Thanks for that DevenTarn, makes sense.

Thank you for posting the link. I didn't know it was out already. Will keep it booked marked and getting the mods I want ready for when the game is released.

What is Open Cities mod? I never herd of it.

It recreates the five major cities in the Tamriel world and removes loading doors from cities so when you open the gate you walk right in instead of having to go through a loading screen into a separate worldspace.

Thank you for the answer. Wow, we always wanted this, I thought it was said it couldn't be done. Will have to try it out.

Wooo, PS4 got its first ever mod: https://mods.bethesda.net/#en/workshop/skyrim/mod-detail/2908244

I think it was it could not be done for the old generation of consoles, with their limited memory, but PC did not have that problem.

If you are able to download it, it won't leave your mod list. Guaranteed. It's awesome.

removed. there are no mods for PS4.

Aw. PS4 doesn't even get extra dogs in Riverwood

On another note, PLEASE REMOVE THE DAMN AGE GATE FROM THE WEBSITE. Thank you.

Really?


The way I see it (and the way Pete Hines makes it sound), Sony have always been willing to allow mods in this restrictive form. It's Bethesda who've refused to accept those limitations for so long, and pushed for something closer to what XBox has. It appears they threw their arms up in the air and gave up just a few weeks ago, and I'm guessing all the cancelling of preorders and general lack of enthusiasm all around caused them to go "what the heck" and throw in the limited support we've got in order to try and salvage some of the potentially lost sales.


Sony doesn't need Skyrim to do well as badly as Bethesda does. They're in first place in the console war, and arrogance comes along with that position. They wouldn't even consider a remastered five-year-old game could cause Microsoft to edge ahead since their strategy predominantly involves their own first-party games on third-party triple-A exclusives and new releases.


But from Bethesda's point of view it was kind of all or nothing. Either we got full mod support, or we'd have none. They called Sony's bluff by pulling mod support entirely, only Sony didn't respond - the players did - so it will have been very clear they were only really hurting their own bottom-line profits by not at least implementing mods in the form Sony will have already put forward.

I just played another PS4 game allowing mods, "Farming Simulator 2017".

Those mods seems to use external assets, comes from "modhub", an external source with just a disclaimer notice.

And there is no obvious problem between Sony and "Giants Software" (developer) and publisher "Focus Home Interactive" (publisher).

I think it is the key for Bethesda's PS4 skyrim mods.

I have a theory the issues are not "let's not give our players freedom", or system security concerns of mods themselves, or the associated legal issues that can arise from user supplied content. I put the blame squarely on Sony's reluctance to hand out the compression tools needed for the CK to actually output PS4 format textures and sounds. Sony are historically super cautious and protective over their codecs, after all - if a compression algorithm could be decompiled from a freely available app, that's another company secret in someone's hands that can be misused for things like the decrypting of secure filesystems, creation of emulation tools and vulnerability anolysis.


I mean, "Farming Simulator" gets mentioned a lot, and as Pete Hines has pointed out when asked, that game doesn't do what Fallout or indeed Skyrim does with it's mods. I don't know anything about "Farming Simulator" thus I can't comment on specifics there, but an example I am familiar with is LittleBigPlanet.


You've never been able to simply load an external asset into the game, but LBP bypasses that by allowing the player to actually take photos and record sounds from within the game itself, thus the encryption is done on the game's side and is never exposed. That's the key thing. Now bear in mind people can photograph anything at all, turn it into a sticker and decorate their level with it, be that their own face, or Darth Vader, or a magazine article on Mario, to their own private parts... and yes, all those could easily be stumbled upon since levels were added so quickly half the time you were the first visitor there.


As for sounds, you could actually record your own sounds via the microphone then have those sounds played through a "magic mouth" somewhere in the level. It's intended so you can make funny noises for fun or perhaps voice characters or narrate the level, but all I ever saw were cases where a person captured an entire copyrighted song from start to finish with the mic, made a "level" consisting of just a magic mouth playing the song and perhaps a dancing sackbot, with the music object being given away in a prize bubble so others can take that rulebreaking object, stick it in their own levels and spread it far and wide.


Now I'm not saying Sony turned a blind eye to this. They absolutely took action when reports were made, only hardly anyone actually bothered filing reports especially when the rulebreaking levels gained a following. They were unable to keep problem objects off the game. That's a thing you'd have thought would have canned the series, but no - LittleBigPlanet spawned two full sequels, a PSP game and a Vita game each of which had the exact same problems as the one before.


