[May 14, 2024] Eurogamer: Fallout 4 mods are broken again following May 13th update

MDCrabCakeFan86 · May 14, 2024

Eurogamer has reported that the latest update released on May 13th for Fallout 4 has broken mods:

Fallout 4 mods are broken again following update

Fallout 4 mods are broken again following latest update.

www.eurogamer.net

But, even the studio's less recent-releases are still faced with the age-old Bethesda bug problem, and patches haven't been able to sort them. In fact, it seems they have sometimes made them worse

Case in point, we have Fallout 4, which is currently having a resurgence thanks to Amazon's show. A few weeks ago, Bethesda finally released its long-awaited 'next-gen' patch that included the promise of native applications for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, while those on higher-spec PCs would get widescreen and ultra-widescreen support. However, this patch was met with a mixed response, as it broke mods and only one of the game's two graphical options appeared to be working on Xbox Series X and S.

Last night, Bethesda released another patch for Fallout 4 across platforms. This, the studio said, would allow players to "manage your control over the game's graphic fidelity or performance" and address a number of other issues players have been experiencing. And while some of these niggles have been fixed, others have not. Oh, and mods are shot again.

A quick scan over on Steam's Fallout 4 forums show a number of unimpressed players asking Bethesda to please stop updating the game. In a post titled "How bad is the update?", which was started soon after the initial next-gen patch went live but has been constantly added to since, players are reporting mods have once again been broken and other issues haven't been fixed.

Eurogamer has reached out to Bethesda for comment on how it plans to address mods and other issues in the future.

SpottieO · May 14, 2024

Updates can break mods yes

vixolus · May 14, 2024

no duh

reksveks · May 14, 2024

feels kinda obvious to me that it would break some mods.

Tagyhag · May 14, 2024

Yeah I wanted to try out the Nexus Collections for Fallout 4 (The New Vegas ones are amazing, from a week of picking/troubleshooting mods to 1 hour from download to playtime) but with all these new patches it just makes sense to wait.

Modders fixing Bethesda shit yet again.

Theorry · May 14, 2024

euro gamer trying to get some easy clicks haha

Slim Action · May 14, 2024

Yeah no shit sherlock, that's how updates work

Ocean Bones · May 14, 2024

Gonna be another fix or two I imagine lol

I haven't even been able to play my original save (no mods ) because it just crashes now even after this fix. Waited for ever for this shit lol.

AgentStrange · May 14, 2024

Every update that BGS release for Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield breaks mods. It's been this way for over a decade. That's just the nature of the beast.

diablogg · May 14, 2024

It sucks it happens but... This is what happens during most updates.

Ant_17 · May 14, 2024

And that's why i don't play Fallout 4 with mods.

Kyari · May 14, 2024

Ant_17 said:
And that's why i don't play Fallout 4 with mods.

It hasn't been a problem for literally years, which is why the entire situation is frustrating.

VoidShaman · May 14, 2024

No wonder people beg to Bethesda to stop updating their games.

Unicorn · May 14, 2024

I think it is noteworthy because these updates are anything but. Too little too late and don't even work as advertised, ruining mods that actually did the thing and better

SaberVS7 · May 14, 2024

SpottieO said:
Updates can break mods yes

vixolus said:
no duh

reksveks said:
feels kinda obvious to me that it would break some mods.

Slim Action said:
Yeah no shit sherlock, that's how updates work

Not like this, at this scale, for moddable games with solid modding APIs.

Games like Rimworld or (at least the original) Cities Skylines can have several small-scale patches that don't affect mods, with "Breaking API changes" only coming with actual major updates.

BethBryo games on the other hand, they keep releasing random micropatches with a single changenote that completely decimates the API that most mods rely on. ...And the update doesn't actually accomplish what the changenote said.

AgentStrange · May 14, 2024

SaberVS7 said:
they keep releasing random micropatches with a single changenote that completely decimates the API that most mods rely on.

Hey now that's a bit hyperbolic. They've got at least four or five per patch change notes 🤭

Flappy Pannus · May 14, 2024

"No duh"

The point is when you have a game with such a massive creative community behind it - one that you draw upon as an actual feature - and a game that was explicitly designed to support this community, you either make a concentrated effort to either avoid these mod-breaking patches, or if there is no way to avoid it, you at least make sure the mod-breaking updates bring significant fixes of their own.

Bethesda has created the worst of both worlds, at least for PC players. Longstanding egregious bugs, like the weapon debris crashing with RTX cards or slow loading with vsync issues have not been addressed, and barely any appreciable improvements were made to the underlying engine - in fact, the creator of F4SE has said this release is far less stable than the previous.

(And as mentioned, the patches don't even always fix the bugs the patch notes say they did - new bugs that were introduced with the re-release in the first place!)

