Howard says Bethesda Game Studios is looking to keep expanding its support for the modding community with the upcoming space-faring RPG.

  • I think it’s not possible for them to make modding tools that are as powerful as DLL plug-ins like SKSE. While they can try to cover their bases with modding hooks, the reality is that they can’t think up everything that a modder might want to do and so DLL mods will still exist. And because DLL mods involve modifying the game code to do literally whatever (including potentially turning it into a completely different homebrew game, hacking the console, or even booting an OS), the problem with that and consoles is that the console makers do not want arbitrary, unsigned code to be running on their consoles.

    No matter how many official hooks are added for modders to use, the PC platform will always have strictly more powerful mods.

    • A lot of the DLL stuff had to exist to work around limited support in the game for modding using the game’s environment, though. I think that a lot of classes of things could legitimately be done in a sandbox.