Creation Club Mandatory Downloads May Not Be Fully Fixable

Published: September 23, 2017 1:45 PM /

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fallout 4 creation club beta announcement content listing

In a recent addition to the Creation Club FAQ by Cartogriffi, Bethesda has responded to some of the issues the community has had in regards to the Creation Club itself, many of which pertain to some of the more glaring bugs and issues the feature came with.

One of the first concerns addressed was whether the Creation Club was the first stepping stone towards Bethesda getting rid of free mods in the future.
Of course not. We love what the community has done with mods. Modding ensures tons of continued content and experiences for our games. We were also thrilled to bring Mods to console players with Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition. We’ve spent the last 15 years supporting free mods. Free and open modding is one of the backbones of our games.
Considering the free modding scene is the first stepping stone of many modders into learning the tools required for modding, this answer does make sense. So far, nobody extraordinarily successful in regards to modding started out with their material in the Creation Club.

The biggest gripe that came with the update, especially for console players, were the resources of the Creation Club mods being downloaded preemptively before any purchase of the mods associated with them had ever been made. This was particularly troublesome for console users who more likely have to deal with limited storage space than PC users do.

This was a requirement for some platforms and how Creation Club needed to work. Most other games that offer similar content do the same. We realize this is a frustration point for players and we are working on a solution to change the way this functions. This has been resolved on the PC for future releases, but is not retroactive for the creation club launch content on Fallout 4.
This means that, while the situation will remain as is for the current Creation Club content, future content will apparently not be auto-downloaded. Or at least, that seems to be the case for the PC platform. Bethesda describes this as a requirement for some platforms, likely consoles, and only mentions the PC platform to see this issue resolved. This is further elaborated when addressing the question on whether the Creation Club content uses the allocated Mod space provided for the games, as these have limits on the Xbox One and Playstation 4.
No, Creation Club content utilizes the game’s space allocation, not the allocation for Mods. Regarding the space for Mods, there is also no ideal way to update the Mod size limits for Xbox One or PlayStation 4. Replacing a partition has wide-ranging impact, and potentially jeopardize the saves you have that are currently dependent on Mods.
In other words, future purchasers of Bethesda's games that come with Creation Club integration may want to reserve more disk space for it than the box initially states.

One of the more infuriating feature that came with the Creation Club was the re-sorting of the load order, something that's been admitted to have been a bug now.

This bug was present at launch, and was fixed in the 1.10.26 Update. If you continue to have this issue following that patch, please let us know. This issue should not be present with the launch of Creation Club for Skyrim Special Edition.
While fixed, it is quite possible that this doesn't apply retroactively, leaving most affected users to fix load-order themselves still.

Finally, Bethesda states that most of the Creation Club content is internally created, with sometimes external creators being part of the team assigned to this content.

There is no intent for Creation Club content to be based upon or built around existing assets or iterations created by the Modding community, and we do not intend to remove similar Mods created within the Modding community. We would only request removal of Mods that directly rip content created for Creation Club – just as we would if someone tried to release Far Harbor as a mod. As an aside, Modders are welcome to expand upon Creation Club content with Free Mods, provided that these Mods require players to get the original Creation Club content (similar to owning the base game in order to play DLC.)


Quick Take

While I'm not one to hold any punches in regards to Bethesda's odd way of managing their business with their moddable games, I wouldn't call all of these issues wholly their fault. True, we've yet to properly define what truly separates this content from paid mods, as much as the FAQ would insist they're completely different. It feels Bethesda makes gracious use of that uncertainty to escape the negative connotation that having it called "Paid Mods" would have.

When it comes to Bethesda's requirement to pre-download the Creation Club content on consoles, it may instead be more of a limitation put in place by Microsoft and/or Sony. Nowadays, consoles more often than not are stripped down PC's with an Operating System that severely limits the potential of what one can do with the machine on a software level. Add to it that consoles seems to be more and more stingy on storage space, and it should come to surprise that Bethesda is facing troubles on expanding the concept of mods, especially the variety that eats up a lot of space, to consoles. It only exhibits that consoles are an unwelcoming platform for game mods, even if their userbase is more than willing to use them.

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