Starfield Mods May Be In Big Trouble According To Recent Skyrim Update

09.12.2023 - 13:17 / screenrant.com / May Be

Although 's modding community is still continuing to grow after the game's relatively recent release, a new update could already be spelling trouble for the game's future mods. Open-world RPGs made by Bethesda have a relatively long history of modding, with games from and seriesboasting some of the most high-profile modding communities in the entire gaming industry. Ranging from community-made fixes, to quality-of-life UI changes, to entirely new content, mods for many Bethesda RPGs tend to enhance the games they're for to a new level, allowing players to change their experience to suit their own needs.

While all of Bethesda's more modern RPGs have modding communities to some extent, the biggest and most well-known is still for, which boasts over 120,000 mods on Nexus Mods alone, split across the original game and the Special Edition (although there is undoubtedly a large amount of overlap between the two). By comparison, there are drastically fewer mods for — around 6,000 on Nexus Mods — but this is almost certainly more due to the difference in release date than any other factor. Still, while 's library of user-made mods is quickly growing, a new update regarding the mods of might spell trouble for the newer Bethesda RPG's future mods.

As reported by, the most recent patch for, has merged the game's Creation Club feature with the integrated mod browser, bringing them both under the umbrella of what Bethesda is now referring to as Creations. At the same time,Bethesda has also introduced the new Verified Creator Program, which, similarly to the Creation Club, allows for some mod creators to release paid mods after being admitted to the program. While no concrete plans to bring the program to have been officially announced, the FAQ on the Bethesda's website regarding Creations notes that the developer/publisher is "."

In a separate, but related issue, the patch also broke one of the game's most prominent and important mods, the Skyrim Script Extender, or SKSE. As a huge number of mods are reliant on SKSE to work, this had a cascading effect, breaking numerous other mods and causing further backlash. Fortunately, the mod was quickly fixed to work with the new patch by the team behind SKSE, but the inconvenience caused by the new update has contributed significantly to the negative sentiment from the community.

Notably, the new update and introduction of the Verified Creator Program isn't the first time that paid mods have been introduced to. In 2015, paid mods were briefly made available through the Steam Workshop, with Valve making the initial announcement. The introduction of paid mods was met with considerable backlash at the time, resulting in the release of several satirical mods mocking the