Let me say first that I am simply putting forward an idea, and all I want is a honest discussion to come of it. Also, I am far from an expert on patent law, but I believe there is a very interesting discussion to be had in relation to Bethesda, the fans, the modding community, and the writings of Michael Kirkbride, specifically Coda and the idea that we all have the power to create our own "canon".


Last night, a couple of my friends were talking about intellectual property, and how software patents seems to be very prohibitive and unreflective of the pace of software demand. While my friend brought up the example of pharmaceutical patents, me being a true TES fan I immediately thought of the Elder Scrolls. My friend who works in IT pointed out how software varies from drugs in that it is shared extremely quickly, and generally has a shorter lifespan in terms of its usefulness/ pace of its creation. In an ideal world, I feel like this should lead to a system of patents that would reflect the realities of software, and see to it that after a decade or so, the core code becomes open source. Now, before everyone freaks out, let's think this through in relation to the man everyone can't seem to stop talking about: Mr. Kirkbride.


On the one hand, I very much enjoy the work of Michael Kirkbride, probably of the most brilliant, tortured writers I've come across. 36 Lessons changed me for the better. But whenever people bring up his work in relation to it being "canon," I generally feel like the protocol for this conversation goes basically one of two ways: someone either points out that you are free to "make up your own story" and decide for yourself what is canon, or they point to how much of Kirkbride's work has made it into the games and generally follow his every word. I think this is because the quality of his thinking tends to be much higher than fan fiction, even when/where it contradicts itself.


Lurking in the background, however, is a very big, real-world problem which gets in the way of fulfilling this key focus of Coda, (and TES in general) which is that your story, or anyone's story, can all be "canon," and that problem would be the restrictive intellectual property laws as they currently stand. See, there is a fundamental imbalance at play here between what I make up in my head, or what the community creates, and what Kirkbride makes, only because Kirkbride's/Bethesda's ideas are transferred into code, and then made into an IP, whereas our languish on a forum and are basically stillborn, never to see the light of code.


If everyone takes Coda to mean that all our stories have a right to exist as canon, than I would say that it follows they have a right to exist as a game, especially since the ONLY reason this cannot happen is not technology, or willpower, or the dedication of the fans, but simply words written on a piece of paper, a result of just accepting the way things are, a result of the short-term, this-quarter's-results driven business culture in America which is far from unique to Bethesda but completely stifles to any sort of bottom-up innovation which is the lifeblood of the TES series.


Why doesn't Bethesda do something really positive and radical and incidentally something any true fan would enjoy, and just have the main code to their game become open source, so that we can actually see and experience all of our fantasies without restriction, and see for ourselves what we would like our cannon to be? I don't want to read Coda, I WANT TO PLAY IT. It looks to me like Kirkbride still enjoys writing for TES, why not just let him team up with a group of modders and have at it, working at the pace that best suits their schedules? And if someone makes a different universe to spite Kirkbride and disregard everything he writes, I want to play that world, too.


There is a massive, dedicated and passionate fan base of coders who would run wild with the idea, and in the long-run I could see Bethesda benefiting from this, by being the first major company in the US to allow its fans the freedom to make games which could be on par with, or, let's be honest here) BETTER than the games they the developers make. I honestly think pride has a lot to do with this, as Bethesda are "professionals" and I understand how it might offend some of them if this transpired, but let's also be really honest for a second: the community has been correcting Bethesda's mistakes gratis ever since Morrowind, and now with the Skyrim remaster, they are basically admitting as much and seeing to it that console players can reap the rewards of this hard work. I love Bethesda, and I feel as though a majority of the community would respect them enough to not take advantage of them - hell, I would be MORE willing to give them my money, if in return I get a more responsive team of developers.


I believe we could make TES into a community that takes its fans and story seriously by coming up with a reasonable agreement with Bethesda which would free up basically all their code (after a reasonable period of time) to the general modding community, so that we can both REALLY create the world in which we want to live. Otherwise, I think all we can look forward to are endless discussions of "canonicity" like we are at some Christian council of bishops, with Bethesda acting as Pope and always having the trump card of saying, "Well this made it into THE game, this didn't, so even though you are free to think what you like, this is the real TES."


