The recent release of a creation club for Starfield – delivering content from Bethesda and modders for purchasable credits as the studio’s previously done with Skyrim and Fallout 4 – drew a lot of backlash from players. Bethesda’s Todd Howard has now addressed the controversy and indicated that the studio could be looking at making some changes to the initiative going forwards.
If you’re out of the loop, the big sticking point with this iteration of Bethesda’s ever-polarising attempts to intergrate some form of add-on system that allows for ‘paid mods’ was the pricing, especially when it came to one Trackers Alliance quest. With that second quest based around the faction being behind the paywall, while the first Trackers Alliance mission was given out for free, some players were annoyed that it looked like they’d be paying a lot more for this and upcoming Trackers Alliance content than they might otherwise do if it was all released as one DLC pack.
In an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, game director Todd Howard was asked about this controversy, and responded by suggesting the studio will be looking into potentially revising how it proces and packages creation club content in light of the backlash.
Acknowledging that Bethesda has heard the feedback, Howard outlined: “First of all, that stuff gets priced based on things that we’ve done before, both in creation club and then with Fallout 76, and we’re always trying to be looking at what else is out there, make sure we’re giving value to everybody, and where we’re not, we definitetly will adjust.”
He went on to specifically address the aforementioned creations Trackers Alliance quest – which is called The Vulture – explaining: “That was an attempt to [recreate] something that we did in [previous creation clubs], where we’d say ‘Hey, you get this special outfit and you get this special weapon’, we kind wanted to put them together and then thought let’s go the extra mile and wrap those around a quest.”
“Now, we definitely see the feedback,” Howard continued, “and that’s not what we want at all in terms of [people saying] ‘Oh no, this looks like a faction that we’re chopping up and then selling for 700 credits at a time’, and so I do think we’re gonna take a look at that and how we deliver content like that. Whether we’re chaning pricing or breaking it up, or what we should do there.”
So, there you go. In that same interview, Howard also adressed what the studio’s current plans are in terms of traditional expansions for Starfield, confirming that at least one more bit of DLC is already penned in to follow Shattered Space.