Paids Mods are back!

 Tell a friend,

Give them a mile and they will take the sun- as the adage kind of goes with a little bit of flowery exaggeration because you know me. Bethesda, love them or tolerate them or hate them so bitterly that you mount a dartboard with Todd Howard's head on it to your wall and play darts with it all day- they are the rulers of the western action RPG world what with their command of the one game that everyone has on their hard-drives somewhere- Skyrim. Even if you can't stand the thing and it's age-gone visuals, paper thin characters and slappy-like combat- you have it, don't you? That's the power of a good Bethesda game, it worms it's way so completely into gaming culture that you look weird for not being involved. And thus is born the perfect testing ground for Bethesda's experiments into exactly how to drain more life out of their long put down games.

To be clear, I don't really think that the whole paid mods thing is some dastardly scheme by Bethesda to make a fortune out of royalty sales from mods- afterall, they don't make much of anything off of Creation Club content as it is. Of course, if their paid mods initiative was to pop off I'm sure it would be a spectacular jump to the ol' bottom line- but the fact of the matter is that the mod community is too deeply rooted in share-ware freedoms. Trying to put chains on that is like wrapping a noose around the neck of your beloved childhood pet in order to keep it safe, and squeezing until- well, you get the image. There's too many quiet corners of the modding community that Bethesda risk losing if they locked down their games, which is why, I think, it's taken so long for them to get to the point where they are at now- providing their own platform for mod acquisition.

Yes, Bethesda has had Bethesda.Net for a while in order to present mods but it was kind of... awful. Bad UI, impossible to navigate, dropped connectivity like a brick every ten minutes or so. There was literally no reason why you wouldn't just use Steam Workshop. And besides, any proper game modder does their business before launching the game with a third party mod manager that allows them to change the load order, update animations, clean files- anything extra they need to do. Bethesda seems to have finally come around on that and are providing their new service, curated curations, as something of a middle ground between Creation Content commissioned mods, and just the basic Bethesda.Net hosting service. It's less of an evolution as much as it is a repackaging. But it came with new content!

Yes, just as we all knew the second that the Anniversary Edition was announced with it's delivery of every piece of creation club content- that was only going to be the beginning. Bethesda aren't done working with cheap labour to sell their mods for them, and I suppose that means somewhere down the line we can expect a 'diamond Jubilee' edition of the game to launch with the new stuff tacked on. Honestly, and I mean this absolutely dead-serious no joking, I think Bethesda should make a small team and set them off to make a new expansion for Skyrim- something exciting and big to reignite interest in the game, instead of all these small scale mod-creator developed, pieces of stocking filler that only exist to draw the scrutiny of paid mods critics. Sell us on something big before trying to push the little things under our nose, please!

Ah, but what of the new paid mods in question? Well, we've got yet another house mod to throw on top of the steadily amassing pile of Real Estate which is probably enough to assume monopoly over the entirety of Tauriel's housing market at this point. There is also a voiced custom Thief Companion, which is about the very first time I think a Bethesda backed mod creation has been able to boast custom voice files- however because of the 'low impact' requirement, as well as their 'no extra mod requirements' rule I assume they have, this particular companion is looking a little... rough compared to most other mods. (She doesn't use a High Poly Head or custom assets. That's not a deal breaker, but it's a head scratcher. Don't we want to start with the best foot forward?) And next they added guns. Wait what? Oh, Dwarven 'Arquebus'? Right. (I'm taking this as official confirmation that guns are canon now.)

Curiously this new era of paid mods has paved the way for some really ambitious mods, such as one of those one's that look ready to ruin the carefully crafted open world if you abuse it too much- which Bethesda would never had allowed under the Creation Club banner. East Empire Expansion appears to be a kind of 'alternate Gameplay' mod where you seize control of a franchise of the East Empire company and gain control of extra loot hauling services, extra vendors and... The ability to claim dungeons in the name of the East Empire Company, cutting you into mining operation profits and loading guard posts outside them? So wait, does that overwrite enemy spawns? How many mods would that potentially end up breaking? Yeah, really a playthrough definer, that one. And there's also a collection of apparently 'Legendary Dungeons' created by some dude called... wait, Trainwiz still makes mods? Okay, that one might be worth checking out- that guy's a genuine legend. (Provided Bethesda allowed him to access his full power level when making that mod.)

Of course the very inclusion of a price tag does sort of alter the expectations of quality around these mods before we've even gotten the chance to engage with them. How can I personally be assured that the money I spend will be worth my time? Well, that's up to me as a consumer to judge how I value these price tags. These are microtransactions, to be sure, for tiny pieces of content- similar to what Bethesda tried to do with Oblivion before 'Horse Armour' became labelled to them as a letter of shame. Do I think the roughly £5.50 it costs to become a member of the East Empire Trading company is worth it? Honestly I'd have to see how well the mod is implemented, and even then it would have to be a gleamingly smooth mod with minimal conflict possibility for me to even consider it. As for the armour packs? £2.50 for a new set of Thalmor Robes? I just don't see it. For a collection, high quality and 4k, I could see a fiver, but a single outfit? That just ain't it.

Is there hope for this new era of Paid Mods? I'm really not sure. Bethesda seem almost half hearted with this go around and every step they've made is dogged by the unavoidable elephant hanging over their head. More Bethesda mods means more game updates. More game updates means more damned updates to the DLL code that breaks every script mod in existence for no other reason than to throw some extra trash in the download store. It is getting beyond a joke at this point- no one wants Bethesda to keep breaking their game for this crap. If they can find a way to add mods without updating the entire game, then I'll call this a non issue that the disgruntled can simply ignore. But considering we've been at this for ten years, and Bethesda already said they'd figured how to circumvent this problem, before failing to do so for several years more, I'm going to call this a overwhelming annoyance that the company who will never cease keeps forcing into our faces.