Grimminski · May 14, 2024

Flappy Pannus said:
"No duh"

The point is when you have a game with such a massive creative community behind it - one that you draw upon as an actual feature - and a game that was explicitly designed to support this community, you either make a concentrated effort to either avoid these mod-breaking patches, or if there is no way to avoid it, you at least make sure the mod-breaking updates bring significant fixes of their own.

Bethesda has created the worst of both worlds, at least for PC players. Longstanding egregious bugs, like the weapon debris crashing with RTX cards or slow loading with vsync issues have not been addressed, and barely any appreciable improvements were made to the underlying engine - in fact, the creator of F4SE has said this release is far less stable than the previous.

(And as mentioned, the patches don't even always fix the bugs the patch notes say they did - new bugs that were introduced with the re-release in the first place!)

It's a huge problem (especially the bolded). Skyrim AE is such a colossal shitshow when it comes to overall stability that it fractured the community in 2021 and again a few months ago with the most recent nonsense. So much so that the creator of the Dragonborn's Fate mod guide (and also Viva New Vegas / Midnight Ride) is no longer maintaining it as it became too much work.

Anniversary Edition and F4 Next Gen fuckin' suck.

julia crawford · May 14, 2024

breaking changes is just what life is like, sometimes you just gotta push that button, if you're making software that is built as a plugin for other software i think it's reasonable to expect the maintenance that comes keeping it up to date with the code you're working with

Soap NickTavish · May 14, 2024

I feel like these stories are just for embellishment and outrage clickbait.

Pretty well known that this can happen with updates.

Igniz12 · May 14, 2024

Does launching the game strictly via Fose not bypass the steam update anymore?

dex3108 · May 14, 2024

People are missing the point. Bethesda updates don't bring anything new to the table and just break mods that fixed way more things than these two Bethesda patches. If they won't put an effort into these patches they should just leave game alone and let modders fix things.

Wrench · May 14, 2024

Hope my busty deathclaw mod wasn't impacted.

Tbm24 · May 14, 2024

dex3108 said:
People are missing the point. Bethesda updates don't bring anything new to the table and just break mods that fixed way more things than these two Bethesda patches. If they won't put an effort into these patches they should just leave game alone and let modders fix things.

I get the sentiment, but the game exists for more people than just modders. Especially now when more people are playing the games. Asking Bethesda to not update their games just because of mods is unreasonable.

dex3108 · May 14, 2024

Tbm24 said:
I get the sentiment, but the game exists for more people than just modders. Especially now when more people are playing the games. Asking Bethesda to not update their games just because of mods is unreasonable.

Again these two updates fixed minor things while still not fixing major bugs like Weapon Debris option that crashes gam on modern Nvidia GPUs. If they were meaningful updates, sure. But they are not.

The Gold Hawk · May 14, 2024

Every update for Fallout 4 will break mods and script extenders. This has been the case since 2015.

Everybody's Macho Man Deathclaw will be fixed shortly.

Tbm24 · May 14, 2024

dex3108 said:
Again these two updates fixed minor things while still not fixing major bugs like Weapon Debris option that crashes gam on modern Nvidia GPUs. If they were meaningful updates, sure. But they are not.

That's fine if they are minor in terms of the annoyance, I understand the annoyance. It's still unreasonable to suggest they shouldn't update their games because minor patches affect mods. It makes articles like this weird, no dev should feel jailed by its modding community. If these patches come out and Bethesda don't make themselves available to modders in helping update their mods to work again if need be, then yea that's an actual problem to address.

Flappy Pannus · May 14, 2024

Tbm24 said:
That's fine if they are minor in terms of the annoyance, I understand the annoyance. It's still unreasonable to suggest they shouldn't update their games because minor patches affect mods. It makes articles like this weird, no dev should feel jailed by its modding community.

What "freedom" did this patch give for devs? This is a 2015 game. These are not patches months, even a year after release designed to fix bugs like every game goes through and modders would expect to be in flux. This game has been basically abandoned for 8+ years on the PC.

Eurogamer said:
But, even the studio's less recent-releases are still faced with the age-old Bethesda bug problem, and patches haven't been able to sort them. In fact, it seems they have sometimes made them worse

Again, I get 'replying without reading the thread' is common here, but maybe even try to read the article the OP is linking.

Eurogamer said:
Also as pointed out, most of yesterday's update didn't actually target issues on PC, with consoles being the main focus. Another thread said the Fallout 4 team is still to fix bugs they believe should be "mandatory".

"What with black screen after launch on monitors 144 hz and above? What with weapon debris problem on rtx cards? Those two problems are known from couple years and still isn't official fixed from bethesda. This is a joke," it reads.

This was a patch that was meant to finally update the game with the expected improvements for SX/PS5, and to largely piggyback off the TV show hype.

I mean ffs, I had to pull up the console to noclip my way out of the first vault to actually exit to the wasteland with the first update on the PC. That was actually a listed 'fix' for the patch! The other 'new' feature listed prominently - the 'widescreen' patch - has a stretched HUD, worse than any mod fix.

