To celebrate the launch of the successful live-action Fallout adaptation on Amazon Prime Video, Bethesda finally launched its “next-gen” version of Fallout 4 in April, but unfortunately, it has brought with it its fair share of problems. On consoles, there have been complaints about texture issues, crashes, freezes, plummeting framerates, resolution glitches, and more. Meanwhile, on PC there have been additional complaints surrounding ultrawide display support – a selling point for the PC update that unfortunately just stretched out the user interface with no FOV slider – and issues with several mods.
Many would expect some mods not to be compatible with a new official version of a game that’s nearly a decade old, but it’s worth noting that Bethesda had stated that it had worked to “minimize impact to the majority community mods” in a post on X days before the patch launched but seemed to overlook a lot of the mods’ dependency on the Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE). F4SE expanded the game’s scripting capabilities that most non-Creation Club mods needed to run without modifying the executable files on disk, ensuring there were no permanent side effects. This resulted in several players undoing the update with further mods, or tricking launchers such as Steam into not running the update in the first place.
On May 13, Fallout 4 received a new update allowing players to control the game’s graphic fidelity or performance. Bethesda Game Studios also shared in a breakdown of the patch on X that, following community feedback, there have also been additional fixes and improvements to address some of the issues caused by the previous update.
Many of these fixes seem to be targeting the issues players were experiencing on consoles, particularly the ones that were resulting in complete crashes, which is an extremely positive start. PC players were less enthused with the patch, however, with Rich Lira pointing out that there are still issues with ultrawide display support, and several others such as Bryon Matthews and PixelSpawn sharing the sentiment that the modding community had done a better job of updating the title over the years, and that it should have been left alone on PC, as each new update seems to cause more problems on the platform.
Many of the comments under Bethesda’s official Patch breakdown mentioned breaking the game’s mods on PC, further referencing the studio’s promise that it had worked to minimize the impact to the community’s work. It’s likely that Bethesda was referring to mods made using the officially supported Creation Kit when it made this statement, as the next-gen update even added some of the packs and quests made using this to the base game for free, whereas before players would have to purchase them from the Creation Club store.
There had been reports that the next-gen update even caused problems with Creation Club content, however, namely missing art and textures. Fortunately, this has been addressed in the latest patch breakdown and is reportedly fixed now, but there are still complaints about other mods being broken, and it’s unclear whether these are ones made with third-party tools or the official Creation Kit.
As with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout games before it, Starfield has already been popular with modders, who have added new armors and ships based on popular sci-fi IPs such as Star Wars or Firefly. The problem these modders are already facing, however, is that they’re not supported in any official capacity by Bethesda, with a recent update to the game completely breaking a cool ship-building mod due to something as simple as changing the way the files in the game were named.
If these mods are breaking regardless of modders using the Creation Kit, it doesn’t bode well for Starfield‘s previously announced Creation Kit, as history could repeat itself with updates added to the game after its release. Although there has been no release date for the modding tool, it is expected to introduce many of the new features developed by Bethesda in its newer Creation engine for Starfield and make it generally easier for players to mod the game.
Hopefully, it will be far easier for the studio to support Starfield‘s Creation Kit with more up-to-date tools, without as much of a dependency on external modding tools such as Fallout 4‘s Script Extender to create major mods. Time will tell, however, as for now, it seems to be the PC community who are most impacted by Fallout 4‘s major updates as a result of this lack of mod support.
Sources: Bethesda Game Studios/X (1, 2), Rich Lira/X, Bryon Matthews/X, PixelSpawn/X