Remember when, a couple of weeks ago, the singer of American band Breaking Benjamin was filmed promoting a Fallout 4 first person he’d made via a mid-gig speech about modding community drama? Well, according to Benjamin Burnley, that wasn’t some planned tirade, but rather an instance of ad-libbing to fill the dead air caused by a snare drum giving up the ghost. As for why it exists, the answer’s largely just that the bloke loves him some VR wandering around Tamriel and The Commonwealth.
“What happened was my drummer broke a snare drum head,” Burnley, who makes mods under the name Killemloud, said in an interview with Nexus Mods. “We were standing around waiting, and in all of my spare time, I work on my own mods just for my own personal game. I just so happened to have been working on that one, and I’d immediately been met with a lot of negativity on the first version of it.
“My experience as a mod user is that the first version is very rarely representative of the final version. Everybody’s system is different, everybody has different expectations, and Mod Authors improve their mods as they go based on user feedback and people’s setups. It was just fresh in my mind, and I’m standing there while the techs are replacing the drumhead. Time on stage when there’s dead silence, every second feels like an hour! So I really just started to joke about it to kill the time. It wasn’t a planned thing, and it wasn’t a serious thing. Bullying is a serious issue, for sure, but I approach it with humour, as I do pretty much everything else.”
As you can imagine, that means the singer wasn’t best pleased that the incident was interpreted by some folks, myself included, as him holding up the gig to go off on a bit of a rant. Having re-watched the clip that was posted online by a concert-goer, who’s since added a note about this drum-fixing context to it, you can see someone sitting at the drums throughout who could be testing them out following the drum maintainance. I’m not entirely sure it explains why one of the fans in the crowd, who’d surely be aware of what was going on, shouts “Play some music!” midway through Burnley’s chat. Burnley also alluded to having been shouting out the mod “every fucking night” in his on-stage speech, which doesn’t quite seem to mesh with this being a one-off or off-the-cuff thing.
As for why the mod exists, Burnley spent most of the rest of the interview making clear that he’s really into playing Fallout 4 and Skyrim in VR. “Anyone who’s played Skyrim or Fallout VR, not that they’re bad in any way vanilla, but they’re most certainly vastly improved with mods,” he said. “Mods for those games, to me, are even more important than flat ones because we’re talking about basic functionality, being able to grab something, for example, and things that aren’t as imperative in the flat version of the game.
“My whole journey to Nexus actually came from VR. Before Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR even came out, there was a programme called VorpX that could take flat games and make them playable in VR. There were a few that worked really well, like Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3.”
He went on the explain that prior to his True First Person mod, he mainly worked on VR ports for existing mods, such as Better Vampires and Convenient Horses. “True First Person came about because when I’m on tour, it’s hard to set up my VR setup every day when I’m on the bus travelling,” the singer added. “I do play flat from time to time when I’m on tour, and because I love VR so much, I don’t like being forced out of first person. You never see your character in VR, so I made a mod that makes the flat game a bit more like that. That’s where that mod in particular came into the discussion.”
There doesn’t look to have been any explanation of why Burnley’s first person mod’s tagged as “AI-assisted”, the label Nexus Mods uses for works which have “developer-led code, content, or mod assets, with limited AI involvement” and/or have used AI for texture upscaling, audio upscaling/cleaning, and concept art that’s not in the final build.