This aren't patches that break the environment for a good reason. If the patches actually fixed things instead of introducing new bugs so some of these mods that are not broken wouldn't be needed in the first place, and/or brought new features to the PC; such as DLSS/FSR, framerates over 60, loading not affected by vsync, physx not crashing on RTX GPUS, etc - some really, really low-hanging fruit here - anyone complaining about mods breaking would be justifiably met with rolleyes. That is not the case here.

J-Spot · May 14, 2024

Vats is still broken (on Xbox anyway) so hopefully they go ahead and break mods at least one more time to fix that.

Fantastical · May 14, 2024

J-Spot said:
Vats is still broken (on Xbox anyway) so hopefully they go ahead and break mods at least one more time to fix that.

Noooo. Wanted this fixed

Tbm24 · May 14, 2024

Flappy Pannus said:
What "freedom" did this patch give for devs? This is a 2015 game. These are not patches months, even a year after release designed to fix bugs like every game goes through and modders would expect to be in flux. This game has been basically abandoned for 8+ years.

Again, I get 'replying without reading the thread' is common here, but maybe even try to read the article the OP is linking.

This aren't patches that break the environment good reason. This was a patch that was largely to finally update the game with the expected improvements for SX/PS5, and to largely piggyback off the TV show hype.

Not sure what you mean by the patch giving freedom? It's up to them if they want to do it or not, that's it. There's no denying it's extra work for modders to then update their mods. That's the relationship you enter when you make mods. This was true when I was modding RTS games in the 2000s and it's true today.

SanTheSly · May 14, 2024

We already have two separate threads on the Fallout 4 updates, please I can't keep track 😭

Flappy Pannus · May 14, 2024

Tbm24 said:
Not sure what you mean by the patch giving freedom?

Should have been evident enough, was in response to this:

Tbm24 said:
no dev should feel jailed by its modding community.

The idea that Bethesda devs are being 'imprisoned' by modders because there are complaints by a longstanding community after a game received breaking patches that did virtually nothing to improve the base game the mods were designed to fix, and in fact introduced new bugs 8+ years later with virtually no attention given to it by these devs during that time, is just ridiculous.

Again, the details matter in this case. People are not upset because mods broke due to an update as game updates often do - they're upset because the updates for a basically abandoned game don't actually do anything but break the mods, if not make the base game even more unstable than before. This is very different if these updates actually delivered some of the work modders put into this game into the base game itself, but they didn't even do that. It's hard not to see these updates, at least on PC, as largely a marketing opportunity due to the show and little more.

As noted as well, the modding community for this game is literally marketed by the publisher for the game too. This is not like some hacks for a game never designed to be modded, Bethesda has a relationship to this community and draws upon it as a selling point for the game. There's a more symbiotic relationship here than a lot of games, it warrants a little more attention given to their concerns I think.

If a third update on the PC say, fixes the loading speed with vsync issue and weapon debris crashing, and then people still complained about mods breaking, then yeah - I'd join in the 'no shit, stop yer whining' caucus. That kind of patch is at least meaningful.

Tbm24 · May 14, 2024

Flappy Pannus said:
Should have been evident enough, was in response to this:

The idea that Bethesda devs are being 'imprisoned' by modders because there are complaints by a longstanding community after a game received breaking patches that did virtually nothing to improve the base game the mods were designed to fix, and in fact introduced new bugs 8+ years later with virtually no attention given to it by these devs during that time, is just ridiculous.

Again, the details matter in this case. People are not upset because mods broke due to an update as game updates often do - they're upset because the updates for a basically abandoned game don't actually do anything but break the mods, if not make the base game even more unstable than before. This is very different if these updates actually delivered some of the work modders put into this game into the base game itself, but they didn't even do that. It's hard not to see these updates, at least on PC, as largely a marketing opportunity due to the show and little more.

As noted as well, the modding community for this game is literally marketed by the publisher for the game too. This is not like some hacks for a game never designed to be modded, Bethesda has a relationship to this community and draws upon it as a selling point for the game. There's a more symbiotic relationship here than a lot of games, it warrants a little more attention given to their concerns I think.

If a third update on the PC say, fixes the loading speed with vsync issue and weapon debris crashing, and then people still complained about mods breaking, then yeah - I'd join in the 'no shit, stop yer whining' caucus. That kind of patch is at least meaningful.

I didn't suggest Bethesda is feeling this. Clearly they are not given we're talking about another released patch. I'm addressing the idea that any dev simply shouldn't update their game when they decide they want to in service of not breaking existing mods without specifying any specific context or circumstance.

I understand the idea of feeling this patch doesn't add enough to justify modern having to update their patches, I don't agree personally but that's besides the point.

As you said, with respects to Bethesda they have a much closer relationship to the modding community than most others, so what they should do is make themselves available if/when a patch breaks mods. I presume that's happening as I haven't read otherwise regarding the next gen patch and this one but I could have also just missed it.

[May 14, 2024] Eurogamer: Fallout 4 mods are broken again following May 13th update

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