There is a big diferent between the Total War games and TES.....Total War is PC exclusive, TES is console based....

DLC will always sell on consoles where you cant get custom mods, so bethesda's market for the DLCs is still there. Cutting modding on the TES series would be like shooting themselves in the foot, they just wont do it.

Also, I dont think the Total War games had proper modding tools like the TES games do, they arent really removing features but instead cutting off what can be hacked and changed.

I'd still buy it, and would have bought Oblivion as well, but 4 years later and they'd both be up on the shelf with all the other "I played this" stuff. Oblivion and Fallout 3 both hang around because of the modding potential. Users are always coming up with cool new stuff. That doesn't mean the initial game is crap, but it does mean that they outlive their competition for YEARS.

I don't think Bethesda is that stupid. They know that their most important platform is the PC. Large scale modding has always been apart of TES games (MW+OB, with a little DF) and I would break a sweat over this thought.

Also thekarithian, I like the new website.

The best approach for profitability and acceptance might be to release a real, professional quality, non-buggy construction set as an addon. Turn the CS for TESV into a serious vendor-supported tool. I would easily spend some decent coin on a construction set that didn't constantly crash, had a texture editor and a quality world/landscape editor.

How very unlike Todd Howard. I'm glad you posted that. At this point, I'm still holding a grudge over the "hackers" comment.

Anyway, I doubt it'll happen. It didn't happen for FO3, and there were rumors it might, but it didn't. FO3's mod scene was hurt somewhat by its delay (the GECK was not released with FO3), but it's still going strong, they're still supporting it (see: the Wiki, including very good first party tutorials plus they contacted Haama, Qazaaq, and I prior to the GECK's release and asked us to help get it going). So I wouldn't be too worried.

Which is something, because I was worried. Bethesda makes most of their money from console sales, and most PC users don't use mods anyway (seriously, this forum starts you thinking that everyone does, but most of the people who bought the game don't even know if can be modded), so it's really not that big a thing for them financially, and it's a headache for them legally (see: the nudity mod that spawned the "hackers" comment), such that I would not have been surprised if they didn't bother with the GECK.

But they did. They more than released it, in fact; I'm not kidding when I say the tutorials they wrote for the GECK Wiki are excellent. I wish they had for the CS Wiki, but Wiki software was kind of new at the time and it really was a radical step forward for them to do it at all (seriously, learning to mod Morrowind was soooo much harder, especially before GhanBuriGhan's Morrowind Scripting for Dummies, which is such a colossal work that I cannot help but continue to thank him to this day for writing it). We didn't get an exporter, but at this point the NifTools team (and every single poster on this forum ought to thank the NifTools team every single time they load up Oblivion) has pretty much replaced that, plus it works for Blender, which is rather nice for an amateur modding community (in Morrowind, the exporter worked only with a specific version of 3DS Max, which was soon obsolete and impossible to find - even if you had the $3000 it cost to buy it - and meant modeling was a very rare talent in that community, at least when I used to spend time there).

So, as much as my bruised ego hates to admit it, Bethesda supports modding. Not as much as some developers, not as much as they might, but they do an awful lot more than they have to. And I'm not convinced it's financial incentives that convince them to do so - which earns more respect from me than it would otherwise. It suggests a certain interest in modding that goes beyond money, and that is a good thing, because the financial gains from releasing the CS are very unlikely to ever be more than marginal.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Bravo :clap:

I always wondered why Bethesda never released a new Oblivion Patch, to fix some of the issues we all still have on performance or ad some cool new features for us to play with.

Very interesting post DragoonWraith.
I certainly bought Oblivion unaware of it's modding potential. It wasn't until I read a user review which went something like "Wow what a great game! Oh no, perhaps not, silly levelling system, days too short etc... Oh hang on the CS! Great game again!" that I started looking into mods at Nexus and PES.

I think there must be some financial reward for support modding, up untill recently, there were literally daily posts from "longtime console player, new to PC - what mods do I neeeeeeeed?" posts, even though I suspect the paid 1/4 price for the game 4 years after it came out. Still a sale tho.

Omg beth please PLEASE don't go that route.

You do realize bethesda themselves used the construction set to make the game? You make it sound like the construction set is a piece of [censored] lol. If the construction set beth used to make one of the best games of all times is a piece of crap i dunno what to say. Also whats the point of a texture editor when people working with textures use proper software made for that specific purpose.

It's not a piece of crap, but it's one big bug in itself because it does stupid stuff in the background that you can easily miss if you don't check certain things.

Minor. I've been here a long time; those posts were never daily. Even if they were, the game has been out 4 years - that's 1,461 days (2008 being a leap year), that's less than 1,500 sales - Oblivion has sold millions.

This is what I mean about this forum making mods seem like a big deal. They're not. The percentage of purchases that were for the PC are less than 20%. And I'm doubtful that even 20% of PC-players uses a single mod. Seriously, it's not that big a deal financially. Thekarithian, basically... no. It's not suicide, not by any stretch of the imagination.


