The real Bethesda fans will know the game is going to be wonky as hell when it comes out. Mods and fan fixes/tweaks are the real bread and butter. Bethesda just creates the world. The fans make it awesome.
A game should not have to rely on mods to be decent. Base Skyrim is still not a bad game.
Base Starfield is molten shit.
Every single one of Bethesda’s fan favorite games are great games without mods.
Mods are little more than the whipped cream on top of what needs to be an already enticing sundae. Starfield was a perfect example of the fact that mods won’t save a game on their own, and that the days of the level of modability old Bethesda games had are now gone.
Are you kidding me? There’s been continents with professional voice acting and 40+ hours of gameplay added to Skyrim. More than once. Not to mention all the patches and tweaks and balancing and UI adjustments.
Skyrim would have fallen off the top 100 games on steam a literal decade ago without mods and fan made stuff. Instead it’s still ranked like 50th.
Yeah and you get to that point when fans rally around a beloved game renewed by mods over literally decades. If your game is dogshit from the start, that just doesn’t happen. It literally happened with Starfield as some of the most well known Bethesda game modders abandoned the game entirely.
You realize they still sell many, many copies on all the platforms that aren’t PC and don’t have meaningful mod availability?
Skyrim isn’t selling a bunch of copies on Switch for $30 on sale because of PC mods it can’t use.