The Most Popular Mod For Fallout 4 Is The One That Removes The Title Screen Crawl For Bethesda's 'Creation Club'
from the modding-out-the-mods dept
You may recall that a few years ago, Valve attempted to rollout a platform for video game modders to make money from their efforts. It was an altogether messy attempt for any number of reasons, but chief among them was that the modding community and ecosystem has long operated as a labor of love and not one in which money is exchanged past the point of asking for donations. What Valve attempted to do was fundamentally change that ecosystem without providing a great deal of transparency as to why. One of the primary early adopters of this system in the game publishing community was Bethesda, which opened up Skyrim, a game both wildly popular and one with a robust modding community, to this paid mods platform. In the wake of the backlash, Bethesda ended up refunding all of the mod purchases gamers had made.
But then it much more quietly rolled out its Creation Club, which was something of a paid mods 2.0 attempt. For Fallout 4 in particular, the Creation Club platform was one in which both Bethesda and outside modders could have additional content published for the game in a way codified and supported by Bethesda itself. Outside modding groups would be paid for this work and, in turn, gamers would pay for the content through Creation Club rather than buying the more traditional DLC. It was something of a trade, in other words. No annoying DLC, but pay for the mods of choice through Creation Club.
So, how is that going? Well, the Creation Club community is still there, but relative to most modding communities there isn't a whole lot being offered up, nor purchased. Despite a huge portion of the game's title screen now dedicated to a window for "Creation Club News", gamers don't seem to be adopting it en masse. Unlike, say, Nexus Mods, long the go-to site to find game mods for Bethesda titles. In fact, one of the site's most popular mods for Fallout 4 is a simple mod that gets rid of the title screen crawl for Creation Club.
Enter the “No More Creation Club News” mod by a modder named InAComaDial999. It’s currently the second most popular file of the month on Nexus Mods’ Fallout 4 page. It gets rid of the ad. That’s it.
I imagine, though, that people aren’t downloading this mod because they’re aesthetic purists. They want to stick it to the man, and this feels like a tiny middle finger they can deploy at will.
Look, there may be a way to make paying modders for their work a reality that doesn't almost universally piss off gamers. I personally am skeptical, because the modding scene has always thrived outside of the profit motive as a community. But whatever the answer to that open question is, it should be clear by now that paid mods 3.0 better have a significant amount of thought put into it compared to the first two versions.
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Filed Under: creation club, fallout, mods, title screen
Companies: bethesda, valve
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if it's a large scale overhaul mod like say, Tamriel Rebuilt (for ES 3: Morrowind, 16 years running) they could licence it. but for something that adds x item in the game (whether it is bethesda's property or not, as in the case for Legend of Zelda weapons in Skyrim) it just seems lazy on Bethesda's part and seems more like outsourcing dlc/paid mods rather than doing it themselves.
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STO does something SIMILAR but then again not similar. They do sometimes hold a design the ship contest, but then again, they are only doing the designing phase and not the actual modeling and rendering processes (that's left up to Cryptic)
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-Promise of all Cclub content being new already broken with the first batch of mods;
-All mods are preloaded (locked) with the Cclub patch so they eat up bandwidth and harddisk space (probably to circumvent playstation restrictions);
-Load order of installed non-Cclub mods is messed up (load order is important for mood compatibility);
-Using bs terms like micro-DLC instead of paid mods.
Personally I'm kinda glad they f-ed up so badly since it may delay paid mods as a common feature a bit more.
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So to sum up:
The second most popular free mod is one that hides the advertisement for the paid mods.
I think it's safe to say that when people are willing to spend extra effort to hide your latest 'feature' you know you've screwed up it's implementation and/or are offering something they don't want.
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Not all games are awful "offenders" here, but some are incredibly painful not to be able to skip past after a while. Apologies for wishing to ignore your insanely impressive logo after the two-hundredth time.
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But yes, that should be something the game devs build into the game - an option that tells it the next time you run to skip all the crud at the start. I don't see that happening as the big bosses want their advertising to play every single time you start the game.
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I hate that too. I don't mind on initial game load (like the intro story video), but EVERY TIME I START THE GAME??? That's a bit excessive.
Most Bethesda games have a line in the Usersettings.ini file. Just search for something like 'SET SkipPregameVideos "0"' and change the '0' to a '1'. Then you can enjoy the silence.
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The only game I'm aware of that loads stuff during the intro videos is Civilization 5, because you can't skip the video until about 20 seconds in (depending on the speed of your PC) and it's got an option to skip the intro that instead dumps you to a loading screen for those same 20 seconds while the game initializes. Everything else just has a noIntro=1 command line argument that the developers put in for themselves because they were sick of the loading screen crap too.
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Also, Bethesda doesn't seem to understand how it's modding community works. They tend to break things every time they go near it. The fact that they want you to pay them to do so is especially galling.
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The publishers have a reason to push the idea that creators have a profit motive. Exploiting that motive is how they make most of the profit available from creative people's work.
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for a good laugh and gag...
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Its a Mod Mod World
Free Mods are made by awesome people who want to fix things they and many others think suck in the official version of mod-able games, or better, they just want to blow my socks off with their amazing additions and revisions and get kudos and fame in return. As a non-coder gamer, this is heaven.
As soon as you add the cash angle to the equation, you have mod-makers doing what every other businessman on earth does - try to do as little work as possible and offer as little product as possible for as much money as possible.
Once you add the profit motive, you end up with nothing but profiteers doing their level best to sell shit as "Shinola"* (*that's an old brand of shoe-polish in case you were wondering).
And then there's the joy and wonderment of trying something out first and paying later, through donations to those mod makers whose products you liked, without having to pay for products you later find truly suck, don't do what you wanted or simply add undocumented features that you really did not want.
Kiss that rare joy goodbye too.
Sure modders deserve to be able to make a living off of their work and I hope that most actually do somehow make money from their labors. But as far as I'm concerned, as soon as you add the cash-up-front thing, you're going to lose quality instantly.
And lets face it, if Bethesda is going to pay these modders and put their company name on the resulting products, you can bet your socks that every such mod forthcoming will have to follow Beth's 18th century morality rules as well.
If Bethesda or other game makers were actually run as intelligent organizations, they'd be putting together packages of the best, most popular modders' works and cutting the modders a royalty from sales of these packages as Modder DLCs.
That way you get modders to work together from the get-go to create super mods. Super Mods would be quality checked by the game company's own coders to insure proper play-through and minimal conflict thru included mod patches.
That's a Win-Win.
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