Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He’s been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he’s not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS “early next year” can make it work, either.

The image I’ve posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is “headline reporting” at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.

Maybe he’s having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally, legacy built upon legacy built upon even older legacy. But if it’s really this bad, then the modding scene for Starfield is going to have a much harder time getting started than is currently being anticipated.

  • ComputerSagtNein@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Idk, I don’t doubt that they know what they talk about.

    However, some counterpoints:

    1. We already have working esp mods although they shouldn’t be possible at this point. Are they risky to use? Sure, but the ones I use work for me.
    2. Modding for Starfield before official mod support already feels on a whole different level than it was for previous games.
    3. Bethesda built Starfield with modding in mind more than any of their previous games. I doubt they did anything to cripple the modding capabilities. Big changes always happened from game to game. There wouldn’t be any progress without those.