There are so many different ways a vibrant and fair economy of mods/games could be created under the supervision of Bethesda to ensure that they get their fair share - but by making the games open source after a fair amount of time (3-4 years?I am no expert or economist but that does seem fair to me) that would simply add to the vibrancy and life span of the game they already made indefinitely. If open source leads to problems, then establish an official marketplace where fans vote for the mods they would like to see, and how much they are willing to pay, and let the modding community go wild satisfying that demand, with Bethesda taking a small, sales tax-like cut of the action. A Coda mod would be extremely popular, I would imagine, and if profitable could fund more Kirkbride projects. Hell, just look at the Skywind project, and just imagine what those guys could do if they were not only making a little money, WITH Bethesda and not off their backs, and if they also had access to the IP and source code they needed to really make the game they imagine? We, and by that I mean the fans, modders, developers, and even the video game industry as a whole, would become a much healthier, vibrant, profitable and lively community. The way I see it, the TES community has a destiny to fulfill, which is to bring about a fundamental change in how a fan base can interact and play with the IP of their favorite developers in a mutually-beneficial, creative, and revolutionary way. Interested to hear what you guys think.


With love and respect to Bethesda,


Citizen Shmike

The only hindrance to actualizing your dream is work. Become a modder, if you can. Beth Soft aren't going to opensource their IP.

How is this any different from modding as it already exists?

Yeah, but don't we already have the creation kit? Mods already change the books that we find all over, the contents of the books, make new books, change the landscape and add new content.


What I'm trying to say is that we've already had what your saying for years.

What you are proposing sounds like the tools that are already at modders' disposals. Perhaps you could elaborate?

Also, are you suggesting paid mods? Because not too long ago Steam tried that, and it led to a HUGE backlash. And I don't see why mods would have a significant impact (or any at all) on what is considered canon.

Also, a minor point: Modders have been "correcting Bethesda's mistakes" (in some cases, whether they are mistakes is subjective) since Daggerfall, not Morrowind. Technically, not quite in the same sense as the modding capabilities for Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, but a similar thing has been doing for, well, 20 years for TES (not aware of any such kind of community patching/modding for Arena though). Example: changing Barenziah's skin so she looks like a Dunmer, which she is supposed to be.

so, basically the creation kit as it already exists?


or are you actually suggesting Bethesda legally relinquish the IP allowing people to do whatever they want with it? because there is no way they are going to do that with it being as profitable as it is

and out of that backlash Bethesda.net became a thing unfortunately

Kirkbride needs people to reign him in when he's writing.

It's sort of like how he tries to pass off Azura being metaphorically (and possibly literally) [censored] by a selfish, self-aggrandizing sociopath as "she totally deserved it".

There's a couple things here.


Let me start with the bottom. LordOfBones, M actually clarified that statement, saying: "I answered, what, 30-45 questions in an hour on that AMA?Let me clarify my position: I think that that the events at Hogithum Hall as a story are a great portrayal of demonic justice between two mythic forces."


As to the OP. Part of the idea of the lore community, as it stands in some places, is that the code IS NOT the arbiter of the "real" Tamriel, or of what is worthy of discussion. Just because something didn't make it into the game for whatever reason (time, money, complexity, being forgotten, being written too late, being fan-made, etc.) doesn't automatically render something non-canon. I wager that most of us lore fans don't consider our ideas stillborn or pointless just because they're not on the disc.


Further, fan made ideas DO (however rarely), make it into the game. This happens for three reasons: a developer really likes the idea and/or the person, a developer fails to do good research and thinks a fan idea is official, or the community adopts an idea as de facto official and Bethesda can't tell the difference. That last one is important. It's meta. We're mantling canon here, walking like them until they must walk like us. Lunar Elsweyr in the PGE2 is a nice example of this.


Second, and most importantly, there is nothing stopping you (or anyone else)

from making your version of TES. You can mod the games to be nearly unrecognizable, and many people do. You can use a totally different engine to make your own game from scratch. As long as you don't sell it, or try to pass it off as Bethesda sanctioned, you'll have no trouble. The reason people don't do it is because it's really, really hard, not because of copyright. Instead, we write, draw, make videos, and express our visions in other ways.


Bethesda has nothing to gain by legally open sourcing their IP. The TES name earns money. The fans can already do nearly everything with it. If it went open source, it would let other companies make money from it, and potentially sabotage the brand through the creation of bad products. It's never going to happen, but what we have now is more than enough for what you're asking.

