ReportWire

Tag: Video game mods

  • Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod

    Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod

    [ad_1]

    Nexus Mods, one of the largest online repositories of fan-made video game modifications, recently deleted a Starfield mod that removed the game’s built-in option to choose a pronoun for your created character. As you might expect, this removal angered a very toxic portion of players who yelled at Nexus Mods over its choice and threatened to stop using the massive site. But Nexus Mods is sticking with its decision and has a message to angry bigots: We aren’t sad to see you leave.

    11 Minutes Of Saturday Morning Cartoon Roguelike Gameplay

    Starfield, one of the biggest games of 2023, is also a Bethesda RPG. That means it’s a large open-world game filled with quests and places to explore, but it also has some annoying bugs and frustrating design choices. And as usual, PC-based modders have come to the rescue to help tweak and improve the game. While many of these mods are useful and/or fun, some aren’t as positive, like a mod that removes the ability to choose a pronoun, a small feature in the game that became a viral talking point among toxic losers upset about Starfield being “woke.” However, if you try to download that mod from Nexus Mods today, you won’t find it, because the people running the site didn’t want it around.

    In a report from 404Media published Friday, Nexus Mods told the outlet that while it doesn’t see itself as the “police of what people can and cannot mod into (or out of) their games” it does decide which content it wants to host or not host. And Nexus Mods said hosting this pronoun-removal mod was “not for us.”

    “It is certainly within our rights not to host content on our platform,” Nexus Mods told 404Media. It also said the mod’s removal wasn’t a “political statement” or the site picking sides in the ongoing culture war. Instead, it said it simply believes in “diversity and inclusion,” adding that the “removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community.”

    Nexus Mods isn’t phased by toxic comments

    If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last few years, you know what happened next. Lots of angry chuds hopped into forums and social media threads to yell about how this was evil censorship and infringing on their rights. For its part, Nexus Mods doesn’t care about the reaction.

    “A reinforcement that this has been the best course of action has been some of the hatred, vitriol, and threats of violence coming from a very, very small minority of the community,” Nexus Mods said. “Frankly, we are not sad to see them go.”

    This isn’t the first time the popular modding site has upset toxic assholes. In 2022, Nexus took similar action against a mod for Spider-Man Remastered that removed Pride flags from the game’s New York City. That mod would later be re-uploaded to the Internet Archive; a good reminder to those claiming these mods are no longer accessible, they are, you just can’t get them from one specific site anymore.

    At the time, Nexus Mods had this to say in a blog post explaining why it had deleted the Spider-Man mod from its site: “We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it.”

    Buy Starfield: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

    .

    [ad_2]

    Zack Zwiezen

    Source link

  • The 9 Least Essential Starfield Mods You Can Install Right Now

    The 9 Least Essential Starfield Mods You Can Install Right Now

    [ad_1]

    As is all-too-often the case, Bethesda releases its games with half-baked UIs, dodgy animations, and painfully slow menus, knowing that its community will clean it all up for them via mods. So as expected, over the weekend all manner of essential mods for Starfield have appeared that will clear up the game’s most immediate problems. Also there are these ones.

    Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build

    Starfield launched without DLSS support: modded. It has a clumsy, oversized inventory presentation, like all their games: modded. It doesn’t let you adjust your FOV, ffs: modded. But forget all that. We’re here to talk about what happens when you order the mods from lowest to highest popularity. These are the people who see a brand new game, and immediately learn how to modify it for the stupidest possible reasons. This is to celebrate the people who make the flashlight show Nicolas Cage’s face.

    Ryan Gosling Character Preset

    We understand the situation you’re in. You’re a busy person, and with work and family you don’t have the time to play Starfield AND sculpt your character as Ryan Gosling. But cacon5 has you covered with the Ryan Gosling Character Preset. As this video shows, this modder dedicated their time and energy into crafting someone who…is also a human being.

    NTD Modder RPG

    Celebrity Flashlights

    If that’s not enough Ryan Gosling content, then you’d better bloody believe we’ve got more for you. Because why not also have Dollar Tree Ryan Reynolds as a beaming point of light? That’s yours via the Ryan Gosling Blade Runner Flashlight from MozzyFX.

    But it doesn’t stop there. In fact, we get the feeling this is something that’s only just getting started. Because there’s also the Nicolas Cage Flashlight Mod, which presents the actor like some sort of horrendous moon-face.

    Or perhaps you’d like to show your eternal loyalty to our lord and savior, Todd Howard himself, via the Todd Howard Flashlight Replacer.

    If your affections lay with even more senior deities, then you might want to opt for the Phil Spencer Flashlight.

    Maquinaremos

    Umbreon Ground Crew Helmet

    This one perhaps doesn’t quite meet the remit of the article, because it’s honestly astonishing that Bethesda released the game without this already implemented. It’s the Umbreon Ground Crew Helmet, which replaces the ground crew helmet with one showing a picture of the Pokémon Umbreon.

