This topic is about using the Creation Kit and other game tools to fix game bugs.

Even though there is a rather numerous community of knowledgeable (and full of free time) people here, I want to deliberately call the attention for the following matter. Experience proved that Bethesda usually has very low support for game glitches and bugs. Most of them have been dealt with by the community in the past.

Should we have the Creation Kit to build new content or is the numerous people providing fixes subtitute of Bethesda game support (development/creativity/whatever)?


Thank you, moderator Leydenne. And sorry for the inconvenience.

The original message follows.

The case against "we'll be producing Unofficial Patches for Skyrim and its expansion(s) and/or DLC... just like old times!"

Tomorrow will be four years since I have been active in these forums. Specially the Oblivion Mods forums. I liked the game and modded it. Learned to use tools to cram esp plugins into one, dealt with scripting shortcomings, mod installs, save game editing, and whatnot, to make the game work.

More than playing, I had to manage the game itself. It requires some knowledge, beyond the average Joe gamer. It was fun, in a sense. However, in the end, I wasn't getting paid to fix a game made from a real company. I am a customer and I deserve some support. It is not the other way around!

With this in mind, I want to point that I understand modding is a time consuming and complex process. Also, while I am grateful for the volunteers, who spent their free time and effort correcting mistakes in the game, we, paying customers, should instead be more angry at Bethesda if they let product support rest - almost entirely! - on the hands of unpaid volunteers. And I believe, from the comments of the developers, whether in the developer diaries pod casts or other media, it is not so much as lack of will to fix their stuff, or even lack of capability. They are great people and probably would very much like to make amends.

What advantage does Bethesda have, as a publisher, in poor support? What is the cost of Quality Assurance when there are defects in the game? Even if QA staff catches all those bugs that could make your hardware explode, why not also catch the ones that appear in the game itself?

This is a game but also a product. If something is wrong with it, fixing it is not part of the game.

I am aware there are concerns involved in producing a great game, as explained by Todd Howard. "This is the great leap you make when you go to make a game." in, i.e., http://youtu.be/DbQK3cURWDA?t=1m12s

In that same conference, Todd H. also presents the point about "Great games are played, not made.", the importance of the people and the culture in making great games at Bethesda. That's great stuff! However, not so great when the game comes out and the people that plays the game has to wear that culture!

I'm not a close follower of the TES series - the only game I bought was Oblivion. I didn't even bought Fallout. Please do not try to put that "fan" mask down my head.

I'm a customer realizing this thing of "Great games are played, not made." is good to game-makers but it is not for game-players.

The worst part is this culture has long slipped through to the product consumers. And it is plain wrong!

Developers could be paid to amend their creations, like most would like. Instead, Bethesda capitalizes on the free modding scene because they pay Developers to focus on next year's thing while us "not-so-ignorant" users adhere to "play the game while patching it" nonsense.

To be clear, Todd Howard's "Great games are played, not made." culture is good for one thing: to create. It allows them to make great games and let modders use the same tools to create new content.
In this aspect, a mod maker is more-or-less like a game-maker, so this culture kind of "fits". However, from a game-player (customer) point-of-view, it does not make sense.

It has everything to do with this thread. One thing is to create new stuff. Another thing is to patch the game (as in correct the mistakes done by people getting paid by a game company).

People do not seem to realize the difference and think "The community is strong. Therefore, support will be there, eventually."

It is an insult to everyone who bought Bethesda games, to keep it going like this, after Oblivion, Fallout, and now Skyrim. The tools, dubbed Creation Kit, should be used to make new content, not patch their stuff at the same time.

We allow this to happen in as much free support we, as game-players (customers), freely provide with our mouths shut, without any complaint.

It will be a combination of both most likely.

The Unofficial Skyrim Patch thread began without even waiting for an official Bethesda patch.

Still, it is an insult, both to Bethesda, because they have that bad reputation of not being capable of providing good product support enough. And both for the game-players like me who want Official Support to fix the game glitches.

I understand we may express our opinions in Bethesda forums. Please be constructive. There are people who seem to have bought the game with the intention of using the Creation Kit alone. Well, let's just say that if Skyrim wasn't that great a game, you probably would not have bought it just for the right to use the CK alone. Otherwise, there is this ultimate CK inside a FreeBSD disk, where you can also hack and slack using seventies ASCII art. The best part is that the game tools is a C compiler. So knock yourself out some where else.



Yes, of course. The thing I wish to point out is that we should make pressure (or allowing) Bethesda to come up with good Official Game support. To stop pretending we have game-patch heroes, in the community, all the time, to save the day. Qarn and Kivan are here now but they have their lives like any other regular modder.

Can you blame Modders? can you? would the Unofficial Patch be needed if their weren't things to fix? how many patches did Beth release for Oblivion/Morrowind? Im iffy on the numbers..what 2? even though fallout 3 and NV got loades of patches in between? Modders shouldn't be fixing a [censored] thing except for personal taste but we have guys hacking away to smooth out oversights and percieved negligence. insulting them is besides the point, they are making an assload of money right now and as a whole they've never really shown "care" to the fanbase, again as a "whole" despite what Todd and Co says about valuing the Modder base.

