Bethesda starts charging for mods as Creation Club launches for Fallout 4

Bethesda’s Creation Club, a system of curated and paid-for mods announced earlier this summer, has now gone live for Fallout 4 on the PC, as well as the Xbox One and PS4.

The Creation Club – which will also be arriving for Skyrim Special Edition next month – caused quite some controversy when it was first revealed, as gamers rebelled against the idea of having to pay for mod content which has previously always been free to download.

For its part, Bethesda argues that free mods are still available as before, it’s just the content in this particular club which you have to pay for. In other words, it’s a case of you pays your money, or you don’t – a two-tier mod system is now in operation, with free mods in one lane, and Bethesda’s curated paid-for mods in the other.

Let us Prey

The club’s initial batch of Fallout 4 mod content includes Hellfire Power Armor, Power Horse Armor, a prototype gauss rifle, homemade shotgun, modular military backpack, and a load of paint jobs for various items. You can also buy Morgan’s space suit (as seen in Prey).

As a sweetener, Bethesda is throwing in 100 credits for free, the currency used to purchase these mods on Steam (or Xbox Live/PSN). Although that won’t get you much…

And the overall response to this initial batch of content has been pretty muted, to say the least.

Doubtless some chunkier mods are in the pipeline, as the Creation Club promised a whole gamut of custom content when it was first revealed, including new gameplay modes. Meanwhile, Bethesda promises that “more content [is] coming soon throughout the upcoming months”.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).