Starfieldcurrently sits at the number 11 slot on the list of most modded game onNexusMods, the most popular modding community website on the Internet, despite the game’s creation kit not even being available yet. The discovery was announced on Reddit by user Loose_Respond_6855.
Despite a big boom of players at launch, helped along by the Xbox console exclusive’s day-one inclusion on Game Pass, Starfield faces a contentious fan base, as even four months after its launch, fans are still weighing its massive explorable galaxy against itsarguably substandard writingand wide variety of glitches. With that in mind,it can be a bit surprisingto find out that it’s sitting just outside the top 10 targets for modders, but that’s exactly what seems to be happening, and its mod count is likely to only increase from here.
Starfield Player Shows Drastic Lighting Differences In New Update
It’s just one of the many improvements included in the latest Starfield update.
That’s because the game’s publisher,Bethesda Softworks, hasn’t yet launched the Creation Kit, a community modding tool that it often includes with its massively popular RPGs. The creation kits for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition are both available for free on Steam, with the publisher encouraging users to share their creations onBethesda.net.
Bethesda Still Reigns Over The Modding World
Bethesda’s games are among the most modded around, and while Starfield currently sits just outside NexusMods' top 10, the top six games on that list are all published by Bethesda (and all but one,Fallout: New Vegas,were developed by Bethesda Game Studios). Currently the top two spots are occupied by versions ofThe Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, with the original game at number one and Skyrim: Special Edition at number two.
Starfield has a long way to climb to reach the top. Skyrim currently boasts about 69,500 unique mods with 1.9 billion downloads. In comparison, its special edition has about 60,000 available mods but a whopping 3.7 billion downloads. By comparison, Starfield can only claim a small fraction of those numbers, with about 6,600 unique mods and 34.4 million downloads.
Still, players in the original Reddit thread announcing the number 11 placement seem mixed on what the future holds for Starfield’s modding community. One person pointed out, “There’s a whole galaxy to mod. The fact procedural generation is already in the game, modders will add basically infinite replayability. Can’t wait.” Still, others were concerned that making modding Starfield easier will only speed up the potential process of Bethesda charging players to download mods. In December,the publiseher announced Bethesda Game Studios Creations, which allows modders to profit from selling downloads on their mods, but which has also led some players to believe that Bethesda will eventually be profiting directly from mod downloads in the same way.
Bethesda is still hard at work on Starfield, promising new updates to be released at least once every six weeks, and its Creation Kit is expected to arrive sometime before the midpoint of 2024. We can only expect another boom in the number of mods available for it once that tool hits the marketplace.
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