They had no obligation, but there was no reason they couldn’t take the minimal effort and put out a blog post saying that the update would break mods. The modding scene is the only thing keeping Bethesda’s games relevant (except New Vegas, but that’s not really Bethesda’s achievement).
They’ve learned something. They learned that they can be as shitty as they want to be, and still the modders will bail them out. I trust this move now will also change nothing in that regard.
Those compatibility issues were always quickly rectified. The last time a script extender was borked to the point where the developer had to make an announcement was Skyrim AE.
If all they do is add more Creation Club content, all that happens is the functions people are hooking end up the same, but at different addresses. After the first few Creation Club updates, tools were made to automate mapping old addresses to new ones, and most script-extender-based mods could be made to work with just an Address Library update, which said which new addresses to use.
This is not that kind of update. The compiler version and settings used have changed, so functions, even ones that do the same thing, end up with different machine code at different addresses. This means a lot of mods will need making from scratch, and a lot of mods will need lots of work tracking down which functions need hooking now and how to do it even if there’s still stuff that’s salvageable.
They had no obligation, but there was no reason they couldn’t take the minimal effort and put out a blog post saying that the update would break mods. The modding scene is the only thing keeping Bethesda’s games relevant (except New Vegas, but that’s not really Bethesda’s achievement).
The recent Fallout series is probably doing a good job.
The modding scene has been bailing Bethesda out for 20 years. You’d think the company would have learned something but nope.
They’ve learned something. They learned that they can be as shitty as they want to be, and still the modders will bail them out. I trust this move now will also change nothing in that regard.
Every single update breaks mods that rely on a script extender because it changes the game’s binary.
Those compatibility issues were always quickly rectified. The last time a script extender was borked to the point where the developer had to make an announcement was Skyrim AE.
If all they do is add more Creation Club content, all that happens is the functions people are hooking end up the same, but at different addresses. After the first few Creation Club updates, tools were made to automate mapping old addresses to new ones, and most script-extender-based mods could be made to work with just an Address Library update, which said which new addresses to use.
This is not that kind of update. The compiler version and settings used have changed, so functions, even ones that do the same thing, end up with different machine code at different addresses. This means a lot of mods will need making from scratch, and a lot of mods will need lots of work tracking down which functions need hooking now and how to do it even if there’s still stuff that’s salvageable.
Some people are conveniently forgetting this.
Yes, but $.