There's a danger a downloaded mod "destroys your game", so how do they safeguard the system? They've "not solved - even on paper yet" - game security.
"I think our PC mod community is one of the things that is great about our games. We’ve always supported it and we want to continue to do it. But a lot of our audience is on the consoles so they’re not experiencing that," said Todd Howard.
"So we have talked to Microsoft and Sony; “how do we do this?”
Recent DLC developments offer a way: "The good news is that those things have started to happen with games like Forza 3 and sharing all your car stuff or Rock Band’s a really good example, where you can make your own tracks where you’re authoring them somewhere else then you’re uploading them to the 360."
"There are still a lot of issues to solve with... because these aren’t instances like a song or a car you know, you could download a mod that destroys your game and we can’t have that. So we’re still... we have not solved -- even on paper yet -- how to handle security; how do we handle not messing up your saved games and things like that."
Obviously an RPG with corruptable saves, especially one on the scale of Elder Scrolls, would completely torpedo community confidence in trying out mods on their console.
"So it’s not going to be solved for the game’s release, but it’s something that we’re going to continue to look at because we think that it’s an awesome part of the game that the majority of our audience isn’t seeing," continued game director Howard.
Would PC mods 'port' to console versions? "It actually works. If you have a devkit console you can take the PC mod files, put them on your Xbox and they work. They actually worked in Oblivion, Morrowind and Fallout 3," he revealed.
"For all of those games, I can take the PC mods and put them on my Xbox. We have one system so we just need to figure out the logistics of: How do we get it there? How do we secure it? How do we make it safe? It’s something that we would really like to do."
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 11th.
