Some form of perma-death could still be implemented in game. You might loose some things, but not everything. For example, in Star Citizen, there are talks about a death mechanic https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman So when you create a character, you set a succesor or a relative that could retreive your belongings in case of your death. After you die several times beyond resurection, you spawn in world as another character, and the important actions accomplished by your old character will be remembered by NPCs. You could even participate to your old character's funeral. In Identity, you could get your things back by somehow proving that you are indeed the successor of the deceased character. This could add a new layer of roleplay, without making players rage quit. You get to attach to the character your develop/roleplay, but it's death would mean roleplaying a new one.

I agree with you that most players would rather prefer playing on a modded server than on a vanilla one. Still, there is a catch: modders do this for free, while the devs are paid to create content. A game being able to be modded raises the revenue of the devs, because of free marketing. Take a look at Minecraft how big it became because of modding and player empowering in the creation process. Once the devs have more money, they could evolve the vanilla game so it is a step ahead of the modding community. As you said, the devs could release DLCs, but mods could get support for the DLCs only after some time has passed. Some players decide to stay on vanilla, so there is a crowd for that too. And there is another thing: economy. On a modded server, there could be some restrictions on that.

Why not ? Modding brings new life into games. For example a modder of Ark, a game made on the same engine as this one, made a map so awesome that the devs included it in the official game and even hired him at their studio. The map was way better than the ones in the original game. Imagine what modding could bring to this game...a new kind of Open Sim with Unreal graphics, and a lot more activities to do. Blueprints also make scripting a lot easier for everyone . The community potential is huge for this game .

There are a few variants: 1. A global marketplace that exists on all servers. What you build on your private server could be sold on that marketplace, and gain money that could be spent on official servers. What you buy on the marketplace could be used on any of the servers, official or not. 2. You could do what you want on a private server, but without any interaction with official servers. Tools for your server would probably be much more than some commands. See here :

Hi. Many people asked here how modding will work in this game, and it is really obvious. This game is made in Unreal Engine 4. It is a shared source game engine that anyone can download for free. The devs will provide a modified version of Unreal Engine 4 editor, that forbids access to game's C++ code, but allows you access to Blueprints, a visual scripting system. You will be able to download the custom editor from Epic Games page. In editor, you could do almost anything you want on your server. Altough you couldn't access the C++ code dirrectly, the devs will insert hooks in Blueprints, so you could still change or develop stuff. All the games using Unreal Engine 4 have taken this route when speaking of modding. I don't see this game different. I've attached to this post an image of Blueprint graph, to see how the scripting looks for turning a light on and off when entering a certain volume. You'll script existing and new things in similar way on your private server. If the devs succeed to modify the editor so multiple players could use multiple editors in the same time, on the same scene, that would be awesome.