Remember when, a few weeks ago, the lead singer of American band Breaking Benjamin was filmed promoting a first-person Fallout 4 that he delivered during a mid-concert speech about the community drama of modding? Well, according to Benjamin Burnley, it wasn’t a planned tirade, but rather an example of improvisation to fill the dead air caused by a dying snare drum. As for why he exists, the answer is largely just that the guy loves VR wandering around Tamriel and the Commonwealth.
“What happened was my drummer broke a snare head,” Burnley, who makes mods under the name Killemloud, said in an interview with Nexus Mods. “We’ve been waiting, and in all my free time I’ve been working on my own mods just for my personal game. I happened to be working on this one, and I immediately encountered 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. Everyone’s system is different, everyone has different expectations, and mod authors improve their mods over time based on user feedback and people’s setups. It was just fresh in my mind, and I stand there while the techs replace the drum head. The time spent on stage when there is dead silence, every second feels like an hour! So I really started joking about it to kill time. It wasn’t planned. It’s a serious thing, and it wasn’t serious. Bullying is a serious problem, for sure, but I approach it with humor, like I do almost everything else.”
As you can imagine, this means that the singer was not very happy that the incident was interpreted by some people, myself included, as him delaying the concert to go on a little rant. After reviewing the clip which was posted online by a viewer who since added a note on this drum repair context, you may see someone sitting in front of the drums who might be testing them after the drum service. I’m not entirely sure this explains why one of the fans in the crowd, who would surely be aware of what was going on, shouts “Play some music!” halfway through the Burnley conversation. Burnley also alluded to shouting mod “every fucking night” in his onstage speech, which doesn’t quite seem to fit with it 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 it clear that he really enjoyed playing Fallout 4 and Skyrim in VR. “Anyone who’s played Skyrim or Fallout VR, not that they’re bad in any way, but they’re most certainly vastly improved with mods,” he said. “For me, mods for these games are even more important than flat mods because we’re talking about core functionality, being able to recover 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 program 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 to explain that before his True first person modhe mainly worked on VR ports for existing mods, like Better vampires And Practical horses. “True First Person was born because when I’m on tour, it’s hard to set up my VR setup every day when I’m on the bus,” the singer added. “I 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 created a mod that makes flat play a little more like that. That’s where this particular mod came into the discussion.”
There doesn’t appear to have been an explanation as to why Burnley’s first-person mod is labeled as “AI-assisted,” the label Nexus Mods uses for works that have “developer-led code, content, or mod assets, with limited AI involvement” and/or that have used AI for texture scaling, audio scaling/cleaning, and concept art that isn’t in the final version.
