The First Fallout 4 Paid Mods are Here, and They Suck

At this year's E3, one of Bethesda's few announcements (which was sad, considering they got a whole hour to themselves) was of the founding of a "Creation Club", a paid mod marketplace where the community's top modders, as well as third-party developers, could sell 'premium mods' to fans, which would be rigorously tested for performance and optimization to ensure they wouldn't disrupt gameplay. While most fans were uniformly against the idea, I was one of the few who thought it could actually work out: the problem with the first mod marketplace wasn't just that it cost money, it was that it was completely unregulated, and this seemed to fix the problem nicely.

...well, I don't like admitting when I'm wrong, but I'll do it if I have too. And based off these first rounds of paid mods that have just been released, it was perhaps wrong of me to hold my breath on this particular feature.

In short, the marketplace just released 12 new premium mods for Fallout 4. Five of them are just new colors for your Pip-boy or power armor, five of them are different but rather bland new weapons or armor (A new shotgun! A new rifle! A armor set focused on stealth, ect), there's some new furniture pieces for home decorating, and, in what's perhaps the best mod/joke of the lot, modular horse armor.

You can check it all out here.
 
If the idea was to wow people with the first batch, well, it obviously didn't work. All of these mods are astonishingly "safe", the kind of thing no one would really need Q&A testing for, and most certainly nothing you would typically spend money on. Nothing too disruptive of gameplay, which inevitably means it's just not really exciting. Fans reaction have been cynical at best, and frankly, I find it hard to disagree with that assertion. This was far from what I had in mind when I had pictured such a thing.
 
Still, it's only round one with one of the two supported games. It's too early to call the entire experiment a wash. But at least now, I'll keep my hopes low for the next batch.