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In the June 2023 Xbox Games Showcase, Corporate Vice President of Xbox Sarah Bond opened her segment by promising “a deep dive into one of the most important RPGs ever made– Starfield.”
That is quite the claim. It’s true that Starfield is looking to be an absolutely massive game, perhaps one of the largest in scope we’ve ever seen. And it’s also true that between Skyrim’s continued dominance in the public mindshare and the impressive showing in the recent Direct, excitement for Starfield is at an all-time high.
But while the bespoke created content in Starfield looks promising, what really could give it limitless potential is the modding scene. I spoke to several high-profile modders of Skyrim to better understand their community and their process, and came away with a prevailing theme: the modders keeping Skyrim alive might just be Starfield’s secret weapon.
While asking about Skyrim’s longevity and Starfield’s potential in the modding space, three distinct factors seemed to be the most important: the setting of Skyrim, the continuing familiarity with the engine, and the modding community that keeps in constant contact.
Setting Course
Anyone familiar with the Skyrim modding scene, or just modding in general, will have heard of Nexus Mods, as it’s one of the most active locations for the distribution of PC gaming mods. Skyrim Special Edition consistently ranks at the top of the popularity charts, and it doesn’t seem to be budging anytime soon, as it still outperforms a more recent Bethesda game, Fallout 4.
So why is Skyrim so popular in the modding scene? I asked DylanJames, a freelance musician and music producer who is also the creator of several popular audio mods, namely Regional Sounds Expansion, Reverb Interior Sounds Expansion, and Acoustic Space Improvement Fixes.
“This is just my opinion, but I’ve heard it expressed [while] talking to other mod authors and friends over the years. Skyrim is, by virtue of being in a fantasy setting, a much more flexible stage [than Fallout] for people to operate in. It has a much more compelling offer to players and authors looking to make content for the game. You possess the character’s ability to wield magic and explore abstract concepts, while still maintaining a strong grounding in reality when it comes to tackling issues of the world’s economy, creatures, and how people look and behave. The existing lore of The Elder Scrolls runs incredibly deep. The character in Skyrim is a blank slate, allowing for a lot more flexible story-telling opportunities. You can even consider its “biodiverse” advantage with each quadrant of the worldspace almost representing a season visually – in Fallout 4 you’re limited to what can be boiled down to “greater suburban area, but post-apocalypse. 9 times out of 10 most people would pick Dungeons & Dragons over GURPS.” GURPS is an acronym for Generic Universal RolePlaying System, a tabletop method for playing in any setting.
This wasn’t to discredit Fallout, or to call it generic in any way, as Dylan went on to extol the many virtues of the Fallout modding community, including their professionalism and commitment to quality, characterizing them as the “more professional younger brother to Skyrim,” and went out of their way to name Sim Settlements, a Fallout 4 mod, as “one of the greatest content mods ever made for a Bethesda title.” But Dylan’s not the only one who feels that Skyrim’s setting is a more fertile modding ground than Fallout 4.
Powerofthree, a Skyrim modder that mostly focuses on reverse engineering, and has an extensive back-catalog in Skyrim bug-fixing and quality-of-life mods, as well as a Photo Mode mod for Skyrim, had this to say when asked about the relative popularity of Skyrim compared to Fallout.
“In my opinion, the post apocalyptic genre is more limited in scope and doesn’t allow the variety and freedom that fantasy offers. With Skyrim, you can mod in guns and make it [a] desolate wasteland, all without breaking the lore. Fallout 4, while more technically advanced, has also some features that make it difficult to mod in the same way Skyrim allows. That is not to say it cannot be overcome, but something like Seasons of Skyrim (that I created, featuring dynamic season changes in-game) would not be possible [in] Fallout 4 without much effort.”
Most of the modders I spoke to reiterated this concept: the fantasy setting of Skyrim led to more creativity, and therefore more long-term interest in the modding scene. So what does this mean for Starfield? As the game hasn’t been released yet, this is all speculation, but you certainly can’t get much more open-ended than science fiction.
