Square Enix should adopt a curated mod gallery/collection ala Skyrim / Fallout 4

[grinkdaboy]

i never understood why that square enix was so against mods. i feel like if they had their own curated mods (while of course maintaining their stance against nsfw mods/copyrighted material), this would help bring together the community.

and as for console users who might cry "not fair!", there could probably be a similar solution that allowed bethesda to bring mods to console

[TheMightyMollusk]

Bethesda games need mods because they're half-finished. We don't need that here.

[grinkdaboy]

Bethesda games need mods because they're half-finished. We don't need that here.

do you have an actual argument against mods, mods that only the person who installed them would be only able to see that's not "i don't like them"?

[Alestorm]

do you have an actual argument against mods, mods that only the person who installed them would be only able to see that's not "i don't like them"?

I mean... there's the fact the devs themselves say "no". It's not much of an argument per say; but it's pretty much their stance and it's always been their stance.

[E4EO]

do you have an actual argument against mods, mods that only the person who installed them would be only able to see that's not "i don't like them"?

I mean, that user isn’t wrong about mods being necessary in Bethesda games, have you tried playing Skyrim without mods? It gets miserable after a time, everything feels half baked!

And sure some things in FF14 may feel half baked to some players, but FF14 has tons of stuff to do in comparison to any Bethesda RPG, so mods aren’t really necessary here.

I could list some aforementioned activities if you want, but I don’t think that’s really necessary.

[Enla]

1. Mods are outside of their control and given what some people have done with mods and the disaster that is the modding discord, can you honestly blame them for not wanting to deal with it?

2. Japan has strict copyright laws and many mods outright rip models from other game franchises - with Black Desert Online being the one that gets stolen from the most. "Well they should just make sure they aren't from other games!" I hear people say, but can you imagine how hard it would be to track down a specific model from a specific game if you've never played said game before? We're talking extensive research for basically no positive return, just to make sure they don't get sued. You also can't trust individual modders to be honest about this either as while many are good people who would turn to creating custom content, many of them are NOT. In-fighting over stolen work - like actual custom work, not taken from an existing IP - in the aforementioned discord isn't uncommon.

3. Quality control. SE would need to test each mod personally to make sure it:
-Meets their quality standards, so no pixelation, the item has proper physics, etc
-Doesn't have broken meshes
-Doesn't cause weird graphical glitches if you're turning just the right way in the right light.
-Actually works for both genders and all races - as mods that only affect one or the other on an item assigned to all races/genders cause fairly bad texture and mesh issues for the gender/races that get left out.

It's a ton of work and unlike Skyrim, FFXIV wasn't built with modding in mind. Skyrim and Fallout both use a modified version of Gamebryo - with the current iteration being known as the Creation Engine. This engine and it's predecessor were designed to make modding and editing easy to accomplish, with Skyrimg and Fallout 4 outright offering a creation kit to modders to go have fun in their own proverbial sandbox. The engine FFXIV uses doesn't have that level of accessibility. It's not as bad as trying to mod, say, Frostbite - which god help you with that since Frosty Tools only /just/ partially cracked it beyond texture/mesh modding - but it's not as easy as you seem to think it is even with the modding tools we now have available.

[grinkdaboy]

skyrim being bad without mods is entirely subjective. you can stomp your feet and cry about it but that won't make it true.

and enla as for those points you presented

1) that's the entire point of a "curated" system. this would provide them with a degree of control

2) fortunately in the curated system i drew the inspiration from this from, there exists a degree of community moderation as well. while there are copyrighted or otherwise stolen mods uploaded from time to time, the community is able to report them for this which results in them being taken down.

3) i feel as those are standards square enix should adopt

[Enla]

-snip-

It doesn't matter, because again in Japan the copyright system is EXTREMELY aggressive and advocates for strict control and defense of one's copyrights lest the owner lose them entirely. Just one mess up and it doesn't matter if it's taken down or not later. This isn't a reality where copyright holders aren't litigious and looking for any flaw and will accept an apology if a mistake happens. SE is opening themselves up to lawsuits regardless of whether the community self policies or not - and if someone decides to sue they can absolutely nail SE to the wall for relying on their customers. Then if SE takes the sole burden for maintaining copyright solvency the amount of work needing to be done is just not worth it for them. There is no happy medium here.

Edit:
About the only way I see this working is if SE sponsored freelancers to come in and make a single item for them to add to the game, as then they'd have full control of the concept and development stage - as well as full ownership of the copyright at the end of the day. But that wouldn't be a 'mod' anymore.

[SturmChurro]

skyrim being bad without mods is entirely subjective. you can stomp your feet and cry about it but that won't make it true.

For sure! A large, no a huge playerbase for Bethesda in like Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim are console players who until recent years literally had no access to mods whatsoever, and thought those games were amazing before, but now everyone has this arbitrary "standard" since Fallout 76. As if Bethesda hasn't been dumbing down their games consistently for over a decade. It's ridiculous!

As to the idea of this thread, it won't ever happen.

[grinkdaboy]

It doesn't matter, because again in Japan the copyright system is EXTREMELY aggressive and advocates for strict control and defense of one's copyrights lest the owner lose them entirely. Just one mess up and it doesn't matter if it's taken down or not later. This isn't a reality where copyright holders aren't litigious and looking for any flaw and will accept an apology if a mistake happens. SE is opening themselves up to lawsuits regardless of whether the community self policies or not - and if someone decides to sue they can absolutely nail SE to the wall for relying on their customers. Then if SE takes the sole burden for maintaining copyright solvency the amount of work needing to be done is just not worth it for them. There is no happy medium here.

Edit:
About the only way I see this working is if SE sponsored freelancers to come in and make a single item for them to add to the game, as then they'd have full control of the concept and development stage - as well as full ownership of the copyright at the end of the day. But that wouldn't be a 'mod' anymore.

would the burden not fall on the person who uploaded the mod in the first place? and if so, why couldn't square enix report this individual to the copyright holder? is there any precedence for this in the japanese courts because the scenario you present sounds absolutely absurd