Bethesda was under no obligation to talk to these mod devs beforehand. But it sure makes them look bad. As a recent comparable, Concerned Ape was open and communicative with all the mod devs before releasing his latest patch for Stardew Valley, a game that is just about as old as Fallout 4.
Bethesda has become a literal laughingstock at this point in time and it’s just funny to point at them every time they rack up another L.
They had no obligation, but there was no reason they couldn’t take the minimal effort and put out a blog post saying that the update would break mods. The modding scene is the only thing keeping Bethesda’s games relevant (except New Vegas, but that’s not really Bethesda’s achievement).
They’ve learned something. They learned that they can be as shitty as they want to be, and still the modders will bail them out. I trust this move now will also change nothing in that regard.
Every single update breaks mods that rely on a script extender because it changes the game’s binary.
Those compatibility issues were always quickly rectified. The last time a script extender was borked to the point where the developer had to make an announcement was Skyrim AE.
I recently had to find out that a mod author of a couple mods I was happily using on my PS5 copy of Skyrim removed their mods entirely because of another batch of greedy monetisation efforts from Bethesda, trying to monetise mods even further. Just fuck those guys man
The console versions of Skyrim, minus Switch, have mod support. They are limited in scope because they don’t allow for external resources to be used for the mods - maybe Xbox does, I don’t know - but they still offer a bunch of QoL improvements, visual upgrades, quests, weapons, spells etc. Some well-known mods like the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch exist on console and some well-known mod authors like Elianora or Juliha also publish their mods on console. It’s pretty great actually. They can make your game look and feel really good.
The mods I was referring to that were removed are Mysticism and Adamant by SimonMagus616 (at least their Reddit handle) that completely overhaul spells and perks in Skyrim. I understand their decision to remove them, but my playthrough feels a little less cool now as a result.
Fallout London is whinging but the real loser is the Fallout 4 Script Extender mod, upon which so many other mods relied.
Fallout London release or no, this has broken a massive number of mods for Fallout 4 that relied on the Script Extender.
That’s actually the bigger story here, that Bethesda declined to communicate with the modders who made the backbone of a lot of other mods.
From the Fallout 4 Script Extender home page:
The 2024-04-25 Fallout 4 update (1.10.980 and later) has broken F4SE and the rest of the native code modding scene similarly to Skyrim’s “Anniversary Edition” patch. I am working on an update and cannot currently offer a timeline for its availability, nor whether there will be any critical technical issues that would block an update. Do not email with questions.
Fixing the script extender itself won’t take that long as it doesn’t need to hook that many functions (although depending on how much free time people have and whether there are any surprises, it could still take longer than most people expect). Fixing all the mods that depend on it will take much longer, as between them, they hook lots more functions than the script extender itself, and with this update, it’s not just a case of most functions being the same, but at a slightly different address (as was typical with creation club updates, which tools could help with), but instead lots of functions have changed slightly due to using an updated compiler, and lots of functions have been inlined differently (so instead of just existing once, they get copied into every function that uses them, and then optimised differently in each place based on the surrounding code).
The solution that Skyrim players came up with was to downgrade to older versions. For example, Skyrim SE mods are all permanently version 1.5.97 supported. This can be done manually via the Download Depot commands in the Steam Console which is accessed by typing steam://open/console into the Windows “Run” prompt, or alternatively using a Downgrade Patcher mod which ironically also has to be updated for every new version.
So what I’m understanding from reading everyone’s outrage and input on this, is that Fallout London may or may not come out because of this, but more importantly, just wait a little while after the update to try out mods, just like every other Bethesda game update?
Little while could be a long while for some mods and maybe never for others. I wouldn’t be surprised if some mod developers don’t go back and fix it if they had moved on to other projects. These mods will be years old and anything that uses the script extender will have advanced features to it so they’re not a 3 minute quest mod using only existing assets found in the game itself.