The competition from another company selling "slightly modified" versions of your own product, and undercutting the price of your own product, makes it a bad idea to open-source a game that's less than a decade old. Morrowind STILL sells a few copies every year, and I'm pretty sure the Steam downloads (which Bethesda gets some percentage of) are a small but significant source of income to this day. As long as you're still required to buy the base product in order to run mods or complete overhauls, they're making money on it. Daggerfall has been released for free download, but I understand that the original source code (buggy mess than it was) was either lost of destroyed at some point, so there is nothing to release.

As Lady Nerevar and others have pointed out, you can already mod the games to your liking, you just have to buy them first. Granted, opening up the .exe file to easier modification would expand the capacity to mod the game, but I wouldn't expect to be able to sell it, or even to redistribute it to others unless they have already paid for the base game. Bethesda has been fairly liberal with their policy in terms of modding, including such utilities as the Morrowind Code Patch, which makes "on the fly" changes to the executable file; you still have to have the original file, so Bethesda isn't losing any money from it.

More recent games, Skyrim in particular, are still generating cash, so I don't see ANY likelihood of Bethesda essentially turning into a charity and giving them away. What's to stop some small rival developer from making a heavily modified game and selling it, and thereby competing DIRECTLY with sales of Skyrim itself?

This for one we know Tamriel has an very developed printing technology. Think 1850 or similar, yes they might also use magic as as an tool here, their field medicine is way ahead of us with spell who can get critical wounded up and running.

We has not seen it, we did not see the year 1700 lumber mills before Skyrim either, however they had good planks in Daggerfall.


And yes the very poplar mod in Oblivion who modified plant meshes then harvested made it into FO3 point lookout, FO:NV and later.

Fun fact is that I was about to post an bug report about Oblivion as the plants did not change after harvesting then doing an test with just one mod

Sorry guys, I seemed to have blasted this one off in a fit of passion, and I admit I only have a limited understanding of how the whole coding business goes, and trying to read the requisite legal documents has been making my head spin. So let me re-phrase, in light of the very nice answers I have received.


I guess what I was originally trying to get at is what kind of ways, if any, we could reimagine the intersection of creative work with the developers and the fan base, who are also a creative bunch from what I can tell. I don't know if this would imply any money changing hands at all, just simply another way of how we, the fans, could work together with bethesda in some freer way than it currently stands, in a mutually-beneficial way. I guess in relation to IP, take the development of TES 6. There could literally be an army of coders waiting in the wings to test play and completely wreck the game during development and in so doing eliminate the bugs that are always going to be there in a game a vast as Bethesda's, and just have that at the start, so they don't have to waste their time fixing patches and making better (and more profitable) DLC. I feel like the only reason this doesn't get done originally is just lack of manpower at the company which I completely understand, they have to meet deadlines and all that. It would just be a cool, real way the fans could give back. Again, people more knowledgeable than myself correct me where I am wrong here, just throwing out an idea.

They actually do something similar to this already. It bagen with Dawnguard, as far as I am aware. In addition to their normal Quality Assurance team they invited beta testers from the community of players to test the DLC before release. In addition to this they also let the modding community beta test Skyrim's Creation Kit before that was released (another first). I believe they have continued to do this with Fallout 4 as well.

The fact is, Bethesda likes to go their own way. While they takes cues from other games, from player feedback, from the most popular ways in which modders have reshaped past games, ultimately they tend to make games they way they want to make them. Sometimes this results in popular design decisions, sometimes it doesn't.

There are apparently several independent alternative executables in various states of completion, and still being worked on. Those will require the assets of the original game in order to run, so they'll still avoid competing directly with Bethesda, but will allow far more freedom in terms of modding and major changes to game mechanics. At least one of them may be in a more-or-less playable beta stage. The amount of effort required for something like this is huge for an unpaid group to tackle, so it's a testament to how much passion the original games have inspired to see that kind of dedication being focused on it.

Theoretically, sure. Bethesda and other companies are already sort of doing this through open or closed beta tests. But there are problems to this.

One, very few people are actually qualified to playtest the game. When you do any sort of beta, unless it's very carefully hand selected from already prominent individuals (like the Creation Kit betas were), the majority of players will either provide no feedback at all, provide feedback that is not actionable ("this feature is the worst" - why? How can we address it being the worst?), or provide feedback in a way that is more work than it's worth ("game crashes when I'm doing a quest". - which quest? Under which circumstances? How often?). Sometimes they will somehow manage to do all three at once. Even people who are providing great feedback with great writeups almost certainly don't understand game development and systems, so the bug they're reporting might be due to factors outside the company's control, or reported too late into the process to fix (or too early to be relevant), or not be a bug at all.