    “Truly the best mod ever created,” says fellow modder jetray1000, despite the mod inexplicably sitting in second-from-last place in Nexus Mods’ Trending list. (Last place is a widescreen mod that is flagged as containing “suspicious files.”)

    A Massive Effect

    How much would you like to see a crossover between Mass Effect and Starfield? Yeah, us too! Meanwhile, the John Shepard mod promises to add a player character who kind of looks like the lead character from Mass Effect—you know, the game which also has a character creator, that lets you make him (or preferably her) look like anyone you want. Well, we say “looks like,” but modder ctxrlsec hedges their bets, adding “probably not perfect because the character creation is kinda limited but it looks close enough.”

    Hello Killy

    Right now, at this early point in Starfield’s life, it’s not yet possible to apply skins to your weapons at will. For the while, it requires entirely replacing the game’s default skin, which is perhaps more cumbersome. Although we would argue, entirely worth it when it’s the Hello Kitty Laser mod.

    Image: realadry / Nexus Mods / Kotaku

    Entirely Ruin Starfield On Purpose

    Sick of the game working properly? Frustrated by the way it won’t let you introduce narrative-breaking situations? Finally, there’s a solution for you. It’s the Kill Essential NPC mod, that prevents plot-vital characters from getting back up once you’ve knocked them down. (Yes, Starfield relies on that old Beth-gem!)

    Rather excellently, in case installing this mod weren’t already obviously a spectacularly bad idea, it seems it also allows enemies to perma-kill essential characters, meaning ruining your entire game doesn’t even have to be by your own hand.

    HowDragonborn

    There. We hope this has proved completely useless for you, and we look forward to seeing even more ridiculous and unhelpful mods once the game is officially released on September 6.

     

    [ad_2]

    John Walker

    Source link

  • Should Mods Be Paid For? Not In Valheim

    Should Mods Be Paid For? Not In Valheim

    [ad_1]

    Mods have for decades been a way for fans to create content for their favourite games, and for decades have been seen as a community pursuit, something free, something people do for the love of it. Over the last few years, though, that stance has begun to change.

    The Week In Games: Wild At Heart

    From Skyrim to Grand Theft Auto, an increasing number of prominent mod creators have begun to lock their work behind third-party paywalls, most commonly on crowdfunding sites like Patreon. This is a thorny issue! On the one hand, if people are putting in work that others are enjoying they deserve to get paid. On the other, mods have traditionally been free, and a lot of mods are built on the work of other mods—not to mention the work of the game’s developers themselves—so where do those charging get to draw the line?

    There’s no clear right or wrong here, which might explain why a lot of companies—at least those who haven’t tried to bring this stuff into the fold officially—have been content to let this simmer along. One studio that has come out with an opinion, though, is Iron Gate, developers of Valheim.

    In a statement released yesterday, they say:

    Hello vikings!

    Lately we have been getting a lot of questions regarding mods, and what we as a company approve of – as well as what we don’t approve of. Therefore we thought we’d try and clear things up a little bit.

    First of all, while we don’t have any official mod support, we are definitely happy to see that people are engaging with our game and creating their own mods for it. It’s definitely flattering that you want to be creative and add your own ideas! Iron Gate not having any official mod support essentially means that any creating and using of mods is done at your own risk, and that we can’t guarantee that mods will be compatible with newer versions of the game.

    The thing that we’ve been getting the most questions about, however, is the phenomenon where mods cost money. We definitely understand that you spend a lot of your time on creating a mod, and that you might want financial compensation for that, but Iron Gate does not condone locking modded content behind a paywall.

    We feel that charging money for a mod is against the creative and open spirit of modding itself, and therefore we urge all mod authors to make their mods freely available to all who want to play them. This should include the whole mod, and not just have part of the mod available for free while another part of it costs money. If you want to show your appreciation for a mod author you can of course still support them with a voluntary donation, but we do not want payment to be a requirement to access a mod.

    Additionally, we would also greatly appreciate it if mods made it clear that they are unofficial mods, both in game and on any website where the mod is available. Sometimes joining a modded dedicated server will automatically trigger a download of a mod, and we simply want to avoid confusion for players so that they can know whether or not they are playing a modded game. Valheim already has a feature for this, where you can simply have your mod trigger a popup in game, which will inform the player that their game is running with a mod.

    Thank you all for taking our wishes into consideration!

    Best regards,

    The Iron Gate team

    Seems fair! Their compromise solution, where a modder’s individual works are released for free but they’re supported generally on Patreon, seems the most workable in this situation, not just from a community standpoint but also a legal one: like Iron Gate say here, a lot of games don’t officially support mods, and so folks diving into the code of someone else’s game and making money off it sure seems like its fraught with peril when money starts changing hands.

    Like I said, though, this question is going to have different answers for each game, depending on how mods are made available and how they’re supported, not to mention the views of the developers themselves. But in Valheim’s case, at least, their stance is clear! It’s not binding—all they can do is ask players to take “our wishes into consideration”—but it’s clear.

    [ad_2]

    Luke Plunkett

    Source link