Yes…core game updates typically do break mods. This is nothing new
It’s mostly about the timing that is infuriating people. Fallout regained popularity with the TV show and they dropped a mod breaking release days later. Now they keep updating it with shit nobody asked for and breaking mods.
Your accusations are driven by anger but they don’t make much sense.
It’s mostly about the timing that is infuriating people. Fallout regained popularity with the TV show and they dropped a mod breaking release days later.
At the end of last year when Bethesda announced the next-gen update would be delayed, it was already easy to suspect they will be releasing it along with the tv show. As soon as the show premiered, they announced they’ll release the update in 2 weeks. Annoyance by the initial delay aside, this was a perfect moment to release the update.
dropped a mod breaking release
Mods are not developed by Bethesda, they are not integral to the game or necessary to play it and you cannot expect Bethesda to align the release date with every “modder” or test for each mod compatibility. Modders are welcome to create mods but it’s not their game - you seem to be implying that Bethesda is required to consult with modders on game development. It’s up to modders to keep their mods up to date with the game, not the other way around.
Additionally, Fallout 4 has seen a significant increase in sales during that period, which not only confirms it was the right moment to release the update, but also that it brought many new players, who are unlikely to play the game for the first time with mods.
Now they keep updating it with shit nobody asked for and breaking mods.
Just because you haven’t been waiting for the update, it doesn’t mean nobody has. Many players waited for this update, myself included. The next-gen update, as the name suggests, is mostly intended for consoles and the game has never looked or run better on my PS5.
The only reasonable issue you can have with this update is if you’re on PC and playing the game via Steam - they automatically updated the game and don’t allow to rollback. But that should be a protest directed at Steam, if you play the game via GOG, you can easily rollback the update. Or disable the game-breaking mods.
The article itself is rather unimpressive and not very investigative. Victoria Kennedy did “quick scan over on Steam’s Fallout 4 forums” and decided to make an article about it because she knew mocking Bethesda will bring precious clicks.
Without mods, Bethesda’s games would not have been so consistently played since:
2011 for Skyrim’s FIRST release
2014 for Fallout 4’s FIRST releaseSaying that mods aren’t important, is actually kind of weird. Without those mods keeping the games afloat through the internet ether, they would not be AS popular as they are today.
People STILL play Fallout 3 and New Vegas TO THIS DAY, because of mods that LITERALLY allow the game to be played as crash free as possible.
From that context, I would assume mods are pretty damn important for these games.
That is true, but it is also true that the script extender (and that is all that broke) is literally hacking and forcing it’s code into the game. And modern code and compiler is built to resist such attacks, if only by randomizing the needed jump addresses with every compilation.
All changes to the exe will break script extender, there is nothing that can change that. Well nothing but, maybe, a official deep plugin API for the exe and it is very unlikely that Bethesda will provide something like that.
The mods that updated for the first update were already updated within 24 hours of the next one.
The only mods that are still broken now are mods that were made and maintained by people who have stopped playing the game some time ago.
And even most of those still work, if they didn’t rely on the script extender
Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don’t know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn’t this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don’t care about steamrolling modders’ work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol
The mods that weren’t backwards compatible were primarily the ones that depended on the script extender. This was an unsupported executable that expanded on the commands available to the scripts in the mods.
Not to say unsupported is bad, but everyone was well aware that if they depended on the script extender, they would break if the game updated at all. The biggest mods avoided that dependency for exactly this reason, and really didn’t have any trouble. (Sim Settlements still worked the entire time, for example)
And like usual, the community stepped up and updated their unsupported extension quickly, ready for this outcome.
If you made a mod that depends on the script extender and then quit playing the game or supporting your mod, that was a choice you made as a modder. Meanwhile there’s mods that haven’t seen an update in 8 years that continue to work without issue.
People act like mods breaking after an update is new. Bethesda (and every other dev team) has been doing it since Morrowind (and long before that) The MWSE and everything else were fine back then, too.
Yeah, Minecraft updates break mods all the time but there it is just something the community accepts as normal and lives with. The huge update rage is something I only see with Bethesda game modding.
Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a “beta” or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the “every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you” hill there wouldn’t be any outrage.
So you say that you want the gog.com version of the game then?
Technical question - does the script extender use signature/pattern scanning at all?
It sounds to me that it may have broken because it doesn’t use it.
You could say “oh they recompiled it so the registers changed” but I highly doubt they changed the code that much or touched optimization flags.
The next gen update used a completely different compiler, and that created a highly different executable, that’s why the update for script extender took so long and that’s why the script extender for next gen edition is unable to load “old” script extender mods.
It is the same that happened with Skyrim Anniversary Edition.
Yeah, we know. And its always a shit update too, nothing worth breaking mods for. Just break steam updates and move on.
