Its mentioned in the article, but it bears repeating.
They force give you the first quest of a questline for free, and then charge you seven bucks for the second 15 minute quest.
Its also not complete, its an early access paid mod where they clearly cut content out of the game just to give you the first hit of a faction questline, end that first quest on a cliff hanger, and then charge 7 bucks per quest. And before this, the faction was just a series of kiosks giving radiant quests.
Fuck that’s bad. Though I’m not playing starfield I’m certainly paying attention to shit like this. Before 76 I would have been a fully committed fanboy pre-ordering most, if not all, Bethesda games. Between 76 and other shenanigans they had dropped sharply out of favor. I wasn’t going to buy a game brand new until reviews came out (hence why I still haven’t played starfield). They gained some favor back with the TV series as it seemed well done for just my kind of interest level. Now they’re losing it again.
Idk why the tv show would have gotten them any grace? As far as I know, all they did was let the property be bought and used by Amazon. Todd Howard executive produced, but that’s not saying much. The show has nothing to do with them as a studio. They just lucked into a team who had something interesting planned with the IP.
How is anybody even surprised by this?
This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.
They didn’t give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.
And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.
Think about how bad it’s (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out…
Also, let’s not forget they are the DLC pioneers and inventors of the historically important Horse Armor DLC.
I’ll admit I’ve been in that crowd that believed they saw early efforts like horse armor and Bioware’s infamous pay-to-continue Dragon Age quests, and backed off - resolving they need to shift monetization elsewhere like skins. Seems I was wrong.
You could argue given Starfield’s overall failures, it’s still in the sector of terribly-designed monetization that just gets forgotten by history, much like most mobile games. But, we’re still in the process of writing that history.
The Bethesda of old is long dead. After the disappointment that was Starfield, it will take multiple rave reviews and watching a few streamers playing on Twitch for me to even consider giving them any money. And I sure as hell will not be paying for goddamned mods, not now and not ever. Eff that and eff the greedy assholes that now run Bethesda.
The Bethesda of old is long dead.
The Bethesda of old who invented MTX with their $5-dollar horse armour?
Or the Bethesda of old who made millions by re-releasing the same game for 10+ years but refused to spend a dime to fix its bugs or give the players a functioning UI?
They means the Bethesda if the 00s and back
Edited: he to they, idk this person like that.
I don’t see any problem with modders charging for their mods. They are doing work, and deserve to be compensated.
If they’re creating additional deep content, I can see that being worth paying. If it’s just some skins or configuration edits like wonky gravity, that would not be worth money to me. But I think it’s a good thing to be able to add micro transactions for.
Take the original DOTA for example. A warcraft 3 custom map. It eventually dominated the custom game lobby, at least 3:1. I would have no problem with the creator(s) making money off their creation that contributed a ton of replayability the game.
When it comes down to it, it should be the modder’s choice on if they want to charge for their work, and the consumers choice if they want to pay for it.
Also why I didn’t have problems with microtransactions for skins, particularly when it was community driven like DOTA 2. Artists can make money creating non-game altering content, and fans get to personalize their characters.
Impressive that enough people still care for there to be a backlash.
Article without tracking paywall bullshit.
So, the player frustration this quest is inspiring isn’t a straight-up next entry in the long-running paid mods debate that’s been going on within the Bethesda community with regards to the Creation Club for a while now, but rather folks simply being unhappy with the monetisation practices Bethesda’s employing with regards to its own stuff.
I suppose that will be part of it, but it takes a load of willful ignorance to not see that the reason they distribute it this way is to ease people into the idea of using the infrastructure they ultimately set up to monetize other people’s work (i.e. mods).
