• So in other words, they’ve found a viable business model that incentivizes the next generation of developers to get their asses into gear?

                Hmm… I’m not seeing the down side.

                  • Yeah, exactly. They’ve created a viable ecosystem for themselves. They have a highly moddable engine and they tend to leave a lot of abandoned code in the game that modders find and make use of. People eat it up and they use it as a starting point to get into development.

                    I’m on exactly that track right now. For me it’s been all about very open ended kinda buggy games that you can mod the hell out of. Wanting to change or tweak a little something here and there leads to wanting to implement more elaborate ideas. Eventually it starts looking appealing to make something of your own, or to make a bigger contribution to other projects. Personally, I don’t really want to work for a big company (or anyone other than myself), but a modding portfolio can certainly be a foot in the door.

                    My first mod for a game was a thing to shut up the Longs in Fallout 4. Super simple, literally just broke the link to their idle audio files. That was ages ago, and my own journey has been more related to getting DayZ to do what I want and now using Conan to further explore game design and more involved elaborate systems, but Bethesda was still that first step.

                    They’re not perfect, and their IP in some cases has certainly been watered down a little, but they make great games and have a workable business model that isn’t as toxic as some others. They’ve done a good job fostering creativity and innovation.

                    I don’t really get the complaints by people who’ve never made anything even remotely approaching a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls acting like the developers are trash and they know better. Let’s see your blockbuster open world rpg.

          • They tend to do that by tacking on new jank without removing (much) of the old stuff, though, presumably because they have base assets and scripts that they’re constantly re-using. Or, differently put: As long as Papyrus will still be in the thing I seriously doubt they’re giving any thought to technical debt. Already in Skyrim people rather used the UI to script stuff (because that’s Flash and ActionScript is at least remotely sane and fast) but ultimately it’s SKSE (that is, native dlls) for anything that isn’t a lag fest.

            It’s not so much that CreationEngine is easy to mod, it’s that it’s what a gigantic community of modders are used to and have developed tooling for (you can get by with little to no use of CreationKit which is an abomination all on its own). Stockholm Syndrome at its finest or we’d have seen much more content for RedEngine which is far technically superior (and yet CDPR is abandoning it for Unreal).