Bethesda’s bringing new content to old games with Creation Club (update)

Bethesda Games Studio is launching Creation Club, a service for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One, this summer.

Bethesda’s new Creation Club will contain a series of mods developed for Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition both by Bethesda and “outside developers,” including those from the games’ communities. These will include weapons, abilities and gameplay, according to Bethesda. A trailer above, from the publisher’s E3 2017 press conference, shows a few of these in action.

Bethesda makes mods widely available to download through its Bethesda.net website. It also used to sell paid modifications for Skyrim through Steam Workshop, before Valve killed the program in 2015. It’s not yet clear if the Creation Club service will also require a fee or subscription when it launches.

E3 2017 begins on June 13, with press conferences starting June 10. For the big announcements, make sure to check out our one-stop shop for the show's streams.

Update: Bethesda elaborated on how Creation Club works on the service’s website.

“Creation Club is available via in-game digital marketplaces in both Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition and purchased with Credits,” the website states. “Credits are available for purchase on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam. Your Credits are transferable and can be used in both games on the same platform.”

Yet the publisher also stated that Creation Club is not equivalent to “paid mods,” similar to what it used to sell through Steam Workshop.

This is what Bethesda had to say about that:

Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.