#Starfield feels "like it wasnt made to be modded", says Unnoficial Patch Modders

[John Elden Ring]

Via Eurogamer

Two months on from the release of Starfield, players are still waiting for Bethesda to address the numerous bugs which are present. But there's a whole other group of players out there taking matters into their own hands - the team behind the Starfield Community Patch, an ambitious and surprisingly professional taskforce trying to fix the game themselves. The project came under the spotlight about a month before Starfield released. It was wild to think that a group of modders could already be working on a mod for Starfield before it had even released, but there they were - anticipating the Bethesda jank fans have come to expect.

It is evident from analysing both the data structures in the provided module files and from decompiling game code that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now. This can also be inferred from the fact that there has been no quality assurance testing of modding functionality from Bethesda, as various current engine bugs that appear in the context of using mods would have been obvious showstoppers. Any existing modding capabilities appear to be incidental, stemming from the engine's legacy code base and the required work needed in that context to maintain functionality within the confines of editing Starfield.esm using the internal version of CK2.

Halgari boils this down to simpler terms for me.

"It's essentially a hack, like they built this game thinking they would add modding some day, and they haven't actually added it yet," he explains.

"The only reason we can mod it already, is because we've modded the other games using the same engine and we know what to do. But a lot of stuff is really broken compared to the other games."

Halgari estimates the modding scene for the game won't take off until next year once Bethesda releases official mod tools.