Theres another thing, Beth doesnt have to release the CK, its their tools, it costs them all of nothing to give it to us, and what do they get in return? more incentive to on lookers to get a game guilded with content by its very players, and what is all that work rewarded with? more focus on consoles namely 360 since some ps3 users are experiencing the shaft at the moment. Do modders need rewards for their work? no Modding is totally optional, and I personally believe any work I do is in of itself for my own enjoyment, some make mods to sharpen their teeth for developement as a career, or purely out of pleasure. but at no point should a modder hack away to fix things that are the obligations of the Company.


and can anyone tell me if Beth folks helped out with the unofficial patch? you know, gave tips, insight? etc etc

@ MK-{OmegaX},

That's precisely the point. There seems to be "inertia" in which players generalize the idea that fixing things must be done by modders. Wake up. This is wrong.

It is rather a sad state that the unofficial patch is already underway, simply because it is known that gamesas won't put forth the effort or manpower to fix it. They don't pay these guys anything for their game saving releases, either. Modders should be MODDING the game. Not pouring their time into fixing what's broken. It's absolutely not right and if gamesas wasn't so busy counting all that cash, I'm sure they'd have the decency to be ashamed..? Maybe. It's like buying a new car, and instead of buying new parts for it, you spend all day under the hood just getting it to run right. The dealer laughs himself all the way to the bank. I appreciate ALL the work done by the modders who make the game better, and in some cases simply make it playable. But it's not right that the only way the game is able to function properly is through consumer effort.

Bethesda should fix its own bugs, yes.

Modders should not have to fix Bethesda's mistakes, yes.

Modders are not obliged to do so, yes.

Modders are going to do it anyway because we can do it faster than Beth does? Also yes.

In my mind, Beth needs to do more QA before release - the same can be said about pretty much any game released nowadays, unfortunately. Can you name a single recent game that doesn't have readily-reproduce-able bugs? The whole industry is rushing things.

While the best thing would be for QA to be of any use at all, it still wouldn't catch all the bugs, that's very improbable. So you'd still get Unofficial Patches. Therefore, the best thing would be for the unofficial patchers to be part of a feedback loop into Beth's support system, making them aware of bugs and perhaps providing fixes, so that the bugs can get fixed for everybody, not just unofficial patch users.

The above is, according to Kivan, exactly what is in place for Skyrim. That's why there's a bug tracker this time around.

I don't get the point of this thread, apart from [censored]ing to Beth about how badly their QA svcks. Surely though they must know this already, what with tens of thousands of bugs fixed in Oblivion by the Unofficial Patches...

I don't think that any modder want to fix the game for Bethesda. I personally want a fix of the UI for support of multi-screens. So I try to have a look at the UI but it is mostly for the fun of trying and succeeding at changing some aspects of the game and when/if I manage to crack it, I can share with other modders and together we can go build a better UI than the dumbed UI for console we have. Even if Beth finally fix the UI for multi-screens which I hope they will do, they wont change its layout, and it is only by trying to fix a bug somewhere that is later fixed officially that you learn how to make different things for the players of modded games.

The unofficial patches for New Vegas, FO3, Oblivion and Morrowind all fix hundreds of unfixed bugs left in the final versions of each respective game. It is for that reason that I'm holding off on buying Skyrim. I will purchase it on the PC, likely when there is a GOTY release and community patches.

It is interesting to know that Unofficial Patch works as a feedback loop to Bethesda. Let's wait and see what they do with it.

As for having "bugs fixed in Oblivion by the Unofficial Patches" can only mean something in case the developers have some kind of self-respect. It is just that there is a time that someone needs to say something about it. Not because of the developers per se, the ones who would have a sense of pride, and also would most likely agree on releasing improvements of their work.

It is more because of the business model that pays the developers and owns their assets. And it does not care. At all. And that is wrong. A large number of people have to step in and say something because just patching things up more and more will not hurt any company's feelings.

Well they are here to make money. The action holders must be paid! the rest is just a mean to en end. If they reach their objective of X sales, then they can go on develop another game and let that one rot.

I am curious why unofficial bug fixes don't get picked up and rolled into official bug fixes, especially given that console players can't install the unofficial fixes.

Because the game already gave them the money they were expecting and they moved from it. Or more precisely each game comes with an expiration delay for the support. The could take the modders fixes though and put it in an official patch without requiring any permission nor credit as per their EULA bu they don't even care

@ Ismelda Lasombra,

I agree with what you say. Allow me to prove another point.

There is this facial normal map that ships with the game. It probably got screwed when compression was applied to it. That compression turned a possibly stunning appearance (for face textures) into a blob of square like noses for almost every NPC living in Skyrim, including the player.

Is Bethesda allowing a release of the original developer asset, compressed but fixed, in a future patch? They could pretend such small detail was already "patched" by a modder. What then?