So make no mistake it's not the potential content of the art/sound files that have Sony worried. It's all but certain to be related to the proprietory formats especially if the only viable way the codecs could help at this stage is through their incorporation into freely available software anyone can grab.


Scripts are likely just a consequence of also residing within the same BSA files that the problematic (ie. not properly compatible so therefore dangerous and unpredictable if used) art and sound assets. When Bethesda brought the hammer down on external assets they simply eliminated the BSA file... it's the quickest, easiest and safest way to ensure the art and sound assets can't inadvertently be loaded onto a system. One solution there would involve the relocation of the script files from the BSA files so they're embedded into the ESP files themselves though that would introduce further delays as the change would need to be put through QA again, and Sony may be concerned that if the ESP can be used as a carrier format for binary data that opens the door for misuse when PC boffins try cramming all sorts of types of things in there.

4 days to go and still not a single mod available for PS4, meanwhile there are 52 available for Xbox and rising...

That...that isn't "logcial" at all.

I heard some kind of private beta is taking place. You'd need the new CK to upload Skyrim files to Bethesda.net and the original game's CK can't handle that. Fallout 4's would file the mods under Fallout 4 (if it accepted the files that is), so a small group has the new CK and nobody else does.


That means the lack of PS4 mods could be explained by:


- No PS4 in that particular build of the CK

- Nobody within the focus group choosing to mod for PS4


There's nothing yet that smells of a conspiracy.

Nobody was suggesting one.

Maybe not here, but it's something that's becoming very tiresome elsewhere. It seems people are going out of their way trying to spot the next disappointment early and it's getting really old.

Will we get weapon and armor mods on ps4?

Answered in the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1609898-what-kind-of-mods-can-we-expect/you created on that topic.

Except that you keep insisting that the answer given for why there aren't many PS4 mods yet isn't good enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if a third party created some sort of mod for the ease of modding for the ps4. In other words, a pseudo SKSE in a sense.

I highly doubt that Bethesda would allow that on bethesda.net and I believe Sony would have a fit if it was.

Depends entirely on a bunch of things to be honest. We don't know the actual reasons for the limitation, and anyone who thinks they know the actual facts behind what Sony's reasons and thinking either works for Sony or Bethesda, is lying, or has an inflated sense of self importance. All we can do right now is look at the evidence available and try and work it out backwards - which is what my lengthy theory earlier tried to do... disprove the commonly held belief that Sony like applying restrictions just for restrictions sake to prevent us having fun. That clearly isn't the case otherwise "Farming Simulator", and especially "LittleBigPlanet" simply couldn't exist as they do.


The reason has to be *specific* to how Bethesda intended to approach Skyrim/Fallout mods, and based around other facts we know (the issues surrounding the textures and sounds reported by Bethesda months ago) there's a definite logic that suggests our current restrictions are connected to that. Doesn't guarantee it, but it's the most logical conclusion we can arrive at since every other theory going around either has no evidence to back it up (ie. could be based on personal bias, probably negativity induced from the disappointment of the past few months), or can be disproven with examples of other games doing a similar sort of thing and it not being a problem for Sony (ie. the idea that a child photographing his private parts or copyrighted work, and decorating a level with it in LBP, a thing that happens with astonishing regularity, doesn't constitute a risk for Sony, while a texture or sound introduced into Skyrim automatically does is preposterous) so the biggest remaining difference is in how the assets are made and introduced in the first place. That's the most likely trouble spot.


So the idea of a "helper app" isn't so far fetched as you think. The only caveat is, as an app it would have to be built and made available by Bethesda and then passed through QA testing before we could ever see it.


Such a "helper app" could take any of a number of forms. Bethesda could, if they so chose, simply cobble together a bunch of specially created new assets or donated user-created assets, convert them to PS4 format professionally at their studios, and then make the resulting archive downloadable for free (or at a cost) as an expansion pack. This kind of idea has been floating around a lot just recently thanks to a mysterious "DLC" rumor for Fallout 4.


Another possibility is the "asset convertor". I remember Mass Effect 2 came with a standalone app that players used to port their ME1 saves into ME2, so that kind of utility app has a precedent. In this case modders would have to download a special app on their PS4's that accepted regular PC textures/sounds read in from the USB stick, and could output PS4 converted versions to a seperate folder on the stick. These files could then be taken and loaded into the CK, and so long as the CK knows to only allow PS4 format files to be packaged into PS4 BSA's we could have BSA's without the actual converter being exposed to the wild in a decompilable insecure form.


