So apparently Bethesda/Zenimax patched Skyrim and, what do you know, they made their DRM enforcement more stringent and in the process messed up a bunch of mods already!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/22/skyrim-patched-for-the-worse/

I'm sure the community will eventually figure out all the appropriate workarounds, but I'm sure glad that I'm not a Day One buyer. I'm waiting for the GOTY edition with all the addons, DLC, extras, etc. By then there will be some awesome mods and people will have figured out how to keep the DRM from intruding on the fun.

Of course, the best thing that could possibly happen would be for GOG to get Zenimax on-board the GOG train.

Yeah. One of the reasons I'm giving the game a pass for a couple of months.

No worries. This has already been fixed by the community. The latest version of 4GB Skyrim has a workaround that works just fine.

That said, this was an incredibly poor move by Bethesda. DRM should be patched out of games, not into them. Still, little has changed anyway, so not the end of the world.

hmmm... messed up the game mods?

Maybe it's their way of saying: it's too early for that, get out from our game, you don't have the right to alter it.

And why do they do that? next thing they do is to lock the game so there would be no modding. Ala crysis 2.

What about the uGrids thing that was supposed to make the game prettier? Does that still work?

Whether the workarounds were found already or not, this move was not a community-friendly move. That really stinks, because the Elder Scrolls games, in my view, have always been about community.

Besides all that, it still bugs me that pirates always find a way to pirate anyway, and paying customers who want to play by the rules are the only ones who suffer from this crud.

They didn't have a choice, no DRM on the exe meant all territories could play it right away, which violated their distributor contracts.

Contrary to what some might think, the DRM patch wasn't to break the 4GB mod. It was to prevent people such as myself from playing the game before the local release date. Too bad, those of us smart enough, kept the old EXE. So it was a completely pointless move anyway.

OK, I understand that, even if I think it's lame. But that's sort of my point: they put themselves in a situation where they had to pit their legal interests against their community. Naturally, the lawyers are going to win. But it doesn't earn my goodwill as a customer.

EDIT: For clarity.

Well, as stupid decisions go, this wasn't exactly pitchforks and knives. If you bought a copy of the game and played vanilla, you very likely got exactly zero problems from this (there were some people crying out loud, but a modified .ini was probably the culprit in everyone of those).

Now, as far as modding is concerned, this is a bitch. All the previous games had a wide open door policy, so this time round a crack of some kind will probably be needed. Or a manager that circumvents the DRM. A crack, if you will.

Uhoa... calm your horses guys....
Is there an official mod kit out? No. Will there be one? Yes.
The whole patch was to fix their main.exe - no modding kit touches that, never had.

Yeah, and people playing the cracked version will surely use the autoupdate function ...

What a dickmove ...

Oh, I forgot to add the "community mod manager" in the previous sentence there. Yes, the official mod kit will most likely than not address this "issue" anyway.

I agree, I remember when gaming wasn't about corporate bullshit. The funny part is we all begged for more mainstream respect at the time, and now that we have it I would return it in a heartbeat.

Hell, I'd even pay the repackaging fee.