One can expect marvelous things from modders. However, fixing a broken thing is not the same thing as properly compressing the game asset in the first place. Preference of an official release over the modder's does not mean the modder's work is of "low quality". Only that it is the game company responsibility to take the developer work into account and facilitate the patch process.

It is good to be vocal about this because, despite what Todd Howard also said in that Fallout 3 conference (and probably other places), about from then on making continuous improvement to games (as opposed to release the game and not patch it, like what happened in Oblivion), this lingering idea that modders are pachers still abound in the gamer community.

I really hope this is the time we see Bethesda take the head off the middle of their legs and concretize the idea of rolling patches.

I don't think they ever said that anything was patched by a modder. They just never admitted/cared about the bug. But they don't use the modding community as fixers (at least officially).

The problem is this. People who have access to user made content don't hate the game because the user content made the game better than vanilla. My memories of Oblivion are still great, mostly due to custom content. No one can blame gamesas for taking this mentality: We release the game. Dedicated modders fix the problems, we make our sales quotas, and people will still buy the next game. Rinse and repeat. They are making their money, and BECAUSE of the dedicated modder base, people are not going to be irate enough to not buy the next game. Therefore the modders who fix the problems are just as much a part of this mentality and business model as the company making the game.

Is it right? No. But it works.

According to the numbers that shouldn't work. 20% of PC users happy with modded game while 80% of console users who have the game built for them dammit! unhappy with the bugs fixed by the modders for PC So that's not a happy fan base ratio in my book.

On the other hand the console people have short attention span and will move on to the next game as soon they finish this one which shouldn't take long... So they don't stay unhappy for long and in 5 years they will buy the new TES6 because they don't even remember they were unhappy with TES5, while PC users will finally have cracked everything in modding terms for Skyrim and have awesome mods to offer

modders for beth = creative input for free

thats it...

they create for consoles and take their time releasing tools because they just need our mods to know what to put in the next game... cause lets face it, everything new about skyrim has been done with mods before for morrowind, oblivion and fallout

and todd howard is somebody i dont believe anymore, he lied once too often in interviews "the game will be a milestone" "we honor the users critique" "well never make a game again that suddenly ends" "our new engine will show em all" and all that talk that simply aint true or maybe is but he somehow messed up transfering that talk into his final products...
i actually found it insulting when he commented on bethblog that "users dont want many skills, thats just too complicated" after like everybody complained about him removing feature by feature, skill by skill from his games...

the only point i see where they improved so far in the last 10yrs are dungeons which got a tad more interesting

and the problem with those patches is most of the time the publisher, "we dont pay for a new engine as long as we produce for xbox" "you need to release next week guys, we dont care if its done" "we aint paying you to patch the game, it makes enough money yet" "no we wont pay more for a better QA teams/artists/technicians" and so on... ...zenimax... not yet EA but not so off either

well they can write alot in that EULA which still doesnt make it legal... at least in europe that would breach a bunch of laws that totally stand above any EULA "agreement" (which i cant read before buying the liscence but after i payed for it) and hence rather pull a nice fat lawsuit like the one EA has in germany atm...

For businesses it is all about the money. Wasn't it mentioned many months ago what a small portion the PC version sales are compared to the console? Heck, if Oblivion and Morrowind have not been so fan supported and modded on the PC, what would the PC sales be like for Skyrim?

You can draw comparisons on game releases to movies. The movie trailers get hyped, showing the best, to draw the crowd. The first weekend is when most of the money is made for most movies. Instant profit, regardless of the quality. Anything after that is a bonus. The movie maker moves on to the next one.

I think the same goes for games. PC players expected some problems with Skyrim, but this? Took me by surprise. I expect a few patches to fix game bugs early on but after that they are on to the next title. Makes business sense. This leaves the community to fix or work around problems left over. Fair? No. But it is the way of the world.

What we have is a decent game engine for fans to build the game PC fans want. Everything else, I never expected, so I am not disappointed. Anything Bethesda does, will be a bonus. Just being realistic about this, like peace in the middle east.

There is peace there?

Unfortunately I don't buy this logic.

The publisher stops paying for QA/bug triage work because the publisher wants to move on. That being said, you can get a return on investment for continuing to pay for QA work because you buy loyalty from your consumers. And really buggy games can destroy consumer loyalty. If someone provides unofficial fixes, it doesn't take as much time to QA, because you're not developing the fix in the first place. You just test that the fix works. It is a cheaper way to fix problems. Publishers should start embracing this and allow community fixes to be submitted for official inclusion, especially given that it would benefit console players who wan't install mods.

It would be such a PR boon, that I think it would pay for itself in the long run. It can make financial sense.

I agree with you and would very much like see that happening and yet it doesn't. Hence my cynical point of view.

LOL. The prospect of that is the same as Bethesda's ongoing support for fixing the game Where is the return on investment there?

Fan loyalty? Not enough of us care enough to make a real difference. Just shrug at the situation and make lemonade.