“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Yeah but Bethesda has the reputation of leaving it up to the modders, even long-term. Look at the 20 releases of Skyrim; some of them have the same bugs that they did on launch, classic Bethesda weirdness resulting from using the same busted-ass engine for 5 generations of games. Those bugs have only been addressed and mitigated by the modding community, despite there being a re-release and remaster on every single console for the last three generations.
It’s not that Bethesda can’t given the opportunity, but they tend to only do so when they are unable to rely on modders, like FO76.
You won’t hear me defending them using that old engine, except that development time is also a resource. They should have spent it a long time ago migrating to a more modern tech stack, and maybe they will for ES6 now that there’s a new boss in town; Microsoft did, after all, delay the game by a year and a half to make what is by all accounts their least buggy launch of one of their RPGs in decades. I also don’t know how much we can claim they’re leaving it up to modders when plenty of console versions are completely unmoddable.
I’m sure I could boot up the 360 version of Skyrim and see some great classic Bethesda bugs.
I agree that Starfield was the least buggy release in ages. I had also heard that at some point they were being directed to adapt the idTech engine which runs DOOM to become the new base for Bethesda games, but I guess that hasn’t happened.
To whit I played a few dozen hours of Starfield and generally by that point with any other Bethesda game, I’d have found some stupid bug that causes me to get annoyed and quit, but I just got bored of the game because of the repetitive nature and the confinement to fast travel for everything.
They must have had trouble, because Arkane moved from Unreal to Void (which is built on idTech) for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop and such, and then back to Unreal again. Everyone got in a hurry in the 2010s to have their own in-house engine to avoid paying out fees to Epic, and then after running into trouble trying to adapt those engines to genres they weren’t built for, they’re back to Unreal again.