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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9518867" data-attributes="member: 18">Fans do "amazing things" with a lot of fairly clunky and hard-to-work-with engines. Bethesda's engine has been getting harder to mod or do anything much with every game with since Oblivion, but up to and including Skyrim Enhanced Edition it basically kept getting more and more mods, only beginning to fall off with FO4 (which still got some impressive projects, including FO: London), and then relatively going off a cliff with Starfield - why?Because of the size and enthusiasm of the audience.If you have mod tools, and a lot of players, and the players love the game, impressive things WILL be done with the game. If you miss one of those elements, it's a lot less likely.BG3 has mod tools, has a huge audience, and has a ton of enthusiasm, so has a lot of mods despite not being particularly easy to mod. Starfield has mod tools, and a big audience, but relatively little enthusiasm, so has a tiny number of mods compared to previous Bethesda games (and those that exist tend to be small and shallow compared to previous games).Worth noting that most game studios do the latter, because when professionals are involved, and there's good management and documentation, it tends to be hugely more efficient than trying to develop a special perfect tool. You only make an "ideally suited" tool if you have absolutely nothing (rarely the case now), or more likely if you actively want the public to make stuff with your tool. Also we're increasingly seeing various tools more elegantly woven together rather than "kludged", but in many cases, those tools are either third-party, or proprietary and not the sort of thing you'd want to give away (dialogue tools and quest scripting particularly tend to be this way), so modders aren't going to get those, for the most part.</blockquote>

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