Fallout 76: How Mods And Private Servers Work, And When They're Coming

@Atzenkiller: Hey Atzenkiller. I don't think anyone knows yet how the "private servers" will function. I have a post in this thread where I explain what Bioware/Atari did in the past, but no one knows what Bethesda will do. IN my example in my other post, Bioware allowed a person to host the game from their home on a dedicated computer. This was neat (at the time) but there was potential for issues such as, if a guy named Bob had a server at his home, and he had three other people that played on his server....in other cities, states, or countries.....and Bob had a power outage, the other players could not play. Or if Bob had someone in his home start a Netflix movie, it would make his game server buck and pulsate in performance. Thus, eventually the idea of "Hosted Servers" came into play. They were actually hosted BY Bioware and you paid like $20 a month for one. When you first got it and logged in, the game was already pre-installed and had a menu where you could start the server, stop the server, send broadcast message, upload mod, remove mod, turn mod on, turn mod off, etc. The hosted server had insane bandwidth and would not suffer power outages.

As far as "morons messing things up"...yeah..for a company like Bethesda who refuses to condone nudity in their games...and in times where each passing new school mass shooting is causing more and more people to blame it on PvP violence in games...I'm really surprised Bethesda threw themselves 'under the bus' on this one and forced PvP. And you can come up with all the Double Speak you want about "oh you can choose to ignore the offender *cough* but they're going to kill you anyway...but hey....they will get a bounty and that makes things better". You can throw all that in the trash when the govt finally has to step in and regulate your game because at the end of the day.....it's still a PvP shooter.

@octagneh: I played NWN on private servers and even hosted a few private server games on my own computer. It's worth mentioning that not only were mods allowed, but Bioware provided DM tools, so a campaign could be run on the fly, a bit like pen-and-paper D&D games. The software technology wasn't advanced by today's standards, but it worked.

Bethesda hasn't said anything about providing DM tools for private servers, but if they did, it would be the first time since NWN that a gaming software company did that, so far as I am aware.

Now that Hines has explained that Bethesda intends to allow modding on private servers, I'm much more interested in this title. Mods could add NPCs, companions, quests, gameplay changes, better graphics, all sorts of things - all in the context of the largest open world map Bethesda has yet released. Players could customize a single-player experience, or host customized game worlds for friends. It's actually rather exciting.

@Marky360: This game was always a non-starter for me until mods are available. I love Fallout and Skyrim but once you've played with mods, I don't want to ever go back.

@Shin_Gallon: If it ends up only Creation Club they are going to have a hellueva PR nightmare on their hands from series fans.

@RELeon: There's a problem with that. Mods aren't gear. Why can't I apply ENB settings to make the game look better? Has nothing to do with gameplay. Why can't I change the UI layout? Has nothing to do with gameplay. Why can't I change locally stored textures so they look different to me without affecting anyone else on the server? How about mods that add more songs/radio stations locally? What if I have a badass rig and rendered all of the textures at 4K and want to use them instead of the potato textures in the game? Again, no effect on gameplay.

Not all mods are "Hurr, look at my god item."