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.

[Penthea]

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

A lot of people praise Blizzard for permitting add-ons in WoW but the truth is WoW is lacking a lot of things in its base ui so any player who even vaguely takes the game seriously needs to use add-ons.

I far prefer SE's approach, which is to regularly improve the ui instead of putting that burden on the playerbase and have them do their work for them.

The sad truth is a lot of games that allow add-ons become lazy with their ui updates and support. Add-ons and mods can be fun but game devs often abuse this by neglecting the base ui because "players will just make a mod of it anyway".

[Cetek14]

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

This game is also half finished (prime example is viera and hrothgar).
But i agree that mods shouldn't be supported. It's online, so mods can't fix actual issues, and beside that they are pretty much useless. Others can't see it, so why bother using it?

[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.

[Avidria]

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!

I... I loved Skyrim. I've never used any mods for it, and I've sunk hundreds of hours into it lol
I mean, there are some awesome mods I'd love to use if I ever get back into the game, but I don't think I'd call them "necessary" really.

Anyway the only mods I've ever wanted for FF were a damage meter, some additional UI functionality (more flexibility in font/hotbar scaling, etc.), and maybe some kind of glamour tracker like what mogit and similar things do in WoW. But the devs seem determined to treat all add-ons in a weird half gray don't talk about it they're evil but they're not kinda way, so... Idk. Most bizarre take on add-ons I've seen in an MMO tbh.

[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