I sat down thinking about what it was I had to write today. What it was I wanted to write today. And what it was I was going to write today. And to be honest I ran aground with all three scenarios. Why? And do you know what I felt? I felt anger. And frustration. Why? And where were these inexplicable feelings directed? I'm glad you asked because the answer is pretty direct- I was LIVID at Bethesda game studios for scuppering my latest attempt to play through Skyrim by just being their unfathomably annoying selves. What do I mean by that? I mean that the company won't stop making it difficult to be a fan of their older games! I know, this is hardly the first time I'm kicked up this exact same fuss, but damn it if it won't be the last either! I'm going to explode if I don't talk about the damned updates- so sit back and grab a bag of chips as I unload my hated upon this rake-stepping machine of a developer.
So I understand how much of a privileged position we sit in as lovers of a game that has an evergreen footprint upon the gaming landscape. Skyrim was foretold to me as a game I could play for the next ten years, and I'm still trying my hand at the thing coming close to year 13; the hype did not lie. Not everyone could get abroad the train, and that is their loss because as far as I'm concerned there are only a couple of games with a modding community to match the sheer ferocity of Skyrim's, and those are the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 teams. Actually, for the rest of the month I'm going to call New Vegas the most extensively modded game currently doing the rounds... that hasn't already spun off into it's own standalone. (Let's not bring DOTA and DAYZ into this- muddying the waters and all that.) And that privilege can make us a bit protective.
At this point the amount of modded reconstructions that the game has renders literally every copy of the game as personalised, right out of the Mario meme. We decide the way that the game plays, where it starts, how combat works, the flow of the economy, the make-up of the enemies, the distance of the engine LODs, the visual hue, the extent of the God rays- and it's not uncommon to throw a few body mods and skimpy armour mods ontop of that for literally every other Skyrim player in the world because I remain the sole being in the universe that still only plays a male character when they boot up Skyrim. It's actually a bit worse than that- I always end up playing roughly the same male character, no matter how much I force myself to change their race, hair colour, anything- it always circles around to the same archetype. (Not someone who looks like mr, thank god! I only do that in Fallout 4...)
What I'm trying to say is that the game is functionally ours at this point, more so than 99% of other games in the market which developers feel likely totally within their rights to throw in a little change here and there to keep the product running smoothly. (But if it's Rockstar knocking up to try and rip licenced songs out of my GTA game- they can go dunk their head in a river! Starting the beginning of Vice City without 'Broken Wings' playing is tantamount to committing a war crime!) When it's one of Bethesda's old games, however, they're more like deadbeat parents kicking their way back into their abandoned children's lives to screw everything up, beg them for money and then leave them broken and non-functional. That is the state of Skyrim every few years after a Bethesda visit.
Here's the damage- Bethesda recently added a brand new storefront from which they instead to flog mods. But through some strange trick of fate- Bethesda decided to kick off this new initiative with a worse slate of mods than what Creation Club launched with. (I think you can tell that a lot more planning and build-up went into the Creation Club. All of this kind of feels chucked together.) This new attempt to centralise the modding scene by integrating official mods into the in-built Bethesda.net organiser is misguided, but well intentioned. It speaks to a decision making committee that doesn't quite get what the personalisation of the game means, but I know all they're trying to do is make modding easier. They have done the exact opposite though, so my understanding can only stretch so far.
First off, obviously, the change to the version number broke the SKSE which breaks every game that uses scripts. But of course it's a bit worse than that. Waiting for the still-active contributor team to fix the SKSE download is par for the course- but not every mod connects through SKSE. Some of the significant gameplay changers have to perform their own version checks, and those mods aren't typically maintained in a timely manner. Some aren't maintained at all. Every frivolous update for nonsense is a strike directly murdering large swathes of mods that would otherwise work fine, all to add another house mod from Eleanora. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate her work- but why couldn't this have been a creation club update?
But you want to know what grinds my gears? Oh this is the cherry on top of the cake, let me tell you! Part of providing access to a modding site through the game is having the functionality to run those mods- and that means having to build in basic features into the game such as a load-order manager. (Basically it tells all mods what order to load in- which prevents code running in the wrong order and mistakes from occurring.) But uhh... yeah, we've all already got our own one of those in our personalised mod building set-ups. Every modder in the world uses LOOT with inbuilt special-case exceptions, right? A delicate placement of orders and rules to make sure the 500 mod mega pack runs precisely as it should... and the Bethesda tool overwrites it.
That's right, if you load Skyrim with enough mods to make Bethesda pause- then their new manager kicks in to disable all plugins and require you to switch, and order them, manually like an actual madman. I don't know what sets it off, I'm yet to see anyone manage to circumvent this, which means I'm functionally incapable of playing Skyrim again unless I manage to book an entire evening off to figure out how to hard-code my load order back into Skyrim and... I just don't have the heart to jump through more blasted hoops just to play this game. We shouldn't have to keep playing this endless pointless game of Cat and Mouse with the developers- when will they just give up and make Fallout 4 their cash cow which they never leave alone? When will us Skyrim fans finally be left alone to mod in peace? When will the beast of Bethesda be overcome?
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