What you need to know
- Bing Chat, the AI assistant created by Microsoft and built upon OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can help users find information and add-ons for games.
- Recommending the best community-made mods can help improve older games, and even modern equivalents look and play even better.
- Reddit user Bandit_Outlaw shared their success (opens in new tab) using ChatGPT to find mods for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
By now, most of us are well aware of the potential for AI assistants like Bing Chat (opens in new tab) to generate fantastical stories and dialog with the proper combination of prompts, even if some have been stripped back a little due to unusual answers. Exhibiting their usefulness in practically every field, PC gamers have been wrangling the robotic helpers into recommending the best mods and even getting involved with creating new add-ons.
Plenty of community-led resources have the answers to running practically any game on a modern computer like PCGamingWiki (opens in new tab). Still, some steps require more intermediate knowledge and the bravery to tinker with config files and other confusing command line arguments. Before you venture into how these fan-made mods even work, you have to traverse the web looking for the ones worth downloading in the first place.
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Diving further into Bing Chat’s recommendations, you can pivot to questions about the modding scene in general or specifics about installing your chosen add-on. The accuracy of answers might not match a purpose-made guide like our roundup of the best S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly mods, but it’s a far better starting point for such a niche game than wandering into fan forums and being shot down in flames for asking where to start.
The ethics of OpenAI-powered assistants pulling from step-by-step instructional lists posted around the web is a moral gray area. Still, I advocate making the Internet more accessible to everyone. If I can skip heated discussion from asking a long-standing and opinionated fanbase which are the best Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim mods to install, I’ll defer to Bing Chat whenever I can, at least for the first try.
Not stopping at discovering mods, AI can even help you make your own. As a coding co-pilot, ChatGPT-powered assistants can help you string simple concepts into plugins and even help you write brand-new dialog for quests. Asking Bing Chat to imitate Ulfric Stormcloak, I can create a simple back-and-forth and even iterate on responses to support the open-ended conversations in RPG titles like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (opens in new tab).
Gamers around social media have been discovering the usefulness of ChatGPT and its offspring, with user Bandit_Outlaw sharing their findings on Reddit (opens in new tab). It’s a delight to see more people getting into the world of modding, whether on the traditional PC platform or the evolving world of modding-enabled console versions. Ask Bing Chat (opens in new tab) about the best mods for your favorite game and see what you might find.
