Skyrim on Consoles May Get Modding Support

The upcoming Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim may receive a special feature on consoles like the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, as Bethesda, its developer and publisher, is currently working at an infrastructure which allows modding to happen on the Microsoft or Sony platforms, not just on the PC one.

Bethesda games have had epic amounts of content, with players spending copious amounts of time with titles like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas.

What's more, the lives of these titles were improved through the vast array of modifications (mods) brought forth by the community of players with the help of Bethesda's own mod tools.

Now, the company has once again talked about the possibility of releasing such tools on consoles, in order to let PS3 or Xbox 360 owners unleash their creativity and share their results with others.

Speaking with AusGamers, Bethesda boss Todd Howard explained how modding made the PC versions of its games that much more popular.

"I think our PC mod community is one of the things that is great about our games. We've always supported it and we want to continue to do it. But a lot of our audience is on the consoles so they're not experiencing that. So we have talked to Microsoft and Sony; 'how do we do this?'"

Howard explains that user-generated content is already being done with titles like Forza Motorsport 3, on the Xbox 360, LittleBigPlanet or Infamous 2, on the PS3, or Rock Band, on both consoles.

This still doesn't mean that it's going to be extremely simple to make mods for Skyrim, as there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

"There are still a lot of issues to solve because these aren't instances like a song or a car. You could download a mod that destroys your game and we can't have that. So we're still... we have not solved - even on paper yet - how to handle security, how do we handle not messing up your saved games and things like that.

"So it's not going to be solved for the game's release. But it's something that we're going to continue to look at because we think that it's an awesome part of the game that the majority of our audience isn't seeing."

If Bethesda manages to implement modding support on consoles with Skyrim, then it would certainly help the role-playing game reach an even bigger audience.