The "asset comvertor" solution is ideal especially if the conversion process is lengthy: modders could use the PS4 itself to convert the files, and even if that process took half an hour or more (which I doubt but you never know, especially with larger assets or large amounts of assets) the process only needs to be done once and the output assets can be reused as-is by the modder even if he needs to make tweaks and fixes to the ESP itself later down the line. It would also make the process transparent to the end user.


However another solution would involve the game itself rebuilding, converting and repackaging BSA archives on the fly at download time. If conversion is fast, having a converter built into the game itself would enable the possibility of PC files being able to be uploaded to Bethesda.net, since the game would know what to do with them; they'd get converted and work, thus there shouldn't be a huge problem. The biggest issue here is that there are endless sub-versions of each type of file yet the game would only be able to recognise and work with a small few of them. WAV files for example would need to be recorded at the right bitrate or the converter might inadvertently speed up or slow down the resulting file. Graphic files are a particular problem, and since these issues don't arise until a user tried to download a file, you'd still have a situation where risky, broken and harmful datafiles could be posted to Bethesda.net ready to cause problems both big and small to any end user that tried to download them.


So all things considered, an "asset converter" app would be the better solution here... assuming as I said earlier, that Sony's problems are related to the risks posed by unsupported filetypes being downloaded by end users, and Sony not allowing the general public to get their hands on the proprietory converter for security reasons. It makes sense too, and ties into why we're able to view any website with the PS4 browser yet cannot download any files through it to our HDD: PS4 probably converts the images before we see them, downloading even images in their original format presents security risks - ie. the TIF exploit that instigated and enabled the jailbreaking of the PSP which went on to cause rampant piracy... you can see why they'd be concerned.

Could Bethesda incorporate some of the additional scripting functions of SKSE into their own scripting engine? Certainly, but they have not done it with SSE or we would have heard about it, since the gag order has been lifted on the modders with advance access to the new CK. Since it hasn't been done as part of their launch of the new engine/CK, and I would be surprised if they introduce such a thing as an update. If they were going to do it, the time to do it would have been with the launch of the new engine/CK.

Could Bethesda release an official expansion pack with new assets that modders could use to create mods for PS4? Definitely. I actually think this would be a lot more likely than the possibility of them revamping their scripting engine, since its just assets (meshes, textures, sound files and the like) but I still think this would be something of a long shot. And it would still not allow custom scripts, which you need to add new dialog or create new scripted events, etc. But there still could be some new DLC in the offering and if so, the assets included in the DLC would be something modders could use. Time will tell on that.

The asset converter idea seems the least likely to actually happen. But who knows.

Mods are now going up, as of now there are 12 PS4 mods online:


https://mods.bethesda.net/#en/workshop/skyrim/view-all?platform=PS4


Some canny folks over on GameFAQs spotted that one or two of those mods almost certainly will require scripts, meaning that some form of limited scripting is available. It's been theorised that if a person makes changes to a pre-existing built-in script, that script is compiled and appended to the ESP itself so therefore doesn't require loose files or BSA files.


I just tested that out on OG Skyrim (though the CK has no doubt improved leaps and bounds in SE). I just did an extremely basic test just to see if this is true. I opened the CK, loaded Skyrim.esm, then found the first thing I saw that had something filled in on the Papyrus column: a script called "critterspawn". I very quickly edited this up (just changed a bunch of things like FALSE to TRUE and whatnot just to see), then hit save... the script saved without being prompted for a filename or directory (thus, just to the "project").


I then saved the project as "test.esp", looked in my data folder and only found the "test.esp" file. There was no "test.bsa" file anywhere.


I then reinitialised the CK, checked "critterspawn" and saw all my changes were reset - good, I hadn't just overwritten the game's default script. I then loaded "test.esp" and checked "critterspawn" again and my changes were present and correct.


I then hex-edited "test.esp", and though I could not find any plain-text changes or scripts there, the file did end with a "DATA" label followed by a couple of rows of hexadecimal numbers. My guess is the script got compiled and then patch data was derived from a comparison between the original and altered "critterspawn", with that patch data having been appended to the ESP.


So it does look like scripts are possible. We just can't introduce new script files. This is in line with what others like Gopher have been trying to tell us - some mods are technically possible but will have to be rebuilt ie. ways would have to be derived to use the built in scripts to double-up as containers to bootstrap new features a modder wants to add. That's awkward, so not all mods can be ported that way, but some simple ones might be able to be done using methods derived from this.