This is laughable. Bethesda's not in the business of engine development, they use a third-party engine (GameBryo), which they couldn't license anyway, and at any rate they presumably neither have the people to do this nor the background in doing it as a company. It's not something you just jump into. This is exactly what the CS is not and never will be. They used the CS to create the game; why would you expect to get a tool better than they used themselves?

I've been told a billion times to stop exagerating :rolleyes:

Good Points...I was unrealistically harsh. Sincere Apologies to Bethesda and my Sincere Thanks for their generosity to the community.

However, the CS could be bundled with some tutorials or simple wizards sold as an addon. I would certainly buy it and many others would too.

Thaellar

Trust, me I know all about the foibles of the Construction Set.


There's some tutorials on the Wiki, you know. Wizards..? Not sure what you mean. Since they released everything they use and are actually legally allowed to release, I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for?

As soon as Bethesda puts a price-tag on the CS or anything that comes with it, it's a product and the users are paying customers, which gives them a certain degree of responsibility for the CS, putting them in a position where they either have to support it (read: do not want! Bethesda is in the business of making games, not supporting the CS), or they get bad PR from people complaining about its bugs and glitches and its pricetag.

I'd love a better supported CS, and I'd be willing to pay for it. But Bethesda doesn't want to support the CS better, because it would cost them a lot of money, and not a lot of people are going to be willing to shell out the cash necessary to make it worthwhile for them.

Of course, I don't work at Bethesda, I don't know the details behind any of this. Everything I've said is an educated guess, with emphasis on the "guess" part. But at the very least, I have a fair amount of experience dealing with Bethesda, so my education isn't too shabby, I'd like to think.

For what it's worth: of course I wouldn't, but it might be nice to convince them that spending more time on better tools would save them hundreds (and us many, many thousands) of development hours in the long run.

Aside: Bethesda did pretty much everything before Morrowind with their own proprietary Xⁿgine; so they do know a thing or two about that field. And while it's still better for them to use a 3rd party engine for the visuals and physics, there are a lot more subsystems involved in a game, many of which can be quite generic (see: the fact that there are total Oblivion conversions at all despite how much is hard-coded) -- so they could reasonably position themselves as game development middleware. Of course I've put no thought whatsoever into whether this makes any business sense; just speculating on what's reasonably plausible.

I must also say that I'll be taking a good close look at Elemental: War of Magic, which might set the bar for future games. Their public beta includes a modding tools phase.

The CS is extremely stable and bug-free compared to Fallout's GECK. How they ever managed to complete an entire game using it without someone suffering from a nervous breakdown is beyond me. Or maybe someone did, who knows.

Morrowind did have Free Plugins for the PCers, but the Poor Console players got Sweet nil until the GOTY edition.


With the current model, things cost money, but now everyone can get them.

I was commenting on design, not implementation. But ouch.

I'd love to see Beth develop a good, generic tool set that supports a variety of game types (fantasy, post-apocalyptic, wild west, sci-fi, etc.) that receives continual support and updates. I'd be happy to pay the price of a new game to get access to the tool and all of the mods that could be developed for it. Beth could use the money to develop the tools and leave mod support to the modders. If it didn't cost any more than a game, players wouldn't have any reason to complain about the price tag. I think it's a fair trade for a top-notch tool and all the mods I can fit on my harddrive.

They could then use the same engine to develop their own games and allow modders to use the assets as long as the modders and the mod-users all have a copy of the game in question. This wouldn't be that much different than it is now. The only difference is the tool set is continually updated and supported and they charge us a nominal fee to use it. Since they're using the same tool to develop the game, the costs would be negligible. They could also offer to publish mods as stand-alone games or DLC in exchange for a percent of the royalties.

Just dreaming out loud. :sleep2:

Another point that needs consideration. The existence of a modder's tool provides feedback on what people want in the next game in a series, because it will show up as mods. Things get tried out and shown to be successes or failures in the field before the new release is committed. As long as you're making game series, mod tools make a lot of sense as free R&D by the playing community.

Of course, they need to apply some judgement, or TES V will be an all-female posing contest in impractical armor.

:rofl: :rofl: Best thing I've read all day!

I'll buy ESV no matter what other stuff you can do it with other than just play it. Of course the OP is just throwing a wild-arsed guess-o-matic blender of a premise out there so...yeah. No offence it's just like saying it's going to be cold tommorrow and it ends up still being hot. And then everyone is sweaty and in a bad mood because they put on a long sleeve. :shakehead:

To OP:
Ya yi howdy ye younge chaps! Anyon here know where I have may Rapier yi da howdi?

Gonna put some holes into thes′ traitors an′ cowars to their′e owne race!

Translation: How dare you even give this suggestion!

This is going to be my new sig. (Unless you send round teams of attack lawyers)