Two, you're opening up the game, at its most vulnerable stage when things are still completely in flux, to a "literal army" of total randoms. There's no way to stop them from distributing the code at every stage, much less talking about it, almost certainly costing the game company sales. Even today, when games are playtested in a nearly finished (beta) state, the comments of fans who are supposed to function as testers but instead function as demanding fans dissuade people from buying the finished product. Games change drastically, sometimes on a weekly or even daily basis, while they're in development. Developers understand this, but 99% of fans don't. Take a look at any forum and see how angry fans get at the inclusion or exclusion of certain features. They would only get angrier to know that the feature was/was not in the game at some early stage and was added/cut before release. Or that a feature was awesome in the game but had to be removed because VGmarket polled a bunch of people and figured out that the majority of them hated it.

Three, developers are bound by contracts and NDAs and a salary. Fans have none of that. On the bright side, that can mean that a fan working on the project is doing it because they absolutely love it. On the down side, it means they've got no responsibility to the final product and nothing to lose. I don't know if it's related or not, but fans tend to be a whole lot more entitled than developers, too.

Four, organization. Random people on the internet have none, and that'd almost make things harder rather than easier. Even in the best case scenario, where a fan reports a bug perfectly, there's still going to have to be some producer that has to create a JIRA task for it. In the most common case, there's going to have to be at least one QA guy that has to verify the bug a couple times and then figure out what's actually going on and only then put it into the bug tracker. You're also looking at a whole lot of repeated bugs, as well as totally untested areas, since the random people aren't coordinating who is testing the area when or how.

Five (maybe most important) is that Bethesda doesn't actually own the code their games are written in. The trees are made in Speedtree, movies play through BINK, Havok handles the physics, etc. etc. etc. Even if Bethesda owns the base engine outright (which I'm not sure they do, since it's based on Gamebryo), there is too much middleware to let random people muddle with it.

Lady Nerevar presents one side of the argument very well, and it's a very valid set of concerns. On the other side of the coin, you have developers who "test" things the same way they've imagined, developed, and previously tested them 60 times before without a single issue...and then the first customer comes along and does things in a different way or order, which breaks the game. That's why Engineering often asks me to "see if I can break it" with new products, because I'm "technical" enough to understand the implications and explain what I did, yet have few pre-conceived notions on how to use the item.

In a previous playtest of another game, I raised a point about a serious balance issue if you took a particular piece of unique starting gear, sold it immediately, and bought powerful items X and Y instead (which there was no way you could afford for a long time otherwise). Nobody had ever considered that you would SELL your initial valuable personal heirloom, there was nothing to stop the character from doing so, and you could buy it back later when money was less important. Many developers tend to suffer from "tunnel vision" after working on a particular thing for too long, and don't always consider other approaches, which the customers INEVITABLY will. Ultimately, the cash value of the heirloom was heavily reduced for the release version.

Another game had no ability to upgrade certain military units, which essentially made them pointless to use early on, since no matter how much "experience" they gained, their low base stats would rapidly be eclipsed by even the untrained recruits of any higher tier unit. The developer never acted on it, so there was absolutely zero reason to ever use them in the game.

I've also scoured the first section of the Tamriel Rebuilt project, including levitating up and down the sides of mountains to look for placement errors ("flying" rocks and plants, or gaps where you could see "under" rocks), ground mesh inconsistencies (including missing ground textures and one hole in the landscape you could see through), assorted dialog errors (spelling, grammar, and a few awkwardly translated phrases), and other bugs. In a few of those cases, I'm not sure if ANYONE would have ever found them without intentionally searching (such as a piece of flying wickwheat about 50 feet in the air above a ridge), and coordinates had to be provided for the team to locate them for later correction. The second landmass section was in far better shape at release, so either the modders were far more attentive about such details, or else previous testers caught a lot more.

Getting good beta testers is definitely a problem, since a bad tester can either provide no meaningful data ("This game is crap!"), or leak preliminary copies of the game or info about it. Non-disclosure agreements are the norm, but having to sue a tester over a leak isn't something that turns a profit even if you win, it just punishes the bad tester. In-house testers are another option, but again, after they've played it once or twice and have "expectations", it gets increasingly harder to get meaningful results about playing "outside the box". In more and more games, playing outside of the box has been discouraged or heavily restricted, making for a more bug-free game. but a less-free game otherwise.