I revised a side quest in the mod today, this was actually the first quest I’d built in the creation kit after having completed the (rough) land masses and general placement of trees and buildings and the like. It’s a fairly straightforward quest, I used it to learn how to make a quest with 2 stages and a handful of optional objectives. It was very simple and very clear-cut as to what you find, where you find it, and the end result. Reviewing it reminds me a lot of the original Fallout 76 quests (though hopefully not as poorly received as 76 was at the start of it’s life as a game given that it isn’t the main quest of the mod).
Looking through it really shows how new I was to the creation kit in general, even now I am still probably a mere beginner, or at least that’s my perception (especially given I still have trouble with getting some simpler quests to behave). But I also appreciate how far I’ve come since that quest and it hasn’t given me the visceral reaction that normal accompanies me looking at things I did (that head-in-hands groaning-at-my-own-terribleness reaction, I can’t be the only one who has that reaction, right?), and I can only conclude this is because I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect when I made it (and also a lot of the clunkiness gets hidden by the nice shiny video game engine so nobody will ever be any the wiser… hopefully). But this does speak to the problem of always wanting to produce something perfect the first time, you know, that impossible task we always set for ourselves. Since then I’ve come a long way with what I’m making in terms of quests, but they’re still works in progress (and will be for some time yet, this is why organising and planning is really helpful; especially if that planning involves tracking where you are, something I’m often not the best at).
I used to look at tutorial quests people made for this (or for anything really) and always try to take the lesson and immediately apply it to the product (quest, story, whatever) I was trying to make. Now I see the value in the tutorial itself, sure I might still be making the quest first and worrying about the tutorial second but I have a better method, at least for the mod. I build a side quest out of the tutorial, use that to experiment and learn and then build the main quest piece that uses the skills from the tutorial. My theory is you still get to make content for your project, but if you screw up a side quest people may never even see it, if you break your main quest everyone will.
Also, save often, the creation kit crashes constantly.
P.S. I dropped the ‘Modding Fallout, Part x’ because I don’t really know how many of these sort of posts I’m going to end up making over the course of building the mod.