Bethesda's Creation Club Auto Downloads ALL THE PAID MODS - without your consent

It seems that Creation Club is bent on shooting itself on to it's legs. With the newest patch of Fallout 4 creation club has been added - but it is not alone. With the CC also all the resources for all the paid mods have been added to the download. Right now it means that 2GB of mod data is tied to the update. This data is Fallout 4 ba2 archive files that contain things like materials, textures and meshes. In another words everything the paid mods need to function is forcefully downloaded - not just the store info. This is even if you have never signed up for Bethesda account.

Now, 2GB of files that you are not going to use pay for might not seem much, but keep in mind that IF this is not fixed and more mods are being added to the CC, your HDD will fill up with useless junk.

Gopher's take on this:

Between this, the files not being encrypted (I haven't seen any update on this yet but I imagine they'll patch that one as fast as possible), the quality and pricing of the mods (3 dollars for "horse armor", with the lowest price for credit's being 7.99), I'm amazed at how badly they fucked up the launch of paid mods for the second time.

It just keeps getting worse. This bit from Jim Sterling was pretty great as well:

Does it re-download all the mods when an update is released like the Windows 10 store does? Cause that will be hilarious.

The pricing on this stuff is ridiculous. Do Bethesda not realise they need to launch this program with a new game and not one that's already got a well established modding scene with over 20k free mods.

The quality assurance and piracy protection for this shit is going to be awful.

I respect the idea of paid mods but I feel like this will keep being a mess and drive me away from Bethesda games.

Had some amazing modding experiences with their games, for example the Skyrim combat mod, the stealth mod, the mod that opens up all the cities to be part of the proper overworld map. But I've also had a bunch of lackluster ones and a bunch of, of course, instability from running various mods. It's all good, but when you start paying for it? And as @ivdamke says, it's not exactly like a buck or two for this stuff. What happens when people pay for incompatable mods? Or pay for a mod that makes their game unstable or causes some kind of error or has a conflict with another mod?

This has to be one of the most ill-conceived product/feature launches I've ever seen. I mean, the automatic downloads has to be a programming error, right? There's no way that was intentional, right?

Right... ?

I'm sure it saves them from having to diagnose what each individual person issues is - who HAS or HASN'T downloaded what.

Its an update, there is likely enormous amounts of replication and redundancy with most updates for most games. Heck, in perfect system where only what needed to be added was sent our downloads for patches and fixes would be 1/100 th the size all teh time. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in a world where if you tell people "You must do "A" before you do "B"...nobody does A. The solution to that is redundancy, making sure three times over that people have a base level of teh game code.

So much of what makes our modern world work is redundancy. Do you think Wifi would work well enough without redundancy? Do you think planes would fly without redundancy? Do you think you could get to work if there was only one big highway that only connected one place to another?

The problem you are all having is not with Bethesda's methodology for ensuring smooth working software through making sure everyone is working for one code base. The issue is you have allowed your ISPs to throttle and charge you for data on a network that was underwritten by your own governments - your own taxes. You paid for the wires and your elected officials gave tax reductions to data companies to install more wires....now you are paying for it again. Bethesda is an easy target, because psychologically nobody want to take on their ISP that could ACTUALLY do something...that would be effort. Meanwhile, whining about a tagte that is just trying to make things work is low effort & easy.

I have to imagine that this was launched at this point precisely because it only affects fairly well established games and they can iron out the kinks without doing any real damage to sales. I think it's worth worrying about whether this "alternative" to user-created free mods will be as optional come the release of ESVI

...Or some people just don't want to have data they won't be using taking up their limited hard drive space. Not that there aren't problems with ISPs right now, but that's only part of the problem. Starting off with 2 gigs isn't to bad, but what if they continually add more mods every week? Then it will start jumping up, 5, gigs, 10 gigs...etc, to a point where it will grow to larger than the entire base game.

