‘Starfield’ community patch arrives with promise to “never” be a paid mod
Starfield players have banded together to develop the game’s first fan patch before Bethesda launches its own modding tools.
Todd Howard, the game’s director, said in an interview with Famitsu that official Starfield modding support will roll out in 2024.
This will likely comprise of something similar to the Creation Kit that was available for Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, allowing even those with little experience to fine-tune their game experience.
In the interim, a contingent of fans have been hard at work on a “community patch” that aims to “make the game better for everyone” by addressing issues “in a free and collaborative manner”.
This is just the first iteration of the community patch for Starfield. The team, which totals nine modders at the moment, expects that the responsibility to target areas for improvement will transfer to new contributors over time.
As such, the aim of the community patch is to place its trajectory into the hands of “trusted content creators” who will adjust the patch in private testing groups before the latest version is publicly launched.
Crucially, the project is free and always will be. Earlier this year, a modder was caught in the crossfires of controversy when their Starfield DLSS 3 mod was placed behind a paywall.
“The Starfield Community Patch (SFCP) project is a collective effort by mod authors and the wider player community of Starfield to fix bugs, errors and other inconsistencies present in the game,” explained the team.
“This includes tweaks, typos and other changes that may have been missed (or not yet released) by the developers. The overall goal is to improve the vanilla experience for all players.”
What the patch does not do is alter anything that is not “in keeping with the original vision for game”. Ergo, there is no new content in it, nor any significant changes to Starfield‘s balancing – how hard specific guns hit the player for, for example.
It’s downloadable only for PC through Nexus Mods or through the patch’s official website, though it is advised to implement a mod manager to prevent clashing with other mods that the player might have installed.
In other gaming news, Call of Duty has announced a secret Chase & Status gig to celebrate the launch of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and fans can win tickets by completing confidential missions.
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Imogen Donovan
NME
