The most famous mod for both Fallout and Skyrim has to be Caliente’s Beautiful Bodies Enhancer (CBBE), the enhancement known for making Bethesda games synonymous with naked ladies. You won’t find it on consoles, however. There’s a reason for that.
While Bethesda made it clear that straight-up nudity mods would not be allowed on PS4 or Xbox One, CBBE can be used for more than just nudity: It also provides users with more robust body modification options. According to a CBBE mod update, Caliente, the creator of CBBE, was planning on porting a more “family friendly” version of the mod to consoles. That plan changed once Bethesda dropped the ball with console mods.
“If you’ve come looking for a console version of CBBE, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” Caliente wrote on the mod forums. “I’m not going to even consider it until Bethesda institutes a reasonable, respectful policy with regards to the rights and time of mod authors.”
“Up until now, I’ve been planning on spending a bit of time and doing what I can to get a clean, usable, and ‘Parent-safe’ version of CBBE onto consoles. It would take a bit of work, and I wasn’t sure when I could get to it, but I was hoping to try soon… however, there has been a rash of theft from, and general disrespect of, content authors on the Bethesda site,” Caliente said.
As you may have heard by now, the console modding ecosystem has been plagued with stolen mods that often don’t even give credit to the original creator. Bethesda has taken steps to remedy this: Uploading mods now requires a Steam linked account, but mostly, Bethesda has simply suggested that users log a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to get stolen mods taken down. As we’ve outlined before, a DMCA may eventually fix the problem for anyone that logs a complaint, but the process still puts a lot of the work on the mod creators themselves. Many mod creators feel that this is unfair.
“This is an unacceptable burden to place on unpaid content creators who just want to share the things they have created without having it stolen,” Caliente wrote.
“Until that policy is changed and more is done to protect mod authors, CBBE stays Nexus-only,” Caliente said.
Caliente is not alone in feeling frustrated. Last weekend, Nexus, the biggest destination for PC mods, put Bethesda on blast for not doing enough for its modding community. Specifically, Nexus dislikes that Bethesda does not seem to be invested in building a real community, nor does it have the infrastructure needed to manage complaints of theft. Nexus on the other hand has a team dedicated to managing its community and mods, as well as better moderation tools that enable them to quickly act on reports of theft. A stolen mod uploaded to Bethesda’s site, on the other hand, might take weeks to be taken down from the site.
“Now, the DMCA system in general on the internet does work… however, the hope is that when you’re running the official mod hosting platform for a series of games, that your moderation system is more advanced than ‘send an email to this address,” wrote a Nexus admin known as Dark0ne. “Heck, even a template/form system built in to the Bethesda.net site for the DMCA process would have been helpful.”
“Coding a website is easy,” Nexus admin Dark0ne wrote. “Anyone can do it… what’s hard is spending the time to form an actual thriving community and trying to do right by that community so that they trust you enough to actually use your site.
“Doing right by that community requires countless hours responding to emails and messages, support tickets, moderation requests, generally conversing and actively engaging with your community and getting a feel for what the wants and needs of the community are and ultimately legislating if necessary so the community understands where you stand and what you expect of them. There’s seemingly none of that with Bethesda.net.”
Just to put this into perspective, while Bethesda seems to offload the responsibility of mod theft to others, Nexus itself is doing what it can to try to help the situation with its own tools. Users who upload mods to Nexus will now be able to flag their content with the following tags:
-I have uploaded my mods to Bethesda.net and they are available for console users.
-I have not uploaded my mods to Bethesda.net for console users yet, but I will at some point.
-My mods will not be available on Bethesda.net for console users.
-My mods won’t work on consoles or would not be acceptable on Bethesda.net according to their rules.
-I give my permission for someone else to port my mods to console and for it to be uploaded to Bethesda.net by someone else. Please credit me, however.
If you select the top option saying you’ve uploaded your mod to Bethesda.net then you’ll be provided with two text fields where you can provide a link to those mod pages on Bethesda.net. These will create mirrors on your file pages from which users can see and navigate to your mods on Bethesda.net and also tag the files with the “XBone version available” and “PS4 version available” tags.
If the modding community feels indignant about all of this, it’s because they have been around for a long time, fending for themselves. Now that mods have blown up, however, to them it feels like Bethesda is swooping in to reap the rewards, without actually putting the work in to maintain appropriate community standards that would discourage people from stealing mods in the first place. Actually, the dramatic yet heartfelt metaphor Nexus uses is that of an absent dad.
