Don't get your hopes up for mods in Skyrim Switch

It sounds unlikely The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim on Nintendo Switch will ever have a Creation Club for accessing mods as it does on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

During a talk at Gamelab last week, Bethesda Game Studios' head honcho Todd Howard said, "Skyrim Switch has a big community that we haven't supported the way we'd like."

I followed this up with Todd Howard in an interview afterwards and asked what he meant. "They asked for mods," he replied, "they asked for Creation Club - 'When are we getting more stuff?'"

I asked what he was doing to rectify it. "Right now we're doing nothing," he said. "People, they're on other things. Our Switch group did Fallout Shelter ... and that's done really well. I'm surprised at how well it's done."

Then I asked: "Will you bring mods to Skyrim on Switch?"

"We are not actively doing that," he answered. "We would love to see it happen but it's not something we're actively doing."

The Creation Club arrived in Fallout 4 in autumn 2017, and in Skyrim a couple of months later, so it's a fairly new thing. But while it sounds great, its needing to be policed for consoles means Creation Club offers a more limited selection than on PC, where the gates are wide open.

Todd Howard is aware there's still work to do. "We are still pushing on making that easily available to everybody," he said during his on-stage Gamelab talk with Geoff Keighley, host of The Game Awards. "It definitely becomes this long-tail life of our games but if you look at the raw numbers it's still not as great as we'd like - the people who are consuming the mods.

"We are always looking at 'How do we get more creators creating great content?' and 'How do we make it easy and safe?' The recent stuff we've done on the Bethesda.net side of Fallout 4 and Skyrim connecting to mods on consoles has worked out really really great - it's way more popular than we ever thought. But we still think there's a way to go there."

Mod support has been - and will be - a fundamental part of Bethesda Game Studios games going forward. This includes in Fallout 76.

"Even though everyone's connected and it matchmakes you to an invisible server, and you can play with your friends, we know, based on our history, that the future of [Fallout 76], the long life of it, is in people having their own worlds they can mod and make their own and say, 'Hey come play in mine and see what I did,'" Howard told Keighley at Gamelab. "Or there's an easy way for them to get mods and pick and choose 'I want my game this way', because no matter what we do, once you release tools and you have this huge community making things, the best stuff rises to the top."

Skyrim on Switch arrived last November - Skyrim having been one of games which originally sold the Switch vision to the world (despite not actually being confirmed for Switch release back then). Nonetheless, when it finally did arrive, Skyrim fit Switch as we'd hoped, and the ability to play on trains and planes and the toilet, was delightful.

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