Basically the issue is that every six months they break all mods. Many projects over the years got abandoned after an update, or they were just never able to make progress because every six months they'd have to spend weeks patching.
There are some big mods still, but they're mostly just content additions. Anything that does overhauls, or has lots of overlapping systems, is doomed to failure unless they want to target a specific version of the game and never update. There was a big story mod awhile ago that decided to lock the game version that they supported, but it died when some dependencies updated to the new game version.
Modders work in their free time, so they can only make real progress when they have a stable base for a long long time.
Sure but that still leaves a lot of unnecessarily broken mods. I don't know how backwards compatible a lot of the main mods are but doesn't this risk forcing players to either upgrade and uninstall some old mods, downgrade and uninstall some new/updated mods, or downgrade and play the guessing game of which versions of which mods are compatible where? And after the backlash of the first update Bethesda went ahead and did it again so clearly they don't care about steamrolling modders' work and they might do it again. Modders going to give up eventually and go back to New Vegas lol
The mods that weren't backwards compatible were primarily the ones that depended on the script extender. This was an unsupported executable that expanded on the commands available to the scripts in the mods.
Not to say unsupported is bad, but everyone was well aware that if they depended on the script extender, they would break if the game updated at all. The biggest mods avoided that dependency for exactly this reason, and really didn't have any trouble. (Sim Settlements still worked the entire time, for example)
And like usual, the community stepped up and updated their unsupported extension quickly, ready for this outcome.
If you made a mod that depends on the script extender and then quit playing the game or supporting your mod, that was a choice you made as a modder. Meanwhile there's mods that haven't seen an update in 8 years that continue to work without issue.
People act like mods breaking after an update is new. Bethesda (and every other dev team) has been doing it since Morrowind (and long before that) The MWSE and everything else were fine back then, too.
I mean, the issue is that the updates fix nothing of value and break mods in this decade old game. Passable update for console, “why did you even try?” on pc.
Yeah, Minecraft updates break mods all the time but there it is just something the community accepts as normal and lives with. The huge update rage is something I only see with Bethesda game modding.
Because Bethesda games are exclusively single player and offer absolutely no way to decline updates. If they had the old version available as a "beta" or (even better) if Valve stopped dying on the "every game must be updated before launching it even single player games because fuck you" hill there wouldn't be any outrage.
Turn automatic updating off for the game in question in Steam, and then set the download rate for Steam to 0 so it can't update when you start up the game.
Without having to re-buy the game, yes. I'd even be willing to pay GOG a bit of money for the cost of hosting the files etc, but I'm not paying Bethesda twice. That's just rewarding bad behaviour.
Right, that's really more of a Steam issue than a Bethesda issue. I get why Valve and Bethesda don't want to provide customer support for old versions, but they don't have to. People have been figuring out their own problems when using obsolete systems or software for a long time.
I have no issue with Steam pushing the updates and encouraging you to take them, but giving no way to decline is a pretty poor user experience. Especially when we already know they keep old versions on their servers, as people have made guides on how to downgrade with Steam
The next gen update used a completely different compiler, and that created a highly different executable, that's why the update for script extender took so long and that's why the script extender for next gen edition is unable to load "old" script extender mods.
It is the same that happened with Skyrim Anniversary Edition.