Starfield is going to love modders

 Building Buildings here.

When it comes to Bethesda games, the lifecycle of how their titles evolve is somewhat atypical compared to your usual game's life span. There's the initial high bump of release and the steady holding pattern of your typical week ever supplemented whenever DLC releases, but then there's the near unending second-life granted by the release of the modding tools and dumped in the lap of the community. Players who just love these games so much that they want to expend creative efforts on stamping their own minds within this play space, and those are the kinds of players who will keep these games alive for as long as they can, each flock to make and remake new and old gameplay systems constantly. Which is why every Bethesda game sort of needs to take it's best swing at designing itself for the modder tomorrow as well as for the player today, making sure there's enough free canvas to be worked with as well as completed vistas for everyone to love. Pretty much what the perfect launch of any live services should be, except even Bethesda themselves managed to screw that up with their drop of 76. (That genre of game is just deeply cursed, I swear.) 

Starfield, providing it comes out and is every bit the game that Bethesda is selling it as which is absolutely not a guarantee, could be one of the greatest gifts to modding that Bethesda had provided yet, with a base game absolutely splayed out for the hand of the community to toss around and shape like silly putty. Though some games typically end up scoring more fan love than others, sometimes due to the pull of the genre and sometimes just the preference of the game itself (as well as how easy it is to inject new stuff into the world) I think that Bethesda's newest IP has a real chance to give them all a damn decent run for their money. New Vegas and Skyrim may have more mods than should be humanely possible to create, but I think Starfield might be the middle ground which can unite the passions of both utterly insanely creative communities. Again, provided the base game knocks it out of the park.

My first evidence for this is the most obvious; the size of the game proposition. It's no secret at this point, Starfield is going to be an ungainly huge game with over 1000 apparently full-sized interstellar bodies for the players to explore, with a makeup balance between procedural generation and handcrafted goodness that we can only speculate on for the time being. But even with those tipped scales, Todd Howard has come out to inform us all the world that this will not be a galaxy of equals. What we're looking at is an expansive and sprawling playspace for sure, but that doesn't mean we're not going to have some empty planets out in the stars that exist as mere resources heaps for players. We absolutely will have those. Just as we'll have mass stretches of empty nothingness on even the big populated planets just begging for stuff to fill their empty spread, and you can likely imagine how this attacks a big problem for modders.

Almost every mod-loved game suffers from the lack of space to stick their new stuff in, and as such overlap in a given. New Vegas had the 'Goodsprings' problem, where most every new mod was spawned in that tiny sleepy settlement in such a way that it made this tiny settlement seem like the most rambunctious, bizarre place in the wasteland, and even Skyrim had a smaller scale version of this issue with a lot of it's mods dotted typically on the road between Riverwood and Whiterun, making that early game sprint one of the most hazardous for those preferring peaceful low-level strolls. Fallout 4 seemed to be better for that, and I imagine Starfield won't be immune to it; but the novelty of seeing two edited cells in the exact same place is going to be a story worthy of the forums rather than just an annoying inevitability. Except for the dozens of city reworks coming for the game's big four. Those are obviously going to stepping on all of the same toes.

There is also a very wanting combat system, which is certainly a bit of a dampener for the players but a boon for the prospect of the modders. One of the first things a modder has to confront is deciding exactly what to add to the game they're faced with, and when such a huge problem like a snore-worthy combat system is present that issue practically presents itself to them. It's a challenge, glaring and obvious screaming 'Fix me! Fix me!'. There are always mods to try and rebalance damage outputs, given how Bethesda seem hardly interesting in intelligent balancing of their end (No shade to their developers; it's just been over 20 years and I've never played a game of theirs which was well balanced.) But some games lend themselves better to the modder's brush stroke than others. A melee game like Skyrim is a difficult nut to mod ontop of, you'd need new animations and everything to make a real dent, but a shooting game? Change up the weapon loot list, throw in new guns, arm up the badguys; Fallout 4's modding community have shown how this is pretty much a blank check to screw around for mod lovers everywhere.

Then there's one of Fallout 4's best vectors for mod insertion also making it's way to Starfield, the build menu. Is there more elegant a way to slip in a new work station, or just a new craftable? It certainly makes for a better choice than the Skyrim standard for modders who haven't got the time to stick in a crafting recipe: Just use the Console! (For those mods I typically just add in my own crafting recipe, it only takes a couple of minutes on the creation kit.) Injecting new items to be built within the workshop has enabled countless great additions to the player's build repertoire and ended up being the basis for a whole mod series in the Fallout 4 modding scene called Sim Settlements as well as three of Bethesda's most bad value DLC ever; so there's a precedent that has been set here, to be sure.

And another great angle for modding, in my opinion, is the trait's system in character creation, and the backgrounds. Both allow the fundamental makeup of a character to be shifted and thus players can get a little creative with buffs or debuffs they mod in for new characters to adopt. Plus the background system almost sounds like a ready-made framework for the 'live another life' mod to inhabit. (Although I think Todd did say that regardless of background all players start in the same place so maybe they'll still need to insert their own take-over menu.) On a more overall level, the inclusion of a Perk system is going to prove a superior way to insert custom effects on the player over the fiddly effects bar that Skyrim had which listed all permanent and temporary effects under the same menu so you couldn't easily look through them. This is a boon from the Fallout school of doing things that'll make custom perk placing just that tiny bit more seamless.

All of that is just speculation, of course, but I hold it to a high degree of certainty given my excessive exposure to what works and what doesn't work for modders, that Starfield is airing towards the systems they love rather than those they hate. Of course, making a mod worthy game starts with making a great game and who can say where Bethesda are heading on that one given how little we understand about this game's makeup despite the things we've seen. Providing everything goes right, however, we may just have the new modding site hit on our hands for the next time some visionary like Trainwiz wants to pop along and shove Randy Savage or something into the models files. Because that's the sort of stuff which makes modding worthwhile.