cronicler said:
Somehow, for one reasion or other Bethesda is unwilling to release the SDK/Map Editor/General Editor/Item Editor with the game. Tahts why there is no solid fact about how moddable the game will be. (And personally i don't really expect tools to be released before first real expansion.) Now if I was a nice person i could belive that it is hard to make the dev. tools friendly to regular users.
In Morrowind, mod tools came with the game. With Oblivion, Bethesda were reluctant to confirm wether or not a CS would be released. In the end, the Oblivion CS were released at roughly the same time as Oblivion.
My bet is that Bethesda are franticly finishing up Fallout 3, and when it goes into production, they will set up a team to build the public release of a Fallout CS. I imagine that the problem is not as much making the tools accessible (they use the same tools themselves), but it is removing those features that are licenced.
cronicler said:
However they are "basically" using Oblivion engine and Oblivion's SDK could have been used with minumum modification for things like reskinning/basic item creation and similar non-invasive tasks.
The formatiing of plugins are likely to be similar, but different enough to give some problems with that approach. It does, however, mean that it should be possible to adjust the community created tools for Oblivion to do similar stuff in Fallout 3.
Arash said:
well, if they dont release any moding tools then they are surely ignoring the entire ol' Fallout fans and the entire Fallout community.
Not to mention the entire TES community, many of which are interested in Fallout 3. And those that aren't may just get angry as well, in fear that it may be a trend for TES V.
There are also more positive reasons to release a Construction Set for Fallout 3. A CS is a catalyst for building a community around your game. Members of this community are much more likely to tell their friends of the great game they are modding, and are more likely to buy other games from Bethesda. On top of this, modders have many interesting ideas that can be used (shamelessly) by Bethesda for later games.