• Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    Yes and no. The thing about Bethesda’s games is they use a scripting language for mods. That means there should be no ABI compatibility breakages between versions like you’d see with compiled programs; things should only break if an API hook or parent script changes. And Bethesda famously don’t fix scripting errors in their games after the first few months of patches (leading to their titles universally receiving unofficial patches maintained by the community to fix the thousands of bugs Bethesda leaves intact), so there shouldn’t be any major script logic changes.

    Which makes it weird that their updates still tend to break mods, since the parts of the game that mods interact with* should be stable. Granted, they’re messing with the Creation Club so some impact should be expected, but the vast majority of mods don’t rely on that.

    * Mods reliant on the third-party Skyrim Script Extender being a major exception, as that’s a compiled library that uses hardcoded memory offsets to target unexposed functions in the engine, meaning unlike scripts it has to be changed and recompiled after every engine update.