Watch what you wish for. [The next game, or a future Bethesda game] might end up on the Unreal engine. From what I understand, that is not mod friendly.
In
JuiceHead's recap (17 minutes) of
Todd Howard's presentation at Develop: Brighton (65 minutes, pick your poison), Juice says they value the modding community and don't want to change that — but, that's been their excuse for not updating parts of the engine for years. Todd Howard has long said that they don't change the engine because they, and the community, are comfortable with it. They don't want to learn a new engine. The consequences of that being, one, the next game takes
even longer for them to complete, and two, the community (modders) have to learn a new engine.
Here's my first problem with that.
Skyrim shipped in 2011. Since then, Nintendo took a 2014 Nvidia Shield and modded it into their new console, the Nintendo Switch. Originally it was going to be more of a Shield and run Android; now it runs some bizarre fork of Android. It's further removed from Android than Fire OS (Amazon's fork) in that the Switch can't actually run Android apps, but parts of Android still shine through in the UI. (To be clear, it's no longer Android in
any sense.) What that means for gamers is that any game a Switch can run, your iPhone can run if it's newer than a Switch (so, an iPhone 6s or later) because no iPhone has ever released and been less powerful than an Android flagship. Since iPhone > Android in computational power, iPhone > Switch. Since, as of iOS 13, iPhones can now take Bluetooth game controllers, the one differential factor, the Switch JoyCons, has been removed (since there are generic JoyCons that work with phones). For Android users, it's harder to say, but Qualcomm (the company that makes the chips in Android phones) stays about 2 years behind Apple's silicon. So if you have an Android phone from 2016 or 2017, or newer (Snapdragon 800-something CPU), you can beat a Switch as well. As for Bethesda... in 2017, six years and six days after the PC release of
Skyrim, Bethesda released
Skyrim for Switch. The problem? NONE of the THOUSANDS of fixes made by the community in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch were included in "Switchrim." So tell me again how much Bethesda values modders?
(As for why I went on that long technical rant about the Switch and iPhone and Android capabilities, I wanted to further ruffle y'all's feathers because we could very well have had
Skyrim on iOS and Android. The reason we don't? "Switchrim" launched at $60, and no one was gonna pay $60 for
Skyrim on iOS or Android. Publisher Square Enix is pushing console games on iOS and Android for $15–25 (mostly
Final Fantasy games) and they really aren't selling that many. So, all that is why instead of getting
Skyrim, we got
The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a play-to-win dumpster fire whose level of bull is only rivaled by that of
Fallout 76.)
And here's my
second problem with that. No, I'm not done yet. My second problem is
Fallout 4 for Xbox One. The Xbox One is not a bad console. On the spec sheet, it's very similar to the PlayStation 4, with the exception that it has 8GB of DDR3 RAM instead of 8GB of GDDR5 (GPU) RAM. So, same RAM, but slower. Still pretty fast though! What I'm saying is, the Xbox One is not an incapable system. And yet,
Fallout 4 is virtually unplayable on it. Past level 50, the game poops the bed (not sure if we can swear up here, playing it safe, but you know what I meant) and I can tell you exactly why it soils the bed, and I'm not even a modder. Modders could probably explain it more concisely, though. Also, the mess that is downtown Boston.
I love modding, but Bethesda delivered a broken and incomplete game
twice to their hardware partners, partly due to their loyalty to their engine, and partly due to their pride. Loyalty to modders wasn't even on the
radar for "Switchrim."
But I'm not mad... just a little salty, because we all deserve better. And these games deserve better.
Fallout 4, for example, could have been a great game about a parent and their long-lost son, but it fell short there. It could have also been a great game about rebuilding after an apocalypse, but it fell short there as well. Mods really haven't fixed the former, but I am thankful for
Sim Settlements for fixing the latter. And
Skyrim for Switch could have had some of the community's many fixes, which Bethesda was well within their rights to use... but it didn't. And that's just sorry.
If the next Bethesda game isn't
great on Xbox, who cares if it has modding support? I care. You care. But Microsoft owns them now (well, technically not until 2021, this is covered in Juice's video) and they need to put out a game that
works.