Nexus feels particularly wronged here because it personally has come through for Bethesda in this realm too: When the Fallout 4 Far Harbor DLC was leaked, Nexus promptly took it down within a couple of hours, out of respect for the developer. To Nexus, it doesn’t seem like Bethesda is willing to return the favour.
“Please let Bethesda know you’re on the Mod Author’s side, and the minimum legal requirement isn’t good enough,” Caliente wrote. “I furthermore urge all other mod authors to take the same stance… this is a community that can only succeed and thrive when creators’ hard work is respected.”
You can download CBBE here, or read the rest of Nexus’ post on Bethesda here.
Comments
14 responses to “Popular Fallout 4 Body Mod Won’t Be On Consoles Until Bethesda Gets Its Act Together”
Very, very interested in copyright rules and rights applied to mods. Monetising them or changing them for ‘sale’ to userbases was always going to be fraught with danger, whether it’s Valve or a company that’s staunchly PC-platform trying to do it in the console space.
The copyright rules are fairly simple: a mod is most likely going to be treated as a derivative work of the game. Creating derivative works is generally a right reserved for the copyright holder of the original work (unless the derivative is covered by fair use or some other exception).
In the “paid Skyrim mods on Steam” case, Bethesda had given permission to make and sell the mods so the rules were not much different to those covering original apps/games. And just like when developing an original game, you shouldn’t be using other people’s work without their permission (whether it is asking them directly, or if the work was released under an open source license). And like what happened with mods, there are people who will ignore this and swipe other people’s work.
The stupid thing is, this is an adult game with adult content. Why do you need to make it parent friendly? So stupid, just as stupid as making a word filter for GTA5 that has more swearing in the game than any other I’ve played in a long time.
It’d be an Xbox live / PS4 / Steam requirement rather than a Bethesda one. Additionally, developer sanctioned mods would mean it is likely that they would have to account for R-rated content in classification and means they don’t have to meet certain legal requirements such as age-gates for pornographic content.
They can get away with a nice simple clause “online content not rated”, noted specifically on Halo and Call of Duty titles… YouTube makes its way to XB1/PS4 without an age rating, can just search for Fallout 4 Sexy Mod….
… and it could be as simple as that. An age-gate for “adult” mods to shield young (but still adult) eyes.
it could> be, but they also might not want to open themselves up to potential litigation. Better safe than sorry, the R rated stuff is on the nexus if people really want it.
Yeah, I kinda thought that the ‘officially curating’ mods for consoles to make sure that they work and aren’t in violation of trademarks/copyrights/T&C(n00dz) was going to be a bit more involved than a quick pass-over to make sure they haven’t put restricted content in, then slapping it up like the wild west. There’s a lot of garbage on the Nexus, but it’s unthinkable how much more there would be if it wasn’t for the community self-policing.
Same. I can’t believe their idea of ‘releasing mods on consoles for the first time ever’ was just to open the floodgates. Heh, I thought this of the paid mods fiasco too; they did have some opening exclusives but nothing that would blow everyones socks off and convince them to pay.
Bethesda is in a position to be the first to do mods for consoles and potentially change custom content creation on consoles for the future and they are already cocking it up. Get your act together guys, these people have been doing this long enough to know what they are on about.
Is there a mod that adds more clothing options?
I’d also like dye & pants/shirt mix & matching.
I’d actually spend time crafting if I could make cool costumes.
There is on the —
…Oh. I’m sorry.
Smug insensitivity aside, mods to keep an eye on will be ones like ‘Armorsmith Expanded’ which frees up all armour slots to be used in combination with one-piece outfits. And there are a wide variety of additional armour mods out there, but I haven’t see any which offer actual in-game dyes; usually the modder has to colour it and you install the colour(s) you want.
See, ESO has dyes & I feel like Zenimax online need to sit down with Bethesda GS & they learn from each other.
I mean, street fighter had colour customization on the PSX
Screw all this house building dlc, give me dyes!!!
Now the entire family can whack off.
so what bethesda is saying is showing the female/ male body is bad, killing people and racism is good, seeing as cait is an outdated racial stereotype, “ooh im irish the only thing that makes me happy is getting drunk and getting into fights, bethesda: no its cool man for any of you who wanted to fuck mayor macreedy in fallout 3 you can have sex with him (off camera of course” bethesda: but wait theres more know hot there was all sorts of cool weapons in the other fallout games? yeah!!!!!!!! we introduce pipe rifles! they shoot 38. bullets!, know what bethesda? way to buy a property and slowly kill it, you guys are fucking clowns