Steffen, known as Pfuscher on Nexus Mods, is the creator of the most downloaded mod for Skyrim Special Edition: Skyrim 202X, a high-res texture mod with over 17 million downloads. When asked about the potential for Starfield’s modding scene, he replied:
“Using another setting and kind of unlimited space is a smart move by Bethesda. Looks like good ground work for an even bigger modding community. I’ve seen a western planet, insects, animals similar to dinosaurs, [and] a fallout like setting. Obviously a few future settings. With so many planets, people are able to integrate any setting they want. Past, present, future. If the game gets good modding tools or is open enough, it has room for a few dozen games inside. I think that’s their goal.”
And a game containing multiple games does indeed seem to be their goal, as Starfield Director Todd Howard said to our own Ryan McCaffrey in a June IGN interview.
“You could say in some respects this is like five or six games in one… it’s the spaceship game, it’s the on-the-ground game, it’s a dialogue game, it’s an outpost game, it’s a crafting game… we try to weave in and out of them in a way that holistically creates something greater than the sum of its parts.”
And while he was speaking on content created by Bethesda, it’s a statement that can easily be extrapolated to the modders at large. Skyrim is a paltry size compared to what Starfield promises to be, and even then, mindflux, a senior game designer and the creator of the Skyrim Particle Patch mod for ENB, said Skyrim is “one of the few games in which almost your creativity is the limiting factor,” and went on to say how important the physical size of the space could be for modding as well, as it prevents a kind of digital land-grab.
“Ideally, mod conflicts will be less of an issue than they are traditionally – what I mean is that with a limited amount of space like in say Skyrim you very easily get conflicts when content creators target the same piece of land. Of course, community can always work around them with patches but it’s more of a necessary evil that can catch especially newcomers off guard.”
Everglaid, the creator of Sirenroot, a highly vaunted questline mod in Skyrim, agreed with the importance put on digital real-estate, and also spoke on her excitement for Starfield’s setting.
“Having multiple planets also helps modders create things that don’t have to directly conflict with other content, like throwing a player home in the center of an already populated city, while not feeling too disconnected with the base game… The game’s themes are very flexible with what we’ve seen, ranging from cyberpunk, to western, to even utopian visuals- I think it’s a prime spot for modders to create in, and I will definitely be doing the same stuff I have been before.”
With Starfield’s many gameplay systems, this many planets, and a setting this many times more open than Skyrim, the creativity it sparks is theoretically limitless.
Start Your Engine
Starfield is confirmed to run on Creation Engine 2, a heavily updated offshoot of the Gamebryo Engine that Bethesda has been using ever since The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. And while this engine has received an incredible amount of upkeep since it’s *ahem* creation, some members of Bethesda’s fanbase are reticent about a new game built on what’s seen as such an old framework. But many modders have a different outlook, including software developer and creator of the Sidequests of Skyrim mod, wSkeever.
“I am reassured that the game is using an upgraded version of the same Gamebryo/Creation engine that Bethesda has used since Morrowind, this would make the transition from Skyrim and Fallout 4 easy for modders.”
DylanJames shared the same sentiment, and even pushed back directly against the anti-Creation Engine narrative:
“I think some of us have been slightly worried about the prospect of a new Bethesda title for a while now. There’s a very loud narrative online about Bethesda games needing “a new engine” that I believe to be very misguided. An update to the engine and how certain features are implemented could heavily restrict how easily we make mods – it’s partially why a game’s modding community might fail to take off. Depending on how this plays out, we could see a golden age of Bethesda Games Modding or Skyrim will remain at the top for another decade.”
Continuity of an engine’s framework is an important aspect to the health of its modding scene. Even Fallout 4, despite making several enhancements to the engine since Skyrim, inadvertently made some things harder for creators simply because they were different than what came before. And Starfield certainly will have changes to the engine, with real time global illumination and a brand new animation system being called out by name during the Starfield Direct.
