Taking a walk in talk.
Oh good golly, the skeletons in big brother Bethesda's wardrobe are about to come tumbling out for all the world to see? And just when they were settled on the slow road to redemption through their plodding pushing platitudes about Starfield and convincing everyone that this is going to be the 'return-to-form' we've waited more than ten years for at this point! Why, if someone is going to ram their way in-between all of that good will I can only imagine this is a serious and perception shattering lawsuit! Clearly Bethesda must have been responsible for selling firearms to criminal insurgents or defrauding the American public out of their tax dollars or... maybe this is one of those suits filled with exaggerated language and neatly stretched out half-truths that makes you start to question if the legal system is really a backbone of intelligent modern society or merely a speech-check game waged by overpaid proxy soldiers we call 'lawyers'.
I'm going to be honest with you, me and Bethesda aren't on the best of terms right now. We haven't been on the best of terms for a good long while, but the recent kick to the nuts I received when they, entirely out of the blue, decided to slap us with a random update to Skyrim Anniversary Edition more than a year after the last update, is still rubbing me raw. Let me try and explain what my problem is; everytime that Bethesda updates anything from their end, every mod that uses the Script Extender. (Which is basically; all of the good mods) Which means you have to seek out work-arounds and updates and all manner of headache inducing nonsense; all just to carry on my ultimate Skyrim playthrough which I had been enjoying for months at that point! And I still can't bring myself to do it, there's just too many mods to update and some of them aren't worked on anymore! I have to play 'inbetween mod updater' all so that Bethesda can add, what was it again... fixes to their Creation Club content? The community uploaded fixes to them months ago- are you serious! Although I suppose this tangent isn't entirely out of the blue because, lo and behold, this actually has something to do with the Creation Club.
But we're flying too fast, let's slow down for a moment. First I have to ask you: What is a Season Pass? An all inclusive ride to every extra journey slapped onto your favourite games whether those experiences be worth the price you paid or not? A cynical cash scheme to lock a purchase out of people for content that hasn't even been developed, or in some cases even brainstormed, yet? A 'press and forget' option for the sorts of games where you already know you're going to end up buying everything regardless of the quality; so that this way you don't have to fumble about for each arbitrary release date? All of these things, in truth: for the Season pass is a complicated little cuss. And for our bereaved today? The Season pass was also a glittery trap leading to a den of cobwebs and lies.
If this is ringing a bell with you, it's because this case popped up back around in February in 2021, and I may have briefly mentioned it in passing around about that time; but what I'm talking about today is really the idea of what it is to challenge a mistruth. Both a mistruth as this client sees it pertaining to Bethesda and the mistruths I think the client is perpetuating for their own clout gain. But first: the case. The client purchased the Fallout 4 season pass and happily enjoyed all the content that it had to offer for the time, only to roll up several years later and find out that Bethesda have been shunting out new content in their 'Creation Club' plan which, in the eyes of the client, draws a distinction between DLC and Creation Club content where none truly exists. It's a lie to get out of the season pass promise. How very scandalous!
From the perspective of the suit, the season pass did launch with the very clear language that it would contain every piece of DLC content for Fallout 4 that Bethesda choose to launch. The language did not change years later when the Creation Club slate of content started to launch, and yet none of that content was even entertained for Season pass inclusion. Other games have launched Season Passes and managed to live up to the promise therein, more or less, so why should Bethesda be liable to skimping out based on entirely self-perpetuated language about what exactly constitutes DLC and what constitutes Creation Club content? DLC stands for 'Downloadable Content', and every bit of Creation Club content is extra items that need to be downloaded to be accessed. Seems pretty case-closed to me...
But then I look at the otherside. The season of content for Fallout 4 ended literal years before the word 'creation club' was so much as coined by Bethesda, and as the name-sake will tell you; most Season passes are designed to last a single season of pre-planned content. Even today you can find examples of companies releasing follow-up 'Season Pass 2' pre-purchase schemes whenever their post-support plans change. (Such as with 'Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous') Whatsmore, all Fallout 4 DLC was created by the core Bethesda team, whilst Creation Club content was specifically created in conjunction with talented creators and/or non-essential development teams. The content is more compact, smaller, and transparently distinct from DLC. They didn't try to hide the nature of the CC; they lauded it.
The very fact a suit like this could even survive does, however, highlight the kind of weirdly odd nature around the Creation Club. Designed as a way to encourage mod creator's making money to live off their art, without touching on the whole 'paid mods' debacle that failed to live past a single month on Steam. In trying to tread the water between Mods and DLC, Bethesda birthed an betwixt monster of content too small to warrant genuine excitement and too expensive not to warrant the critical eye of a dubious public. The smartest move Bethesda ever did with it's Creation Club stuff was slap it all under the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim and flog it in one package. But even then, Fallout 4 doesn't have a deal like that yet for some reason, so the dichotomy of mismatching remains.
I think that the filer of this suit likely knew exactly what the Creation Club was, and knew their Season pass obviously wouldn't entitle them to it's content. They probably understood what Bethesda were trying to do and had little to no grips with it beyond the obvious. ('This stuff shouldn't cost this much, this feels over-cooked. Etc.') In my mind; this lawsuit was just a more public dunking on the haphazard system that Bethesda tried to introduce, highlighting another inconsistency with what they envisioned and what was created. "If this isn't DLC; then why does it have a price tag?" Fair enough, if muddied behind a frivolous lawsuit that just makes the 'aggrieved' look like the dumb one in this equation. But this saga does serve as a helpful reminder, should we need it; Starfield really doesn't need a Creation Club, Todd. Thanks.
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