It's been a brutal past few months for owners of Fallout 4 on the PlayStation 4: while they sit in envy as their peers on the Xbox One get to enjoy the plethora of mods now available to them thanks to strides made by Bethesda, they have been left in the cold, waiting for any news about the fate of mod support that has been long overdue. Well, that wait is over now, as Bethesda has just given its latest update about the situation: mod support for Fallout 4 (and by extension, Skyrim Special Edition) will not be coming to the PlayStation 4.
In an update on Bethesda's website, the famed game maker revealed that mod support for both games won't be coming to the PlayStation 4, and identified Sony as the reason why this highly-anticipated feature won't be coming to a sizable portion of the game's playerbase.
"After months of discussion with Sony, we regret to say that while we have long been ready to offer mod support on PlayStation 4, Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition," the post reads in part.
So, that's the end of it, for the most part (Bethesda intends to keep fans in the loop in case any major developments occur), and puts an end to the mod debacle that started back in June when the Creation Kit 1.5.4 Update finally came to the PS4. Upon arrival, the kit had three primary problems: lack of sound file support, memory and performance issues when PC textures are used and a storage limit capped at 900 MB.
This was pretty much a slap in the face for fans of Fallout 4 who had been waiting for mod support to finally arrive for the PS4: not only did the Xbox One receive mod support first, but the kit went off without a hitch and was actually superior specs-wise in some instances (the storage limit for the XB1 version was 2 GB).
Naturally, Bethesda, unsatisfied with the situation, delayed the Creation Kit at the end of June, but there weren't any major updates about it — until now.
Now, here we are, with PlayStation 4 owners left in the cold. Why? Because of Sony, apparently. According to Bethesda, Sony won't "approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition."
The immediate assumption is that Sony was likely trying to enforce greater control on which mods would show up on its system than what Bethesda would like. For what it's worth, Microsoft also regulates which mods appear on its console, such as nudity mods, but it seems Sony has taken things one step too far and Bethesda has decided to nix the whole thing as a result.
While unfortunate, this turn of events is hardly surprising, considering the troubled history Sony and Bethesda have had. Though not overly common, PlayStation owners have suffered through problems not unlike this one on more than one occasion.
For example, the Far Harbor expansion had a number of problems across all platforms, but the PS4 stands out because it was the only one with a fix that involved having to reinstall the game. Before that, the PS3 version of Skyrim (around the time Dawnguard came out) had a glitch that caused the game to freeze whenever you entered a body of water of a certain depth. The fix for this problem? Delete your game data files, and that was before Bethesda released a fix of its own.
So, in reality, Fallout 4 and the associated Creation Kit is really just the latest casualty of whatever dispute lies between the two companies.
Of course, now that Bethesda has blamed Sony for this mess, the latter has quite a bit of explaining to do. Fans have been waiting months for this, and now that they know mod support won't be coming, there will definitely be some fallout over it. Hopefully, Sony has some answers.
