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Bethesda have launched the ‘Creation Club’, a collection of brand new content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition.
The new content is created by Bethesda, contracted studios and members of the modding community. The mods include new items, armour, weapons, characters and worlds which will seamlessly apply to the games and to any save files. Creators can apply to become part of the club and will be compensated as if they were a developer.
A statement in the Creation Club FAQ section reads: "Creators are required to submit documentation pitches which go through an approval process. All content must be new and original. Once a concept is approved, a development schedule with Alpha, Beta and Release milestones is created. 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."
The creations will be available for PS4, Xbox One and PC this summer and are available as paid in-app purchases. Bethesda also clarify on their website that this is not just a way to monetise mods. "Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like," the statement reads. "Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content.
"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."
