@@COBLoneWolf @@Aleh
First off, when paid mods were taken down, Valve straight up said that they still think it's a good idea, but they admitted that Skyrim wasn't a good place to start since the modding community was already so ingrained and such a huge upset would ruin a lot of stuff. We also know Bethesda is where the idea came from, as well as the 25%/75% split came from. This is all about money, and they'll bring it back when they think the backlash won't be as much. We've seen plenty of such backlashes over other stuff; pre-orders being shitty, Assassins Creed Unity and its disastrous launch, Evolve and its DLC nightmare. How long did that outrage last? Tons of people still pre order games, plenty of people still bought ACU (granted they did fix most of the performance problems), and it took about a week for people to forget all about how shamelessly the Evolve DLC was pushed. By the time FO4 comes out, not enough people will care to have the same kind of backlash.
And yes, a lot of my problems come from modding, simply because, recently, Bethesda vanilla games have been mediocre. New Vegas wasn't that bad vanilla, but it took a lot of mods to get to the point where I thought "yeah, this game is awesome." Almost everything about vanilla Skyrim was bad, down to even the interface. Combat was boring and just spamming power attacks. Magic was boring since most spells were just upgraded versions of previous ones. Mage characters were weak since the damage didn't scale well and the only way to make it viable was to spam the dual cast destruction stunlock thingy. The crafting skills required a ton of grinding to be useful, and even then, Smithing was OP while Enchanting was fairly weak, and Alchemy was unnecessary given the amount of potions you find just walking around and the ease of battle. The UI is abysmal. Very few of the fights were hard unless you were trying to kill things obviously above your level.
I always try to play a game all the way through in vanilla before modding, but I only made it through about 15 hours of Skyrim before I had to change things. Had the modding community not been so incredible, it would not be nearly as big.
I think you misunderstood. I was saying that ever since Morrowind, Bethesda games have had great modding communities, and I think FO4 will be the end of that due to paid mods. Morrowind is my favorite game ever, and I've made a few mods for it myself. We're still alive and kicking