It's obviously very important that in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME that they make sure all the players have the same content so that there's no problems with displaying things, even if that content is behind a paywall.

This has nothing to do with redundancy. In a multiplayer game, it absolutely makes sense that they have you download the assets for content that you might not own so that it doesn't cause splits in the player base. But for a single player game, there's no excuse.

Also - I live in a country in Europe where my ISP doesn't throttle me based on usage or have data caps. And so far you're the first person whose mentioned that whole aspect. Other peoples complaints are that they don't want their HDDs full of crap they're not going to use. I'm not sure what point you're trying to spin that this is somehow the ISPs issue and not Bethesdas.

I'm not trying to waste resources of any type, even in a data transfer over wires, downloading the clean faces big butts mod thanks.

@panfoot: This was the exact problem I had with Doom; multiple, large 10+ gig patches for an almost dead multiplayer. Last I checked, the patches for the multiplayer and snapmap account for close to half the game size. Of course, the patches started off small but they quickly ballooned to the point where I had to uninstall the game if I wanted to play anything else. It's such a bummer that if I ever want to go back and play Doom 2016 I have to download all that bloat again.

No, the problem is I have very limited space on my SSD, and I don't want it constantly getting filled with optional paid content that I will never use. Content sizes that will cancerously grow out of control as more mods are added.

If all the resource files are available, it seems like it would be trivially easy to write a utility that enables all the mods without purchasing them. There probably isn't any demand for such a thing yet, since I believe all the current mods are already available for free on the Nexus, but if there's any original content added, it seems like a glaring vulnerability.

This feels like a really mistake from both a user friendliness perspective and a business perspective.

I don't mean to discount the issue of forced extra data downloads filling people's harddrives and data caps, however I truly think the bigger issue here is on the creative business-front. I know creators have to pitch their idea and then work with Bethesda to allow them to distribute it, but the idea that anyone would agree to put their effort into working on mods for this, to then have they're work freely distributed to everyone regardless of paying is ridiculous. Someone will find a security flaw and data-mine the content, and freelancers can't afford to take such a risk.

I don't know how creators are expected to be paid but either: A) there's a consistent pay based on workload OR B) They are paid a portion of sales for their content. It would be difficult for Bethesda to make the former appealing because most mods wouldn't be financially successful making the equal pay need to be relatively small to be profitable (plus creators may be put off given that if their content does incredibly well, they wouldn't be reciprocated for the success). The latter pay-based-on-sales is completely undermined by this new development because it requires the access to the content to be heavily secure (so that people actually pay rather than cheat or bypass the security). Were I a creator wishing to join their paid modding program, this would be a huge red flag against applying.

Goodwill!? Pfftt... who needs it?

Panic! Data! Paid mods is a poor idea anyways.

I don't know why Bethesda seems to desperate to get paid mods to be a thing. I think every time it has been brought up, it has been universally panned and reviled. Hell, who in their right mind would pay for different skins for armor? This is like Fable 3, where you had to pay to use different colors, it's absolutely ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that you have to purchase a secondary currency to even purchase the mods seems really god damn slimy to me, there has to be a reason they are doing it, but I don't know what. Otherwise, why wouldn't they just let people pay for mods directly and cut out the middle man?

I know this is way off topic, but Jim Sterling's videos just keep getting weirder and more gross. It's making me like his videos way less than I used to, I wish he'd pull back a little bit.

I can't believe they actually managed to make their paid mod launch even more shoddy than the Steam one. Like, everything looks ten times as bad already now that they've made a big deal about it being "mini DLCs" that are curated by Bethesda, but then they go and make every single element of this launch incompetent on top of that.

I wonder if people are defending this somewhere? I guess the people who are getting 5 cents a month from their Orange Pip Boy Skin MINI DLC sales probably are.

If they fuck up a third time can it be a "3 strikes and you're out" situation?

I don't watch his videos too often, but I did see this one. I'll have to take your word for it.

