All thanks to Steam, if they had not released Skyrim on Steam we would have it by now.

Yep and in the end that steam integration wont do anything that the nexus manager cant do. Bit of a waste of resources and our patience.

I honestly think of myself as a patient person, but here we are, nearly three months after Skyrim's release, and still no Creation Kit. Though the official staff here stated in early December that it would be released in January (seemingly carved in stone). Here's the claim from the sticky thread:

"Creation Kit (PC Only) — Beginning in January, PC players will be able to download (Bold highights are my emphasis) the same development tools we used at Bethesda Game Studios to create Skyrim. In tandem with the Creation Kit’s release, we will roll out a new Wiki and videos to help you get started. It also features something we think you’re going to love…"

Just please give us gamers a definitive date. I thought the near 7 weeks it took for Fallout 3 to get the GECK out was a bit long. Oblivion only took about two weeks for its tool set to be released. I have no clue if Steam is the reason if going by the mention by Gstaff, that mods will still be able to be created and shared for free. MY fear is regarding the Steam comment is that the kit may be reduced to what can be created/modded as to not hinder sales of DLC on Steam for PC. Bioware omitted releasing a toolset for Dragon Age 2 on PC, though they would never say if they would or not, The toolset for Origins was incredible.

"I hate steam." -Francis
Agreed!

Technically, anywhere until February 15th is near the end of January.

Eh... I don't think so. Anything after February 10th, at least, is mid-February.

True. But Mid February is near to early February. And so the 10th February, the end of early February, is within two working weeks of the last day of late January.

There are already more than enough female body mods to keep the teenage boys happy, while they are not looking at porm, without the Creation Kit.

yeah probably 30th of february

Giving a specific date at this point would probably be a way for them to shoot themselves in the foot in terms of PR. Why? The date will either be too far in the future or it will slip. They seem to be putting a bigger effort than usual into releasing a quality tool -- even going so far as to have a closed beta with a group of skilled modders. My thinking is they found an issue that's stopping them from releasing it and they're trying to fix it robustly before they dare release anything.

The thing about software projects is they are hard. If you're not doing something very conservative the dates either slip or the product ships full of bugs. This happens 99% of the time. Software that meets the date is almost always full of bugs (eg. every one of Bethesda's games). The smaller bugs won't stop a release, so they're probably fixing something important.

I wouldn't worry about them crippling the tools: that gives them no advantage because there already isn't much skilled modders can't do. If they cripple the CK then tools like SkyEdit will fill the gap as quickly as possible. That's exactly what happened when they were unable to release GUI tools. If there's anything that impedes the sales of their DLC it will be the quality or price of the DLC.

Yeah probab...ooohhhh.... I see what you did there. ?_?

Beth did release a working preview of the CK on youtube so it's obviously very close