I find it funny that almost every single thread that somebody opens about adding a element to to the game there's always some people saying: " Somebody will do a mod for this...",
"This can be fixed with mods..". Its quite ridiculous in my opinion that its always expected that the mod community will solve the problems. Its like you don't believe the game will go beyond a certain point and after that its up to the modders to create the rest.

I have all respect for the modders and i love their work, but there are many things that cannot be fixed by modding simply because they were game design decisions.
Is it really right to expect to have the modders do that work all the time?

Anything can be done with mods. Bethesda is making Skyrim...not some magical bunny with magical powers. If Bethesda can make Skyrim, a person (or a team) can modify it.

I like this entry great arguement. Me myself I look to mods just to add extra things to do in the game, or extra campaine, and if theres anything good, new weapons. Yes somethings can be fix by mods, but you can also ruin things with mods.

I don't rely on them that much. I originally played Oblivion on the 360 and only had minor complaints about the leveling, and vanilla Fallout 3 and NV were fine.

It's only after playing these games with superb mods that people start harshly criticizing the vanilla versions. I find myself using fewer and fewer with each new release and I have no doubt I won't even begin modding Skyrim until 50+ hours of play at least.

If the TES PC community would like a TES game released on 11/11/11, they either need to settle for Bethesda Game Studio's design choices, or expect modders to bring the features they hoped to see back into the picture later.

Modders aren't "fixing" the game (exception being unofficial patches). They're changing it. Bethesda chooses to follow one path with their game, and they are not expected to pander to every whiner on the forum. The modders change aspects of the game to align it with the path they feel the game should have taken but didn't. No one "expects" anything of them. If they don't like a decision Bethesda made they change it of their own volition, and those like-minded download the mod.

Every game has a point it does not and cannot go beyond. Bethesda's games have a very, very high stopping point, and mods only push it beyond that.

Given the crazy stuff people have modded into Oblivion? I honestly wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. Whatever you can think of, it'll happen... eventually. (even if you'd rather it didn't. But, luckily, mods are optional. Just because someone makes a mod for, oh, playable anthropomorphic platypus children, doesn't mean you have to use it. )

I think it's dead wrong to expect or demand of Bethesda to do anything at all.

In a free market economy they are entirely at liberty to package a turd and call it TES V. It is 100% your choice whether to buy it or not.

Many threads on this forum speculate about what might be included in the game as Feature "X" or "Y" and some of us, based on comments made by the devs so far, might be able to help someone verify that Feature "X" is not going to be in the game, or very unlikely to be in the game.

As far as mods go, if you have experience running an install with hundreds of mods for Oblivion or Morrowind, or even some experience just surfing through all the tens of thousands of mods that are available for download, then you would know that 99% of the features people might want that are not in the game can be incorporated into a mod (and probably will be).

I don't expect anything from mods. I expect to pop the game into my PS3 and enjoy it for what it actually is and like other Elder Scrolls games, I will love it for what it actually is.

Modding is a part of what TES actually is.

No, modding is an extra thing people rightfully love to do on one of the three platforms platforms now supported by Bethesda and has been only for the past half of the series.

No. I'm pretty sure Bethesda said that modding is a huge part of TES.

This is exactly correct, though many users (I'm a 360 myself) don't necessarily love the idea. TES has shipped with a construction set for modding, so its reasonable to assume part of the package will be the mods that the community creates with that official set.

Bethesda wants TES to sell to as many people as possible; aka the mainstream market aka not the people who would play a game like balder's gate, witcher 2, planetscape torment ect.

Mod tools are there to refine the game to the "i like my games complex, challenging and with extreme depth," crowd.

That's not true. You can use simple mods. They do not have to be super complex and in depth. It could be as simple as changing how your UI looks like all the way to recreating part of Morrowind or to a new house for you to buy in the Imperial City.


It's sort of funny how little people who play on consoles know of mods.

Of course you can keep it simple or go complex in depth; but the fact remains when people speak of "fixing" it is as i state.

IE an element of the game that most likely was removed because of the fact they are making the game not for a hardcoe niche market but for the mainstream $$$$$$$$$$$$$ market. Things like OOO, gold weight, banks w/ bank notes, ect and so on are things that would not be appreciated by the mainstream market.

Interesting story, Jabronie.

It's part of the package, but still an extra feature. The game does not ship with installed mods. The game is not officially a modded one. Mods are not officially recognized as part of the series' canon. Mods are not for the majority of modern Elder Scrolls platforms. Mods are, strangely enough, not even supported by the only PC-exclusive Elder Scrolls games (the first two). Yes, people rightfully love them, yes, the series now supports it and yes, it's a rather neat feature that has its impact on the series, but it is not actually a huge part of the series itself. It's not that I don't necessarily not love the idea or anything such as that simply so much as it is that I believe something that isn't in half of the series, is limited to only one of three platforms, is completely optional for those of that third, and is strictly unofficial cannot be considered an actual part of the series. Mods are, by their very nature, unofficial, third-party applications.

I don't use the mod argument unless someone creates a topic suggesting a feature I realistically believe won't be implemented by Bethesda; such as:
"I want to ride dragons"
"I want to turn into a dragon"
"I want to be able to turn into a lich"
"I want guns to be in the game"
" I want to play an purple elephant that defeats enemies with its rainbow beam breath":P
Some of those ideas might be fun to add to the game, but most of those don't fit in Elder Scrolls games and will most likely not be in the vanilla game(and some have already be confirmed not to appear). Doesn't mean you can't mod it in if that stuff is your kind of tea.

I play on a 360. I have Morrowind and Oblivion on a fully capable PC. I still use the 360. The mods were the reason I picked up the PC version, and the reason I put it back down.

There are 30,000 mods for Oblivion floating around, and I spent twice as much time finding, downloading, and testing mods. I never became immersed in the game, because I was always back to the Nexus looking for the next mod to load in. Getting into the game world on the PC was impossible.

I did eventually settle - I downloaded Nehrim and enjoyed that solid beautiful experience, but i'll be picking up Skyrim on the 360, even knowing how many great mods can and will be created.

No. The first two games do have mods for them...sort of. Look again. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Files.

This is half the fun for me. And the reason why one should always play through the vanilla game once or twice without any game-changing mods first.

Todd himself raved about the extensive modding community that Bethesda caters to in an E3 interview - I don't believe he expects the community to pick up the slack, be he certainly considers them a major part of the game. The early PC games didn't exist during a time where modding was a popular or reasonable feature.

This is what I do. Play the game without mods at first. Then, go back and download lots of mods and play through it again.

Those aren't mods so much as they are a few, simple, community-provided tools for messing with some of the game files. Any other Arena/Daggerfall player could tell you the same thing as I will. They have little relation to the playing of either game. We don't even discuss mods much (with the exception of the occasional DaggerXL update) in the past games section. Any PC game can have such limited, non-developer-supported tools. Both game's flaws and strengths are pretty much set for any serious Arena/Daggerfall player.