What Bethesda Didn't Tell us About Creation Club

Remember when Bethesda introduced paid mods for Skyrim and the entire internet decided that they were now evil? Well get ready to experience that all over again with the newly-announced Creation Club.

In their E3 presentation, Bethesda gave us a lot of detail about the scheme, how it would work and how brilliant mods are. They detailed how we would be seeing both first party and third party mods, as well as how they will all be approved and quality tested to make sure they don't interfere with anything. There was one small thing they didn't mention, found in the FAQ section on their website:

"How do I get Creation Club content?

Creation Club is available via in-game digital marketplaces in both Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition and purchased with Credits. Credits are available for purchase on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam. Your Credits are transferable and can be used in both games on the same platform."

They go on to state that this isn't a return for paid mods

"Is Creation Club paid mods?
No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. 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."

So, that's cleared up then. Creation Club contains mods, and your way of acquiring those mods is to pay real world money to acquire credits with which to buy them. So this definitely isn't paid mods, even though it's mods that you pay for, it certainly is not paid mods: Bethesda have learnt their lesson there. Apparently.

The internet has already started to go into meltdown, with Reddit and Twitter currently on the verge of catching fire due to all the flaming. There have been calls to boycott all of Bethesda's games, and there's rumours that someone might be writing an angry letter to Pete Hines.