They are in no way endorsed or monitored by the game’s creators. Here is where I state the obvious: These mods are created by users and distributed via third-party sites like Nexus Mods. There are male-centric and gender-neutral additions as well, but they appear with noticeably less frequency. “Simple clean face for woman” is just the latest in a long lineage of mods designed to alter the female characters in Bethesda games. Take, for instance, “ Simple clean face for woman ,” a mod whose sole purpose is to remove dirt smudges and skin texture from only the game’s female characters, leaving them with an inhuman, artificial smoothness. And that’s when some of the mods get … weirder.

In both cases, the characters in these games are generally hard-scrabble and grimy. I’m personally bewildered, and creeped out, by the clean mods.īethesda’s two major RPG franchises are the Elder Scrolls (medieval fantasy) and Fallout (nuclear post-apocalypse). Last week, a mod for the Boston-set Fallout 4 earned the ire of Major League Baseball because it featured David Ortiz and Red Sox paraphernalia. Given that Fallout 4 is only a week old, many of these mods are simple cosmetic upgrades - higher-quality 3-D models and textures, color swaps, a Taylor Swift background for the playable character’s wearable computer. Mods are popular enough to sustain substantial online communities, and when it comes to modding communities, there are few that can rival the one for Bethesda games. Mods (short for “modification”) allow players to tweak the game, from things as minor as interface tweaks to more substantial additions like new characters and locales. While some play on console systems like the Xbox and PlayStation, many are playing it on PC, because that version offers mod support. You may already own it: Bethesda Softworks, the game’s publisher, announced that they had shipped 12 million units of the game “representing sales in excess of $750 million” (shipping, it should be noted, is a different metric from sold). You may already know this, since the game has been the subject of a pretty heavy media blitz before launch. Fallout 4, the newest blockbuster role-playing video game, came out last week.

Fallout 4 body slider mod