Updated Creation Club FAQ Brings New Info
The arrival of Creation Club has been a point of contention for many Bethesda fans. User-based content has been free for a very long time in the form of mods. And people fear that Bethesda’s new Creation Club could shake up the status quo. Recently, however, Bethesda updated the program’s FAQ to better address concerns.
While many gamers believe Creation Club is simply paid mods, Bethesda simply reiterated a difference:
“‘Paid Mods’ would mean that any modder can take a mod and then charge for it without any QA testing or vetting by us. If we allowed ‘Paid Mods’ that would likely cause a ton of issues. Creation Club content is different because the content goes through the same internal development process as any game or DLC we’ve done (internal builds, art, design, sound, fx, QA, translation, etc). Most content is internal created by BGS developers and some have external creators as part of that.”
According to Bethesda, then, the difference is basically in semantics. To users, the difference doesn’t bear as much relevance as it does to devs. Even so, Creation Club content is official and anything considered a “mod” is not. Which is why the developer points out the difference between buying items from the program and receiving them as mods.
- Creations work across all platforms and versions of the game; PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
- Creations all work together with each other
- Creations are fully translated
- Creations do not prevent you from earning achievements
- Creations work regardless of load order
- Creations can make additions and changes to hardcoded content not generally accessible to modders
But, the most interesting tidbit of the new FAQ may be Bethesda’s clarification on which file formats they will use to deliver “Creations.” It reads as follows:
“A variety of content is currently being worked on for Creation Club. Larger pieces may be released as an ESM, like other official plug-ins. The ESL format is streamlined for content that is relatively contained, or primarily reliant on scripts.”
For all Creation Club content released thus far, Bethesda has been using ESL (light plug-ins) format; basically, these types of files drastically limit the size of content but help devs deliver them with ease. Apparently, we will also ESM (master files) sometime in the future. These are the files that make up the entirety of Fallout 4 and its DLC. Unlike ESL, these are not limited and could potentially see very large DLC drops for Creation Club, thereby giving console players access to large add-ons. It’s simply a matter of whether or not Bethesda will make it happen.
To read the official FAQ, you can click right here. And feel free to let us know your thoughts on the updates.
Happy gaming.