This kind of mod is always a DLL of some kind, and typically, they’ll have you install the DLL to a location that the script extender will load DLLs from automatically (but sometimes they instead use the same name as a Windows DLL and go in the same directory as the game’s executable, as when the game tries to load the Windows DLL, it’ll try ones in its own directory before System32 and similar folders, then as long as the mod DLL in turn loads the real DLL, everything will still work). When the DLL’s loading, it’ll either overwrite bits of memory corresponding to functions with its own code, or if it needs to replace the whole function, will swap out the first few instructions with instructions to jump to a mod function instead.
They did this to Skyrim too. Breaking mods in decade old games is ridiculous
This isn’t a great take IMO.
Why does Bethesda have to be obligated to ensure third party mods work on their game after an update? Isn’t that the job of the mod author to ensure their mod is compatible with the latest update? How is this any different from how any other game with mods has ever worked, ever?
Would it be nice? I guess, but it would require Bethesda to get every mod for the previous version and test for compatibility with the new update before they release their update. That’s a ridiculous request.
The thing is, modders are Bethesda’s most die-hard fans, and Bethesda games have some of the largest modding communities in the world. Many of these modding projects have taken an extraordinary amount of effort from an extraordinary amount of people. For them to not communicate and work with the community at all is a big slap in the face because modders have given people a reason to continue purchasing their games and keeping their business relevant.
Is Bethesda obligated to work with modders to try and help with backwards compatibility? Not legally, no. But their lack of effort is rightfully leaving a sour taste in many people’s mouths.
To your last point, I’m sure you didn’t mean it intentionally but that is a straw man argument; nobody is claiming that every single mod needs to be compatible with Bethesda’s updates. However, if Bethesda at the very least communicated and worked with the community even a little bit, they could make the task of updating mods substantially easier. Instead, they chose not to, and now countless of hours of work will be wasted because so many people will not find it worthwhile to update their mods to be compatible with the new version. It’s extremely unfortunate.
Every single time this happens, people act like its the first time. Game updates -> Script Extender breaks -> Mods reliant on it break too. Every. Single. Time.
but this is a game that basically lives and dies by its mods, and this is an update that (arguably) changed nothing anyone who is still playing the game cares about after years of stability. why fix what isn’t broken?
Supposedly, the biggest change was simply removing the launcher. Because in order to be steam deck verified, it can’t have the intermediary launcher that interrupts the game booting.
But removing that apparently broke a lot of other things for a lot of people. Supposedly, doing a fresh install helps. Apparently the update fucks some stuff, but a completely fresh install will be buttery smooth. At least, that’s the scuttlebutt. But that doesn’t include mods which have been broken, (and many which aren’t being actively updated anymore, because why bother updating a mod for a game that hasn’t had an update in years?)
I used to run a popular mod that made an indie beta game even more popular. Guess who almost all of the final testers were before release? My whole team. We were clearly the most devoted people to the game and knew best how to break it. It was nice to get a head-start on our new mod (which we pivoted to be the equivalent of Steam Workshop or an app store before those existed). Of course, the creator became a dickwad years later and we all ended the mod and the game is dead.
For a company that relies 100% on modders for their games, you’d think they’d have an actual modding API built into their games by now.
There’s a pretty extensive API, capable of more than most games that advertise modding support, but it can’t do literally everything anyone could think of, so people reverse engineer the game engine to make it possible to do even more things (hence it being called a script extender rather than the modding API). It’s the mod reliant on reverse engineering the executable that break, not the ones using the modding API.
“This thing they announced for last year, then pushed back to this year and released to coincide with a massively hyped TV show was a complete surprise to us.” Is that really FO:London’s stance? I mean, I feel for them that it sucks, but to call it a surprise feels straight up disingenuous.
How do you prepare for an update when Bethesda don’t tell you what is changing? It says in the article they had literally no correspondence from Bethesda until the update dropped, so the only thing they could do was keep developing and hope not too much broke in the process.
That being said, from what I understand is that the script extender broke, so they’re just waiting for an undefined time until that gets fixed for the latest update.
