I’d agree with making life easier on the devs, if that was the purpose.
The purpose is making everything cheaper by removing complexity. And said removal of complexity, makes for far less varied content in the game. If your system is strong enough to spawn large crowds in the game, it quickly becomes obvious there isn’t much variety in terms of clothes and armors in the game.
As for making it easier to make full armors, sure, but only full armors.
One of the big things that has made the modding scene so vibrant is because slot item clothes have been created and ported over since Morrowind and Fallout 3.
It makes it so that there is a large volume of mods that simply carry over with minimal work.
Making it simple being the key requirement.
If you now want to import just the whole of the VTAW collection for Fallout 4 and the many variants created for it by other modders to Starfield, you’ll have to combine all variations of all 100 something clothing sets and armors, manually, instead of simply being able to wear all individual pieces.
And like I said earlier, that’s not 100x a job (that’s how many sets there are in VTAW, each with 5-15 items per outfit), but 100(hands)x100(shoes)x100(coat)x100(pants)x100(left arm armor)x100(right arm armor)x100(left leg armor)x100(right leg armor)x100(shirts)x100(mouth, yes that’s actually an official slot)x100(underwear)x100(hats)x100(jewelry)x100(glasses/masks)x100(other accessories), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc combinations you have to combine and bring together and edit.
It won’t only make for an obscene amount of work, but will also make the disk size requirements for all these combinations go from 1000 or so items to exponentially more, as every combination now is its own mesh, rather than simply a reference to an item slot.
In FO4, there are 60+ item slots (with modding tools, there’s even more than that). The most commonly known and used by Bethesda themselves for vanilla assets are:
Hat
Eyes
Mouth (for cigars, cigarettes, lower face maks, surgical masks, etc, etc)
Pants
Shirt
Chest
Left Arm
Right Arm
Left Leg
Right Leg
Backpack
Weapon
Boots / Full outfit (they use the boots slot to equip single mesh outfits)
Gloves
But there are also slots in the background for jewelry, earings, ring (like the weddingring), top hair, long hair, undershirts, underpants, beards, eyepatches, shoulders, belts, capes/backpacks, left hand, right hand, bracelets, weapon on back, leg addons like gunbelts, headbands, necklace/scarves, offhand weapon, etc, etc and many more agreed upon and assigned by the modding community.
Starfield as far as I can see only has suit/clothes, helmet/cap, backpack and gun slots. None of them layered.
So to release mods with many clothing and accessory items, you’ll have to manually combine all of these or only release a few full outfits.
And you won’t have a choice in what body you use as they need to be baked into the single outfit.
What made Skyrim and FO4 so awesome was the fact you could pick and combined all these different mods, some pants from here, some shirt from there, a standard left light armor on one arm, a modded right arm armor on the other arm, a gun holster on one leg, a standard armor on the other, a mask from some obscure mod and a hat from some sex mod.
Easy peasy to have a completely unique outfit and even possible to use mods to have every single NPC in the game use a random outfit comprised out of all the available clothes items you loaded into the game through mods.
You could really make every single NPC you came across wear something unique to them very easily.
Starfield now has about 40 armors and about as many (or a little more) full outfits (of which many are just very small variations on the same full outfit), but that still only makes 100 or so possible clothing and 100 or so possible hat combinations.
In Fallout 4, even with only the default clothes and armor, you had less “sets” of armors (light/mid/heavy variants of metal/leather/gunner/atom/minutemen/raiders/covenant/etc,etc), but you were able to combine any one of them to result in far more possible armor combinations than the 40 in Starfield.
In Skyrim and FO4, you could load thousands of clothing and armor items into the game and wear any combination of any of them and have NPCs wear any combination of them.
I’d agree with making life easier on the devs, if that was the purpose.
The purpose is making everything cheaper by removing complexity. And said removal of complexity, makes for far less varied content in the game. If your system is strong enough to spawn large crowds in the game, it quickly becomes obvious there isn’t much variety in terms of clothes and armors in the game.
As for making it easier to make full armors, sure, but only full armors.
One of the big things that has made the modding scene so vibrant is because slot item clothes have been created and ported over since Morrowind and Fallout 3.
It makes it so that there is a large volume of mods that simply carry over with minimal work.
Making it simple being the key requirement.
If you now want to import just the whole of the VTAW collection for Fallout 4 and the many variants created for it by other modders to Starfield, you’ll have to combine all variations of all 100 something clothing sets and armors, manually, instead of simply being able to wear all individual pieces.
And like I said earlier, that’s not 100x a job (that’s how many sets there are in VTAW, each with 5-15 items per outfit), but 100(hands)x100(shoes)x100(coat)x100(pants)x100(left arm armor)x100(right arm armor)x100(left leg armor)x100(right leg armor)x100(shirts)x100(mouth, yes that’s actually an official slot)x100(underwear)x100(hats)x100(jewelry)x100(glasses/masks)x100(other accessories), etc, etc, etc, etc, etc combinations you have to combine and bring together and edit.
It won’t only make for an obscene amount of work, but will also make the disk size requirements for all these combinations go from 1000 or so items to exponentially more, as every combination now is its own mesh, rather than simply a reference to an item slot.
In FO4, there are 60+ item slots (with modding tools, there’s even more than that). The most commonly known and used by Bethesda themselves for vanilla assets are:
Hat Eyes Mouth (for cigars, cigarettes, lower face maks, surgical masks, etc, etc) Pants Shirt Chest Left Arm Right Arm Left Leg Right Leg Backpack Weapon Boots / Full outfit (they use the boots slot to equip single mesh outfits) GlovesBut there are also slots in the background for jewelry, earings, ring (like the weddingring), top hair, long hair, undershirts, underpants, beards, eyepatches, shoulders, belts, capes/backpacks, left hand, right hand, bracelets, weapon on back, leg addons like gunbelts, headbands, necklace/scarves, offhand weapon, etc, etc and many more agreed upon and assigned by the modding community.
Starfield as far as I can see only has suit/clothes, helmet/cap, backpack and gun slots. None of them layered.
So to release mods with many clothing and accessory items, you’ll have to manually combine all of these or only release a few full outfits.
And you won’t have a choice in what body you use as they need to be baked into the single outfit.
What made Skyrim and FO4 so awesome was the fact you could pick and combined all these different mods, some pants from here, some shirt from there, a standard left light armor on one arm, a modded right arm armor on the other arm, a gun holster on one leg, a standard armor on the other, a mask from some obscure mod and a hat from some sex mod.
Easy peasy to have a completely unique outfit and even possible to use mods to have every single NPC in the game use a random outfit comprised out of all the available clothes items you loaded into the game through mods.
You could really make every single NPC you came across wear something unique to them very easily.
Starfield now has about 40 armors and about as many (or a little more) full outfits (of which many are just very small variations on the same full outfit), but that still only makes 100 or so possible clothing and 100 or so possible hat combinations.
In Fallout 4, even with only the default clothes and armor, you had less “sets” of armors (light/mid/heavy variants of metal/leather/gunner/atom/minutemen/raiders/covenant/etc,etc), but you were able to combine any one of them to result in far more possible armor combinations than the 40 in Starfield.
In Skyrim and FO4, you could load thousands of clothing and armor items into the game and wear any combination of any of them and have NPCs wear any combination of them.
Thanks for going into detail! I don’t really have anything to add, but that was an interesting read.