Starfield, Bethesda Softworks’ first new IP in over 20 years and biggest project since 2015’s Fallout 4, is a space sci-fi adventure that continues to take the gaming community by storm. After all, it should — it’s been widely available for less than 48 hours. If no one was playing this thing, we’d have bigger problems.
Easily one of the most, if not the most anticipated title of the year, the hype (and expectations) surrounding Starfield couldn’t be higher. Which is why the world’s modding community has jumped at the chance to start making changes to this genre-defining game, getting out in front of the developers and adding their own personalizations to a massive game world.
With Microsoft “early access” being an option for anyone willing to pay-up on August 31, mods were well underway before the official September 5 release. And the amount of content made in that amount of time is as eye-watering as the number of planets you can visit in-game.
More than 600 mods? 100 daily? 2.2 million downloads? Not bad modders, not bad at all.
The fact that folks have already been hard at work is a testament to how much gamers really love Bethesda as a publisher, and enjoy testing the limits of what the Maryland based company brings to the table in the first place.
Still, because things are so early on, some Reddit users seem to think they know exactly why there has been so much traction in the Starfield mod space. Let’s look at the board’s most upvoted comment…
Ah, yes. The age old NSFW debate. In all honesty, this person isn’t wrong. As long as there have been games, there have been gamers trying to figure out how to makes things a bit more risqué — that’s just part of the territory. And here’s the thing; what anyone chooses to do to their own games is entirely up to them. After all, they bought it.
Still, there’s got to be some mods out amongst the initial 600 that aren’t off-limits. Right?
Kind of. For now, it seems that most mods are simple re-shaders, character changes, and simple color swaps to alter the look and feel of Starfield at large. In a totally PG way, that is.
Okay so most of the mods aren’t very interesting, but there’s a good reason for that.
Without the official Bethesda Creation Kit, modders of the game don’t have much to go off of when it comes to tweaking Starfield. Full stop. Thankfully, the comment above promises that more in-depth deliverables will be produced once that toolset is released to the public.
Let’s just hope we won’t have to wait too long for that to happen. Until then, cover your eyes if you don’t want to see all the explicit content. Or don’t, if that’s your thing. It’s your world, I’m just living in it (and playing Starfield without NSFW mods along the way.)