Another Fallout 4 update fixes performance issues while leaving modders angry, but it doesn’t have to be this way

Bethesda is celebrating a decade of Fallout 4 this month, and, as is Toddly tradition, has released yet another version of the Sole Survivor’s wasteland journey. The Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition launched on November 10 as an all-encompassing collection of DLC and add-ons, but a related update to Fallout 4’s Creation Club menu rolled out for everyone who owns the game and caused issues with certain existing mods.

Shortly after tanking Fallout 4’s “very positive” review average on Steam, Bethesda said it was investigating reports of new bugs, performance issues, and crashes introduced with the Creations Menu Update that went out alongside the Anniversary Edition. The studio issued a hotfix on November 17 for its biggest troublemaker, Fallout 4’s Creations Menu, and shared plans for more on November 24, followed by another update sometime in December.

Bethesda made good on some performance fixes last Friday, on November 21, when it published a follow up Steam blog with patch notes to address stability and crash issues. Though that’s not the fix some modding diehards want, with threads on Reddit from players who sound like they’d rather the update just not exist to begin with. And there’s still a trickle of negative Steam reviews rolling in.

Sure, some of those reviews are a bit aggressive, but others sound totally reasonable. Take users like Dihhdevil, for example, who simply wrote, “Please let us have the option to stay on a game version like cyberpunk if you decide to keep updating the game.”

As several of my fellow modding sickos pointed out in that same thread, the first step in amassing any unreasonably sized mod collection should be turning Steam’s auto-updates off and waiting to see how mod creators respond before downloading anything. But that doesn’t really solve the issue for folks who need a fresh install when something breaks. It’s also just a pain to micromanage.

If your favorite Fallout 4 mod is broken, try downgrading

Steam doesn’t automatically catalog old game versions so that you can roll back whenever you want, though some devs do offer custom branches in case something breaks (or you just prefer a previous version). To revert Fallout 4 to an older version, however, you’ll have to use a tool like the Fallout 4 Downgrader by zerratar on Nexus Mods.

It’s inconvenient, but that’s just modding, honestly. It’s really more of a bummer for folks on console, who don’t have access to resources outside of Bethesda’s official mod library.

In fairness, Bethesda did warn us about some of the specific mods that would break in a post prior to the Anniversary Edition’s launch. The performance hiccups, nasty crashing, etc. are understandable complaints, but it looks like the Fallout 4 Script Extender on Nexus Mods is keeping up with fixes as they roll out. Mod makers should be able to update old projects with the resource, though that doesn’t help long-abandoned projects. If you’re trying to fix something published in 2018 and never touched again, it sucks.

The bar for archiving and offering old game versions is somewhere down in hell, but Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 branches are a good example. The studio doesn’t maintain a massive library of every iteration of course, but there’s usually a couple of older patches you can roll back to when your favorite mod crashes and burns from a version change.

Perhaps it’s unreasonable to assume any studio should put extra work into supporting more robust third-party tools, but I would’ve never touched Skyrim as a kid had I not been able to turn it into a playground for medieval Barbies. While I can’t say I agree with angry demands for a studio to stop updating its games, I think asking for a little easy-to-access version control is more than fair. I’d love to see every game, but especially games that make modding a focal point, start giving us the option to roll back automatic updates that are likely to break things.