Disgruntled fans and gamers never forget the wrong that those in or outside of the gaming medium do, and with Bethesda’s last conundrum with paid mods many believed that Bethesda’s current Creation Club would fall in the same fiasco pit. Well, fans voicing their opinion about the matter has Bethesda’s vice president, Pete Hines, speaking on the program’s behalf.
The Creation Club has started on a rough note and has not been received well by fans or gamers alike. Most people who support the initiative in actuality are being informed by others in the community that they are scamming themselves through the program, and those speaking out against such acts have sparked Bethesda’s VP, Pete Hines, to step-in and provide feedback on why things are the way they are with the Creation Club.
The response sits below courtesy of Pete Hines’ Twitter account.
You can't claim "first" for a thing someone else created. Regardless of what game it's for. "First" is FO3. Not a mod for a later game.
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 30, 2017
Before deconstructing Hines response, let’s take a further look into what Hines has to say about Creation Club’s policy on existing mods and the use of old content.
hellfire armor existed in fallout 3 because we created it. someone making a mod of it doesn't mean it wasn't our idea/creation
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 29, 2017
So let’s sum everything up from his response that was made to fans and gamers of Fallout 4. Hines mentions that due to Fallout being an IP of Bethesda, everything made by the devs and taken by fans and implemented into a newer version of that IP can be used as is or retrofitted for use in the Creation Club, right? We see this with the second tweet regarding the Hellfire armor and how it existed in Fallout 3 and that “someone making a mod of it doesn’t mean it wasn’t our idea/creation.”
Did you catch that? No? Let’s take a further look into Hines response: you know the now notorious Road to Liberty team and modder Unoctium’s Chinese Stealth Armor? Well, the modders had good intentions by letting fans download the mod for free across PC and Xbox One, as shown on the mod’s NexusMods page, but the mod isn’t notorious because of the modders but what Bethesda and crew did with it regarding the Creation Club. Take a look at the original Fallout 3 version and the Fallout 4 modder iteration as seen below.
We can clearly see that the mod retrofits the older design with a better model file and crisp textures. That same mod is featured on the Creation Club portal on bethesda.net. So if a retrofitted mod has made it into the creation Club doesn’t that mean Bethesda and Hines just admitted to a breach of service?
“Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content.”
Reading the above quote carefully, it makes mention that mods can’t be retrofitted “into” the Creation Club, meaning that if the mod changes something that is already in existence that is or is not found in the Creation Club, it must be rejected. As Hines stated, the mod was done first by Bethesda in FO3 and then retrofitted to be in Fallout 4 by Unoctium. The problem comes in is that the mod was not created by Bethesda from scratch with a new model file and design, they just took Unoctium’s mod, priced it and slapped it on the Creation Club and broke the program’s own policy.
I know a lot of people are thinking “yes, you’ve established this before. What’s your point?” The point that I’m trying to make here is that a professional head over at Bethesda, VP Pete Hines, is encouraging the act of policy breach. And if Bethesda did or did not tamper with the mod it means one of two things based on Hines:
A) – They breached their own policy about uploading retrofitted mods.
B) – They made a new Chinese Stealth Armor, which would make it an existing and non-new mod in practice and would still breach the terms of use.
Bethesda should really get their crew together and thoroughly talk about the minutiae of the Creation Club in-depth so that other members won’t make comments or responses regarding the policy and terms of the Creation Club out of turn. As it stands now, what Hines has just said is very dangerous to this program’s already endangered life.
In the meantime, you can try to ignore the Creation Club if you want to with this new up and coming mod by InAComaDial999 over on NexusMods for free. It attempts to block the Creation Club from appearing on the main menu.
(Main image courtesy of ESO)
