E3 2017: Bethesda's Skyrim, Fallout 4 Getting "Creation Club" For New Content

Tonight during Bethesda's E3 2017 briefing, the company announced "Creation Club," a new feature for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4. This is the name of a platform of sorts for new content made by Bethesda and the community.

This will include new items, weapons, outfits, and accessories. The Creation Club content is "fully curated" by Bethesda and is compatible with the main games and their add-ons. Bethesda also announced that mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4 have collectively passed 300 million downloads on consoles.

The Creation Club for Skyrim and Fallout 4 will launch in summer 2017 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can apply for the Creation Club here. Community members who are accepted into the program will be paid for their work. It doesn't sound easy to become a Creator, however, as people must submit documentation pitches, which must then be approved by Bethesda.

"All content must be new and original. Once a concept is approved, a development schedule with Alpha, Beta, and Release milestones is created," reads a line from the Creation Club FAQ. "Creations go through our full development pipeline, which Creators participate in. Bethesda Game Studios developers work with Creators to iterate and polish their work along with full QA cycles. The content is fully localized, as well. This ensures compatibility with the original game, official add-ons and achievements."

According to the FAQ, you will get access to the content by purchasing credits, which can be used for both Fallout 4 and Skyrim: Special Edition. Specific pricing was not announced, but Bethesda assured that this is not the return of paid mods, even if it sounds like it.

"Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they'd like," Bethesda explained. "Also, we won't allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators.

"All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We've looked at many ways to do 'paid mods,' and the problems outweigh the benefits. We've encountered many of those issues before. But, there's a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things."

You can watch Bethesda's E3 2017 briefing right here and follow along with our liveblog. Fallout 4's VR version was unveiled, as was new DLC for The Elder Scrolls Online.