At the Bethesda press conference at E3, the company announced a new program called Creation Club for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition that will allow players of both games to spend credits to purchase curated mods created by both Bethesda themselves or partnered Creators.
Creation Club will feature content such as new weapons, armor, outfits, items, and even new locations, abilities, characters, enemies, and gameplay enhancements, with all the content from the Creation Club being fully compatible with the main games and official add-ons.
Content from the Creation Club can be purchased through upcoming in-game digital marketplaces using Credits, which are available for purchase through PSN and similar platforms. Credits can be used on both Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4 and are transferable between the two.
Bethesda does maintain that Creation Club isn’t paid mods, saying:
No. 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.
Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together.
We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.
So, while mods in general can still be made for both games and shared for free, the Creation Club will provide players a venue to purchase premium mods that have gone through Bethesda’s curation process and development cycle. Whether that will mean the mods coming out of Creation Club will be better is unknown for now. We’ll just have to wait and see when the program launches sometime in the next few months.
