Bethesda’s announcement of Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition to coincide with the upcoming tenth anniversary on November 10th was not met with celebration but rather immediate and vocal backlash from the player community. It bears evidence that unregulated modding will be further suppressed by the new release, an increasingly frequent point of discord between developer and committed fanatics.
Technical ramifications are equally grave for community-made content. Like many executable updates passed by Bethesda, a great number of mods would be broken by the Anniversary Edition, especially extensive-overhauls which often incorporate third-party tools. This would be particularly damaging for mods that rely on the Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE), which would very soon be declared nonfunctional until the tool’s developers bestow upon the world a miraculous update. This would be the second massive incident of mod incompatibility in only about eighteen months after the 2024 next-gen patch.
For many players, this feels like a terribly gigantic anticlimax. The fan modding community has expressed its deep frustration publicly, since hours have been spent curating, fixing, and testing mods in a list often comprised of hundreds of modifications jeopardized by an official update. There are also widespread feelings of anger for what many felt were worthwhile updates being offered by the Anniversary Edition. Bundling all six DLC packs and over 150 legacy Creation Club items called “Creations,” the critics say it provided scant new content to counter the disruption caused to the vibrant modding community.
The release only promises to widen the divide among the already disjointed base of players and creators. The last-next-gen patch required the mod authors to choose which version of the game to support, and some players actively downgraded their copy to retain access to the old, forgotten content. This update threatens to deepen that divide, forcing creators to make difficult choices and possibly putting many beloved mods to rest that will never be updated for the latest update, hence alienating a heavy segment of the player population that has relied upon these additions for their enjoyment of this now decade-old title.