Between this and not giving out press/review copies before a game's launch, Bethesda is really starting to permanently root away good will from consumers. Hell, this move just makes me less interested in their future products.

@gnosislord said:

That utility already exists (and has for a long time), if I'm understanding what I've read. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

Apparently you can use a BSA unpacker (one of which has been on the Nexus since 2011) to unpack the automatically downloaded files, and repackage them so that our mod managers can install them. Since the automatically downloaded files have no encryption there's nothing to stop someone from installing all of the Creator's Club content for free.

It seems that "download everything" was actually how it is/was supposed to work. However after some critique they seem to have changed their minds:

"Hi everyone, we’re working on solutions that would not require Creation Club archives be part of the game’s patch. We are certainly listening to everything people are saying, and appreciate the constructive feedback, both positive and negative."

Source: https://bethesda.net/community/topic/88724/why-is-fo4-auto-downloading-creation-club-ba2s/150?page=8

The answer to all of your questions is 'money'. Bethesda probably takes at least a 30% cut of each mod sale. Lots of people seem to like paying for cosmetics. Overwatch, DOTA 2, and just about every free-to-play game out there have made a big business out of it. Selling a secondary currency is usually designed so that you can't buy exactly as much as you want. For example, when the Xbox used Microsoft points, you could buy them in bundles of 500, 1000, 2000, etc., but games were 400, 800, 1200, etc. That way you're always holding a balance and that next purchase looks cheaper because you already have some currency just sitting there.

I still can not stand his voice. Do you think he sounds like a muted trumpet on purpose?

I agree with what he is saying, though. Bethesda seems to hate the people who buy their games.

On a slightly related note; I feel like it is time to replay New Vegas, perhaps the last good Fallout game (and maybe the only good 3D one).

Is this OK in the same way some people justify buying Overwatch lootboxes because they 'want to support the dev'?

I don't like the idea of Bethesda increasing my game bloat with content I don't want. Besides, the mods that interest me would not be available via official channels anyway. The greater concern I have is will the Elder Scrolls VI's creation kit be available only to members of the Creation Club and not to the general gaming audience as it has been?

And how it all could be worse than previously thought:

@charlie_victor_bravo: It's an eight minute video based on another YouTube video based on anonymous sources!

Still the one-off payment would be a bad look, I think it was universally expected the content creator would just get a % of lifetime sales.

Fallout 4 definitely stands out to me as one recent game that does not need to take up any more space on a drive, especially once you've added in all the story DLC. I'm not even sure who this was meant to help. Anyone who downloads an individual mod isn't going to have a long wait time to get it and I imagine most people aren't going to buy even half the paid mods so this just feels unnecessary. Then just giving people all the resource files before they've even paid for them seems like a recipe for getting them hacked unless they have very good technology to protection against hacking, and technical robustness is not what Bethesda games are about.

@paulmako: Yes, but it would make some sense for Bethesda to pay modders same way as for the game developers: one time fee (~salary for duration of development) regardless of how well the game sells. Logistically it would also make sense because would they make small pay outs if mod would sell poorly or would they hold modders money until some threshold would be reached? One time payment would streamline things nicely for Bethesda, but would be not as convenient for the rest.

But yes it based on rumors, hence "how it could be" and video mentions this also.

From a game company that releases games in a buggy and sometimes unplayable state, it is the opposite of surprising that they fucked up the Creation Club release. Now for a rant about paid mods:

First of all, mods by definition are free. There are names for additional content that you pay for.

Second, if Bethesda wants to monetize mods, they better release a fully featured, unfucked version of a game that doesn't require mods to not be a buggy mess. I will never pay to get a working inventory, or for the required unofficial patch that every Bethesda game has.

Third, Bethesda thinks they can get away with this shit because gamers will swallow any turd named Elder Scrolls or Fallout. They might actually be right. But, the latest Fallout and Elder Scrolls(online) haven't exactly been setting the world on fire.