I'm posting this in the Other RPG's section because it's highly unlikely I will add a forum for Skyrim. Not particularly because of this debacle, but for several reasons I don't care about the game anymore.
So, before I add some of my own comments I suggest watching this entire video which although it is quite long, explains very well what went wrong and who should be blamed. And that is not the modders.
It's my opinion, and I'm not alone, that Skyrim, and Oblivion to some extent, are both bland and uninspiring games which to this day have only been redeemed and continue to be popular, by the selfless work of modders who add a plethora of amazing things to enhance our games as well as fixing the bugs, unfinished and glitched quests, and other problems that Bethesda never bothered to address. This is more prevalent in Skyrim however. At least Oblivion had meaningful and interesting quests and not so much of the annoying Radiant filler quests that took you all over Skyrim to attempt to extend gameplay.
Despite promises of continued support for Skyrim, Bethesda abandoned it and left it to modders to stabilize and patch. Yes, they provided the toolkits to enable mods to be made in the first place, but even they have bugs that have never really been addressed. The papyrus scripting engine is the cause of many of the problems. It's why we are advised to never, ever remove a mod with scripts that has been in gameplay because it will ruin your saves forever. You may not notice it immediately, but somewhere, sometime, your game will fail and you have to start over. Again and again. Sometimes just trying to finish the main Quest was a trial, especially if it wasn't approached linearly and other quests were started or you just wanted to do something else for awhile.
I have 100's of hours played in Skyrim which don't show on my Steam profile because I used to always played offline. Now I'm always online for dark Souls 2:Scholar of the First Sin, a game that takes all of my free time and then some. Many of those hours in Skyrim however are from having to start over because something went wrong. Corrupt saves, the out of the blue CTD's and unexplained crashes and freezes, and that was only in the vanilla game. I lost my first character after 110 hours to corrupt saves after one of the official patches. To say I was angry is an understatement. That was before mods even existed for Skyrim.
People might say, and I have heard this from people who don't know any better...it's the mods. Mods cause instability, mods cause crashes, etc, etc. Not true. If users educate themselves and learn to manage load orders, use Bashed Patches, use LOOT and other tools Skyrim can be very stable. Not to mention the memory fixes and Unofficial Patches which any sane person should be using.
And the most important thing users often don't do...read the damn Readme and understand it before complaining.
Bethesda, and Valve, had to take a huge step back from this after the massive backlash, but if they had communicated with their fan base beforehand and not after the fact, this may not have turned out to be the disaster that it has turned out to be.
If for one minute people think this won't come back when, and if Fallout 4 and TES6 arrives, they are fooling themselves. It's my opinion that this was an experiment on Bethesda's behalf to test the waters on an already released game and on seeing how it failed, and how the modding community has come together against it as presented, they will be working on a new model for their next games. They are a business and as such they need to make money. Giving a damn about their player base comes way down the list of priorities, no matter how much they admit to getting it wrong this time.
That's pretty much all I'm going to say. I could go on and expand on several points and I will if anyone is interested, or wishes to refute what I've said. I will say that any future games from Bethesda will need to be on sale a year or so after release before I consider buying them. And, no, I'm not one of those who rants about one
game and then happily hands over money for the next installment to find it's no better, or worse. I have a longer memory than that.
It seems to be the trend for AAA developers these days to release unfinished, buggy, and in some cases unplayable games and the end consumer is either stuck with it in the case of unmoddable games, or modders have to clean up the mess.
THIEF and Dragon Age: Inquisition I'm looking at you as well. And they are not the only ones, just two of the games I purchased and are now gathering dust.
So, before I add some of my own comments I suggest watching this entire video which although it is quite long, explains very well what went wrong and who should be blamed. And that is not the modders.
It's my opinion, and I'm not alone, that Skyrim, and Oblivion to some extent, are both bland and uninspiring games which to this day have only been redeemed and continue to be popular, by the selfless work of modders who add a plethora of amazing things to enhance our games as well as fixing the bugs, unfinished and glitched quests, and other problems that Bethesda never bothered to address. This is more prevalent in Skyrim however. At least Oblivion had meaningful and interesting quests and not so much of the annoying Radiant filler quests that took you all over Skyrim to attempt to extend gameplay.
Despite promises of continued support for Skyrim, Bethesda abandoned it and left it to modders to stabilize and patch. Yes, they provided the toolkits to enable mods to be made in the first place, but even they have bugs that have never really been addressed. The papyrus scripting engine is the cause of many of the problems. It's why we are advised to never, ever remove a mod with scripts that has been in gameplay because it will ruin your saves forever. You may not notice it immediately, but somewhere, sometime, your game will fail and you have to start over. Again and again. Sometimes just trying to finish the main Quest was a trial, especially if it wasn't approached linearly and other quests were started or you just wanted to do something else for awhile.
I have 100's of hours played in Skyrim which don't show on my Steam profile because I used to always played offline. Now I'm always online for dark Souls 2:Scholar of the First Sin, a game that takes all of my free time and then some. Many of those hours in Skyrim however are from having to start over because something went wrong. Corrupt saves, the out of the blue CTD's and unexplained crashes and freezes, and that was only in the vanilla game. I lost my first character after 110 hours to corrupt saves after one of the official patches. To say I was angry is an understatement. That was before mods even existed for Skyrim.
People might say, and I have heard this from people who don't know any better...it's the mods. Mods cause instability, mods cause crashes, etc, etc. Not true. If users educate themselves and learn to manage load orders, use Bashed Patches, use LOOT and other tools Skyrim can be very stable. Not to mention the memory fixes and Unofficial Patches which any sane person should be using.
And the most important thing users often don't do...read the damn Readme and understand it before complaining.
Bethesda, and Valve, had to take a huge step back from this after the massive backlash, but if they had communicated with their fan base beforehand and not after the fact, this may not have turned out to be the disaster that it has turned out to be.
If for one minute people think this won't come back when, and if Fallout 4 and TES6 arrives, they are fooling themselves. It's my opinion that this was an experiment on Bethesda's behalf to test the waters on an already released game and on seeing how it failed, and how the modding community has come together against it as presented, they will be working on a new model for their next games. They are a business and as such they need to make money. Giving a damn about their player base comes way down the list of priorities, no matter how much they admit to getting it wrong this time.
That's pretty much all I'm going to say. I could go on and expand on several points and I will if anyone is interested, or wishes to refute what I've said. I will say that any future games from Bethesda will need to be on sale a year or so after release before I consider buying them. And, no, I'm not one of those who rants about one
game and then happily hands over money for the next installment to find it's no better, or worse. I have a longer memory than that.
It seems to be the trend for AAA developers these days to release unfinished, buggy, and in some cases unplayable games and the end consumer is either stuck with it in the case of unmoddable games, or modders have to clean up the mess.
THIEF and Dragon Age: Inquisition I'm looking at you as well. And they are not the only ones, just two of the games I purchased and are now gathering dust.