Bethesda has finally announced the beta release of their Creation Club. With it, users can purchase new mods that are exclusive to the platform using Bethesda's own credits system, which can be bought with money. Reversely, content creators can upload mods to this platform, given the condition that these mods have to be new and exclusive to the platform and are approved by Bethesda.
In exchange, they will receive a cut from the sales of these mods.
To start it off with, Bethesda has released a handful of items that are right now available for purchase through the Creation Club. These range from skins for the Pipboy and one for power armors, to new armors (both regular and power armor pieces), a backpack and a set of furniture.
To celebrate this event, Bethesda will give out a free 100 credits to all Creation Club users. While this is enough to purchase to purchase two Pipboy skins or one Power Armor skin, the other content will be priced 200 credits and up with currently nothing at the 150 price. As expected, there's a price difference between regions, which you can compare in the spreadsheet below.
It is worth noting that there are currently only 12 available items, which have a total cost of 3000 credits.
While the system will launch in full tomorrow on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One and will arrive for Skyrim next month, players can access it early on PC by opting in for the Fallout 4 Beta through their Steam launcher. This can be done by right clicking the Fallout 4 entry in your Steam Library, clicking Properties, Betas, click the drop-down menu shown then clicking the Beta entry listed.
Despite controversy arising around the inclusion of Hellfire Power Armor in the Creation Club release, this release is completely different from the recent Nexus Mods release of it. The mod was developed by a different developer working independently from the Bethesda sponsored creation on the Creation Club.
What is a worrying fact is that most of these item pieces come with very little information. Especially when it comes to armors and such, knowing what the defensive stats are on these items may be a vital requirement to make an informed purchase.
Quick Take
Fair is fair, the witch hunt surrounding the Hellfire armor is undeserved. They're clearly different armors and the creator of the mod has clearly said so, and is a different team. What is, in my humble opinion, not undeserved is the criticism this platform will likely receive in the future. First off, the platform does such a terrible job at informing the user what the content entails in detail. As mentioned above, armor stats are important, but you can't even tell what any of the 40 pieces of furniture are short of the one shown. It is the epitome of poorly informing players and hoping they blindly purchase.
Where is the 3D preview? Valve has managed to enable that a long time ago in many of Steam's Workshops, and that's done on regular website pages. This Shop is being provided in the game itself. Therefore there's even less of an excuse for Bethesda to not have set this up already, as clearly many mod creators are capable of working with such a system already.
There's also a matter of the UI. When compared to the regular mod listing as shown below, the listings in the Creation Club have a bad case of wasted space, quite likely to cater to console players in the future. It doesn't help that the coloring doesn't contrast enough with the background, making it just that tiny bit harder to read.
Add to it that Bethesda's own limitation in regards to only allowing "new and "unique" content could mean that discoverability will be a great challenge for content creators to overcome in order to hope for good sales. If your mod isn't flashy, you'll very likely need an existing fanbase to have a need for your "new" project.
The fact that I can come up with these problems in the span of mere hours tells me that whomever responsible at Bethesda must not have bothered to think of some of these issues. That said, it's still a Beta. So here's to hoping the full release will address all of these concerns.