Yes and no. The thing about Bethesda’s games is they use a scripting language for mods. That means there should be no ABI compatibility breakages between versions like you’d see with compiled programs; things should only break if an API hook or parent script changes. And Bethesda famously don’t fix scripting errors in their games after the first few months of patches, leading to their titles universally having unofficial patches maintained by the community to fix the thousands of bugs Bethesda left intact.
Which makes it weird that their updates still tend to break mods, since the parts of the engine mods interact with* should be stable. Granted, they’re messing with the Creation Club so some impact should be expected, but the vast majority of mods don’t rely on that.
* Mods reliant on the third-party Skyrim Script Extender being a major exception, as that’s a compiled library that uses hardcoded memory offsets to target unexposed functions in the engine, meaning unlike scripts it has to be changed and recompiled after every engine update.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but it’s Bethesda as well so you could chalk compatibility breakages up to their usual incompetence.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Or mods will break for any game after an update?
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes and no. The thing about Bethesda’s games is they use a scripting language for mods. That means there should be no ABI compatibility breakages between versions like you’d see with compiled programs; things should only break if an API hook or parent script changes. And Bethesda famously don’t fix scripting errors in their games after the first few months of patches, leading to their titles universally having unofficial patches maintained by the community to fix the thousands of bugs Bethesda left intact.
Which makes it weird that their updates still tend to break mods, since the parts of the engine mods interact with* should be stable. Granted, they’re messing with the Creation Club so some impact should be expected, but the vast majority of mods don’t rely on that.
* Mods reliant on the third-party Skyrim Script Extender being a major exception, as that’s a compiled library that uses hardcoded memory offsets to target unexposed functions in the engine, meaning unlike scripts it has to be changed and recompiled after every engine update.