Bethesda Greed Essay

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If you listen closely and stay as quiet as possible, you may very well hear the rapid clattering of keyboards and angry rants about Bethesda Softworks' latest blunder in a painfully long and maddening series of mistakes. A series of mistakes that may very well cost them the momentum and fan loyalty that they'll need for their next major release. If I'm not making any sense, that's because Bethesda Softworks has a complicated history with their two main franchises, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and their respective modding communities. Mods have always been a large part of the two franchises, mostly because games from either franchise are open-world, sandbox RPGs with dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to play - and that's without mods! Factor …show more content…

But the focus isn't all on paid mods. In fact, most of why Bethesda gets such a bad reputation these days is because of how they handled free mods. Long story short, when Bethesda launched Fallout 4 just six months after the big Skyrim paid mods debacle, they did something that raised a red flag for many. To them, it was the beginning of the end, or at least a steep decline, and time tells us they were right. Bethesda opted to not release their Creation Kit - the tool that is used by modders to create original content - until six months after Fallout 4's release. This came with the foreboding of the Season Pass releasing with the game. The Season Pass ended up including a total of six DLC expansions post-release. Not surprising to anyone, however, was that three of those six expansions would be small add-ons to Fallout 4's settlement system. Before the game's release, the settlement system was guaranteed to not only be optional, but functional. It was neither of those things and even the best modders couldn't fix it entirely. Why this was such an issue with the Creation Kit was because, presumably, Bethesda didn't want modders beating them to the punch and making free alternatives to what they intended to be paid DLC.

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