Fallout 4’s Creation Club armor has free counterparts — and fans prefer them

Bethesda’s Creation Club is now in beta on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One, introducing a set of premium, “mini” add-ons to games like Fallout 4. But the service, which has been criticized as akin to paid mods since Bethesda announced it at E3, is already being discredited by some players with identical — even superior — fanmade content already in their games.

The most obvious of these is the Hellfire Power Armor, which is inspired by the Enclave Hellfire armor from Fallout 3’s Broken Steel expansion. The Hellfire Armor doesn’t appear in Fallout 4, so a group of modders called Road to Liberty designed a near-perfect recreation of the popular, powerful suit. It has been available on popular mod repository Nexus Mods since Aug. 19, garnering more than 25,000 downloads in the past 10 days. (It’s also on the PC version of the Bethesda.net launcher.)

Now that Creation Club is live, however, some players who already patched the Hellfire Armor into their copies of Fallout 4 are incredulous that Bethesda wants them to pay for something that’s freely accessible.

The Road to Liberty team did a comparison video that shows the differences between both Power Armor suits, but that’s only stoked players’ ire further.

“That's absolutely disappointing,” a YouTube comment reads. “Bethesda created the Hellfire Armour in Fallout 3 and later in Fallout 4 a modders [sic] revamps it and adds it in the new game. Then Bethesda decide to make creation club. And they do the same and the modders’ looks far more better and it's free lol.”

The Creation Club Hellfire Power Armor, by comparison, costs 500 credits. That’s equivalent to around $5, although the minimum credit purchase is 750 credits for $7.99. It’s one of the pricier options currently available.

Bethesda may have a tough time winning players over to Creation Club’s premium model, especially when there are similar, free options for much of its early content.