If you’ve been following Bethesda, or their game “Starfield” at all over the last few years, you’ll know that game studio is a bit… controversial, lets say. There are a variety of reasons for this, but today I’d just like to weigh in yet again regarding one of the most tiresome arguments against BGS and “Starfield”: The Creation Club, and its paid mods.
Look, I don’t care if you are for paid mods or not. I’m not going to try to sway you one way or another on the subject, since we’re all welcome to our opinions. I’m not even going to go into why I support paid mods, since I’ve covered that here in the past. No, what I’m going to talk about today is simply why I prefer paid mods over free ones, as controversial as that may be.
To be honest, it’s simple: Paid mods are just better than free ones. Even those ones that are just paid versions of otherwise free mods, so they can be “Achievement Friendly”. I know this really gets under the skin of the folks who hate paid mods, but honestly, I don’t care. I really don’t.
Look, I get it. You’re used to mods being free. You come from Nexus Mods, and you’re used to your mods for “Skyrim”, “Fallout 4”, and so forth being free of charge. It irritates you when that isn’t the case with “Starfield”, especially those “Achievement Friendly” ones.
Well, too bad. Seriously.
They cost money for a reason, because BGS reviews those mods prior to putting them up for sale on the market, and while there may be the occasional bug still to be found here or there, for the most part the paid mods work just fine. And that’s why I prefer them.
I have been playing “Starfield” since launch, and using mods on my Xbox Series X since they became available a year ago. I avoided paid mods to start with, because I bought into the hype that paid mods were hurting the modding community, especially when the “Achievement Friendly” paid versions of free mods showed up.
But then I bought a few, and guess what? They were better.
Here’s the problem: Free mods are often really great, but they also are often full of issues that will conflict with other mods. Hell, some free mods don’t work at all, but at least you didn’t pay anything for them, right? Only your time and patience, that is.
Bethesda simply doesn’t have the time or staff to review every single mod that gets uploaded to the Creations market. That’s why they have the Verified Creators section, which is populated by modders that BGS know are capable, and create quality products. This allows those creators to submit their mods to BGS, who conduct a review of the mod, and if it meets the standard, it gets added into the paid mod section.
Yes, Bethesda takes a cut, as does Microsoft themselves, 30% and 40%, respectively (as I have been told). Yes, this leaves only 30% for the creator, which does suck, but at least they are making something for their work, as opposed to creating mods for free.
Look at it this way: You have two mod creators, one is Verified, the other is not. Both make a sprawling, massive mod for “Starfield” that makes significant changes to the game, and do basically the same thing. They can both be high quality creations that players love, but one is free, and the other might cost as much as 1000 Creation Credits (roughly $9.99).
So why would I support and prefer the paid mod? First of all, I know that BGS will have reviewed and tested the paid creation, to ensure that it works with the game for the most part. Yes, there could be issues, but those are rare and usually minor. The free mod could have conflicts galore, bugs aplenty, and just ruin your play experience. Why? Because you have to trust the free creators word that it will work well, and in my experience, that isn’t a good idea.
Now then, I do use free mods, but when I can replace them with paid versions, I do. Not only does this make collecting achievements in the next DLC easier, again, I know that Bethesda has at least given the mod a once-over to ensure this isn’t going to ruin my save file. I’ve had that happen, and it was back when I was using free mods exclusively, which borked everything, making me have to step back almost 100 levels to a clean save, or start over.
I chose to start a new toon, and use only mods that I trust, which means a lot of paid mods.
Recently, which is to say back in April because I’m pretty far ahead on my blogging, I picked up the paid mega-mod “Darkstar”. This replaced multiple free mods from this creator (“Darkstar Astrodynamics”, “Darkstar Manufacturing”, and a Boost pack fix mod), plus added features that allowed me to replace a bunch of other free mods. One that expanded my fleet size, one that leveled the enemies as I leveled up, and so forth. Since BGS reviewed “Darkstar”, and I know it was fully tested prior to release as I am on the Discord server for this creator, and followed its progress, I know that I would be better served to just drop $10 on this mod, than to keep a dozen free mods running… any of which could become a problem later on.
Now that’s not to say that paid mods are always perfect. But I will say that my game crashes a Hell of a lot less when I’m using mostly paid mods, as opposed to the free-for-all I had going with all free mods. If that’s your bag, I get it, but I prefer gameplay that is not so insufferable. Just saying.