The new animation system in particular may actually be a good thing for Skyrim modders switching over to Skyrim, depending on how it’s implemented. Everglaid told me:
“Skyrim’s animation system is restrictive because of how information about animations are held- it’s all bundled in big behaviour packages. It’s easy to swap out an animation if you aren’t changing the functionality, like adding stylistic touches to attack animations, or movement. However, changing any properties of animations, or adding any new ones, require editing and rebuilding that behaviour package… Skyrim, nor the Creation Kit came with any tools to do so, as it’s licensed under the Havok Engine… Starfield would benefit massively just by having tools in the first place, and the more robust the better!”
And hopefully those modding tools come quickly. It took around 6 months for Fallout 4’s Creation Kit to be released to the public, and a delayed start off the blocks could hurt Starfield’s momentum out of the gate. But given that it seems to have such a diversity of gameplay systems and planets, and is continuing to use the familiar Creation Engine framework, I’m willing to bet that modders will still show up when these tools are released.
After all, many in the general public have questioned Bethesda’s insistence on sticking to the same engine they’ve used since Morrowind, but it actually speaks to the attempted ethos of Bethesda’s games, as exemplified by the modders and the above quote from Howard himself: they’re not just about delivering an experience, but the possibility of every experience.
A Community Effort
Other than the setting, one of the most celebrated aspects of the Skyrim modding scene in the answers I received was the community. Several of them I spoke to are game or software developers in their day jobs, and modding is a passion project. But sometimes the passion isn’t even for the love for the game, but for the simple act of passing a creation on, as mindflux opined.
“…modding is primarily a creative outlet which lets me do things with games that I’m otherwise not able [to do] in my [day] job. This is probably surprising but I don’t play games except for keeping tabs on where the industry is going and from what I have heard this is actually not all too uncommon in the ranks of modders… I have to say that it feels astonishing as well as super rewarding having been watching the game transforming from a title that launched all the way back in 2011 to something that looks like it could be released right now… I feel like the community works like a collective, self-organized system – like a hive mind, if you will – in that it’s very much working towards a common goal of improving and enhancing the game: launching projects which the community feels there’s a need for, filling in blanks and fixing bits and pieces the game is missing and gradually evolving it.”
And mindflux wasn’t the only one to describe it as a hive-mind. I also heard this from Steffen, the modder known as Pfuscher.
“The internet is a big hive mind regarding modding knowledge. The discord channels contain thousands of people which would be too much to talk to though. But still, up to 100 people are always actively discussing something on a discord channel.”
Community, again and again, seemed to be the focus for many, as many answers were quick to celebrate other creators’ mods, or big contributions to group projects. DylanJames said that “a day doesn’t go by where I’m not talking to a friend about what we’re working on, helping with assets, or supporting each other and our work.” And these bigger group projects have their own kind of inertia, a modder-Katamari that bundles up those caught in its path, as Dylan goes on to explain: “as these larger projects start to build up in size and momentum, it becomes much easier to attract new talent and harder for others to abandon.”
wSkeever also said it concisely:
“Modding is a group activity. No mod has a singular creator. Without the prior work from Bethesda devs, the shared knowledge base of the modding community, or the availability of open permissions asset libraries, most mods would not be possible.”
Given that Skyrim is undoubtedly one of the largest modding communities around, with no signs of slowing down (mindflux says “the community is nowhere near done with Skyrim yet”), and these creators are always in constant contact with one another, it’s an easy bet that much of this community will continue modding Starfield when the creation tools release, even despite some wait-and-see trepidation from a small amount of the creators I spoke to. There’s so much investment, so much passion, and so much community bonding in the current Skyrim community, that it has to go somewhere. Why not go to space?
The earnest hyperbole Sarah Bond kicked this video off with is easy to mock at first listen, but to a group of unofficial creators behind the scenes, could she be right? Could Starfield be one of the most important RPGs ever made? With a vast setting, a legacied engine, and an army of passionate part-time creatives behind it, it may very well have a great chance. Even if it ends up being just for them.
Ronny Barrier is a gameplay producer for IGN. When he’s not playing fighting games or diving into a new RPG, he’s probably trying to get his rescue dog to stop eating dirt. You can follow him on Twitter @Ronny_Barrier.
