Bethesda released a Creations Bundle for Fallout 4 yesterday as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations, adding 150 player-created items for the not-so-low price of £17.99. Unfortunately, Bethesda appears to have dropped the birthday cake on its way to the party, as players report some pretty serious issues with the Creation Bundle and its contents.
At the time of writing, Fallout 4—Creations Bundle sat at a “Mostly Negative” Steam rating with 124 reviews—quite a lot for what is essentially an asset pack. While some of the reviews complain about the price and the pack’s content—which is apparently a repackaging of items that were already available on the Creations Store—the bulk of the complaints lament that the pack doesn’t actually work.
The issue appears to be related in part to connectivity with the Bethesda store, with various reviews citing an inability to connect or load up the creations menu. Others state that, even when the Creations Bundle does work, not all the Creations mentioned are actually in the Bundle. “Does not include all creations. Still more microtransactions to follow. That or it’s bugged,” writes rudetearex.
The latter seems to be the likely option here, with other users citing problems with the Creations menu added in Fallout 4‘s most recent patch on November 6. “The ‘creations’ tab in the main menu seems to be broken, can’t tell what I own, what’s a mod or what’s a Creation Club piece of content,” writes KFC Bargain Bucket (strong name).
It all sounds extremely messy, and echoes back to the similarly troubled release of Skyrim: Anniversary Edition, which still has a Mixed Steam rating four years on from release. And there are apparently still issues lingering from Bethesda’s Next Gen upgrade of Fallout 4 last year, which caused huge disruption at the time of its release. Bethesda even warned players that the anniversary edition would break mods upon launch, though the Creations Bundle seems to have broken a whole lot more.
It’s an unfortunate scenario, given Bethesda’s creative chief, Todd Howard, so recently spoke about the studio learning from its past mistakes—though in that case, he was referring to Fallout 4’s cinematic dialogue system, which he said ‘did not resonate’ with players even though the studio ‘spent forever’ working on it.
