crap at working around modding that, despite promising it wouldn't be the case, every update to Special Edition has broken that iteration of the script extender? And this jump to 64 bit is going to absolutely lead to the same problems, if not slightly worse problems, when it comes to conversions? And compare where the Skyrim modding community is right now compared to during Special Edition. Everyone has moved on completely to vastly different points in their lives, some people are on other games, some are on stupidly ambitious total conversion mods or new lands projects. A much more sizable number have moved on from modding altogether. (Hopefully into software jobs, because some of those mods were crazy good) Where does that leave Skyrim's modding scene?

And that doesn't even take into account the other problems that then modding community has been seeing over the years. Remember when Bethesda tried to partner with Steam to create paid mods, which lasted all of five minutes before the ickiness of the proposition shot itself in the foot? I mean at least that did transition to sites like Nexus encouraging donations, but somehow I feel like Bethesda and Valve were hoping for a sizable cut of those donations. Then there's the much more recent issue when Nexus, one of the biggest modding sites, tried to make it impossible for mod publishers to remove their mods, which led to a mass exodus from their site for a cause that absolutely wasn't worth fighting in the first place. (Seriously, what was Nexus thinking?) The community isn't exactly at it's strongest these days, and I can't see another effort to try and migrate the vast deluge of Skyrim content over to this new version of the game, so I guess the modding scene is just cold for now. 

Now luckily for us, the Special Edition jump did leave behind it a precedent for updating mods on the users' end that was actually rather straightforward to follow, it was just a bit precarious to perform for those who have no idea what they're doing. (See: most of us) I can only imagine the same will be true for Anniversary Edition, but then we've never had a jump this large and who's to say what it might effect? I mean, even with the Special Edition leap there were some script-heavy or strangely packaged mods that simply couldn't be updated without taking the thing apart and going into the nitty gritty, I doubt many mod users looking to spice up their game is willing to start learning code in order to get their mods together. It really is just a situation of wait and see, which really isn't what I want to be saying or doing. 

In conclusion, Skyrim Anniversary Edition isn't just a lazy way to sneak a few extra bucks off of your ten year old homework, it also has the potential of splintering the already stretched thin modding base anymore. And considering how this is arguably the peak of Bethesda modding, (New Vegas might have a few more mods to it's name, technically) isn't this just the most ignoble end to such a legacy? Stretched out to the point where most stopped caring and moved on, waiting to be summoned back by that blinding new Bethesda game which captures their old magic. (A game which probably is never coming, as much as it sucks to admit.) And did we need it? No. At the end of it all, Bethesda could just have unlocked all the creation club content for Special Edition people and got back to working on the projects people are actually hounding them for. Thanks Todd, I guess.