This curator has usually done the laborious work of putting together the mod collection, loaded, played, reloaded, and re-played the game with them, repeatedly, to make sure there are no conflicts in the loading order. Nexus Mods intends for its Collections feature to be a loading order of mods whose working order a curator vouches for and has tested. Two perfectly useful mods in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim can still cancel each other out or break other parts of the game if they touch the same assets or game systems, and one should have a priority that the other circumvents.
Mod users, as well as mod makers, know that proper loading order is a critical step. Collections are basically the means of creating and sharing a list of mods by different users that work together and, importantly, are loaded into the base game in the proper order. Since 2019, the site’s managers have been developing a feature they call Collections, to be served by a proprietary content delivery system called Vortex. 1 on, all mods will be archived and accessible through the site’s API, even if they are hidden from public view or search by their creator. After this 30-day grace period, no user may remove or demand their mod’s removal from the site. That request is an all-or-nothing proposition: Either a user asks that all of their content be removed, or none of it is removed. In this grace period, any user may write the site’s administrators to ask that their work be removed. What is Nexus Mods doing?Īfter a 30-day grace period that began on July 1, Nexus Mods will permanently store any mod uploaded to the site. We’ll try to explain what Nexus Mods is doing, why it’s made those decisions, why its fans and users are troubled by it, and where things will go from here. And it’s brought a lot of pushback, as you’d expect of a PC gaming community that often reads the fine print.
Nexus Mods’ sweeping and unlimited claim to its users’ work has given many of them pause. On Thursday, the site’s staff (of 18) announced that any mod uploaded to its catalog by anyone is going to be archived there and available for distribution, permanently. So it would seem to take a lot for that kind of a community resource to get in trouble with the public it serves. From the silly to the sublime, Nexus Mods has changed games for almost 20 years. The site is vital to a vibrant PC gaming culture whose players take pride in understanding how games are developed, and use that knowledge to tailor global bestselling franchises like The Witcher and The Elder Scrolls to their simplest taste. Nexus Mods is an A-list name among PC gamers, serving a McDonald’s-like 4.5 billion downloads of user-created content, changes, and improvements.