Bethesda has had many successful games over the years, but by far its two largest juggernauts are The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises. Both open world RPG series have gained plenty of fans since The Elder Scrolls: Arena was first released in 1994. The critical mass of fans then fed back into the game’s popularity, since many of the more recent games in both The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series rely on fan-made mods to make them enjoyable, or sometimes even playable.
Bethesda has always had a modding community, which began modding The Elder Scrolls: Arena and greatly expanded when The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was released. It was revolutionized by Bethesda’s development of the Elder Scrolls Construction Set, an editing toolkit that made The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a much more modding-friendly game than its predecessors. Still, none of these compare to the modding community that formed around the most recent installment in The Elder Scrolls franchise: Skyrim.
Skyrim has an absolutely unprecedented modding scene. There are over 28,000 mods on the Steam Workshop alone, and many others on Nexus Mods. There are entire lists devoted to finding the best hundred mods for the game. There are so many Skyrim mods that there are entire Youtube series dedicated to modding Skyrim beyond recognition, using mods that do things like turn trees into hands and dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine.
But often, the mods for Bethesda games aren’t as outlandish as those. Sometimes, they just make the game work right, something that was not necessarily Bethesda’s number one priority. One of the most downloaded Fallout 4 mods, with more than 3.2 million downloads through Nexus Mods, is the Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch, which aims to eventually fix every single bug not officially resolved by the Bethesda team. There’s a similar mod for most recent Bethesda games. Otherwise, the games are mostly buggy messes that have a chance to crash every time you enter a loading screen.
Some mods even add extra content to the original game. The Fallout 4 mod "America Rising" and the Skyrim mod "Moon and Star" are just two of the many quest-sized mods that are so professionally produced that it’s difficult to distinguish them from the base game. Both add in fan favorite characters and factions from previous games, and provide new stories to the game.
It can be hard to go back from a modded game to vanilla. Depending on the mods you have downloaded, locations will be less vibrant, characters will seem duller, and quest threads just won’t exist anymore when you turn them off. Not to mention, it can actually be harder to play an unmodded game once you’ve gotten used to mods. It’s not easy to play Fallout: New Vegas when the loading screen crashes your game every other time you fast travel.
That being said, Bethesda has historically been pretty friendly towards modders. They even make the official Creation Kit that they use for their games available for anyone with a Bethesda account and operate a wiki that explains how to use it. Lead Developer Todd Howard even said that “the sky’s the limit” when it comes to mods. It’s clear that, despite Bethesda’s shortcomings, they’re aware of how much their games depend on mods.