this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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Yeah but what expectation could they have had that they'd need to communicate with Bethesda in the first place? The game's been "complete" for several years at this point, and IIRC Skyrim Special Edition (the Skyrim version of what happened here) was both announced in advance and released as a separate game, so mods that weren't getting updates could still function. In light of that, it seems reasonable for the developer to expect advance warning at least in the form of a press release prior to the update being made available. Should they have reached out every week asking whether Bethesda had any plans to update a 10-year-old game?
They did...
The modder said it themselves. It will take time for them to check the 4 years of work to see if it still function. At this point, no matter when Bethesda drop the update, they will complaint that it break their mod. This has been going on since the launch of FO4 where every time bethesda update the game, it break the mod, people complain about it, some straight out announce they won't fix it until the final update. It's nothing new.
To play devil's advocate, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, and changing the game so much doesn't seem like something that wouldn't do anything to mods. Then - who should they inform? There is no "king of mods", there is a ton of people making shit. What should they do? Open source to people who aren't in the company? Give them the patch early? If they promised well in advance, that the patch was comming, priorities could have changed from "patch a years old game to new consoles" to "put out fires in the newest installments". And people would be mad about that too, or expecting the patch to drop any second, when it was half a year away. Also, what good would saying "ayo, we're making a patch that'll break your shit completely" do? Having that info doesn't change what happens to the mods, and nobody will stop a game update going forward with the arguments of "it'll break mods"
Honestly the best thing they can do is make for easy game version rollbacks on PC platforms. Kerbal Space Program uses the Steam Betas feature to have a ton of different game versions easily available to download for example. If it were EA I'd also be saying to give the option to defer game updates in their shitty launcher but I've given up on hoping EA ever does something positive for its userbase
How about just not "updating" a finished game?
IMO the solution is to enable easier manual versioning management. Instead of auto updating everything, just add an update button when there's an update available, include a rollback option, and offer downloads for popular versions instead of just the latest.
Back in the StarCraft modding days, some tools required specific versions of the game to function. The modding community figured out how to work around that by hosting the patches that got to the desired version and giving instructions (maybe even tools) for users to manage using both a specific version for mods and the latest version to play online.
The modding community was doing its own thing and didn't expect Blizzard to adjust the way they were doing anything to make things easier. I can't believe the sense of entitlement I'm seeing all over the place regarding this.
These broken mods were using a third party tool that reverse engineered the game's binary to do things their modding API didn't expose. If they wanted to be dicks about it, they might have been able to shut it down as a tos violation or tried to deliberately block it some other way. All they did was update the code, which then generates a new binary and changes all of the addresses and offsets that the tool needs to use.
When is a game "finished"? Why wouldn't they capitalize on the fact that the show is popular? A lot more people will check out the game once they hear it now has widescreen support and is better performance-wise. They also added content about a major faction from the previous games. Are we seriously angry that a game gets more stuff?