Anyone else miss mods?

[el derpenburgo]

As I browse what was previously one of my favourite sites, TWC, I can't help but notice the sorry state of modding right now. Previously, the total war series was an absolute bastion of talented and creative gamers everywhere, and it wasn't uncommon to not only see redefined gameplay mechanics but also new art assets ranging from soldiers to buildings. Nowadays, mods for Shogun 2 are simply recolours of existing units, simple 2D UI enhancements, or gameplay tweaks. In fact, many opt to still mod for the much older Rome and Medieval 2 games.

Its sad because people who have done amazing things with games in the past are now stifled by a lack of support from developers. The same thing happened to Battlefield, which used to have a really productive modding scene from 1942 and now is virtually non-existent, not including the very clever groups of people that still mod for the older games. In Skyrim, how long until we are able to make new quests and dungeons ourselves? I much admired mods because of their willingness to create games that would never be accepted by big publishers, and their catering to niche groups (yes, even the weirdos that ate up any nude mod that came out for Oblivion, you have to appreciate the dedication).

I know that modding is still alive but it is slowly dying in new games. All the ambitious ones exist in the games of the mid 2000s. Indie games have come in force to supplant the influx of niche things that mods provided but most insist that experimental mechanics are the only way to make games and do nothing to improve existing games that could have been great.

Has the complexity of game design finally caught up to the abilities of modders or are developers simply not bothering about this audience anymore?

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well complexity is some part of it but the bigger issue is engine accessibility, most of them are locked down/obscured for purposes of DLC (people won't buy simple color/model/map packs if someone does it for free).

In ye olden days modding features were part of the sales pitch, now with most games being just console ports that is never needed, hell it turns out far better for DLC sales if people can only get new shit from the dev nipple.
Aldo with any matchmaking multiplayer games mods are right out of the window, and should anyone figure out how to do custom servers they usually get banned.

 

[el derpenburgo]

Thanks for all your responses, however bleak they may be. I was hoping someone would point to a bright future ahead but I guess there is something comforting about the fact that old games will still be kept alive many years in the future by modders unable to move to bigger, newer engines. It means I don't need to upgrade my computer nearly as often

 

[evilneko]

There are over 200 quest and new (as in not a tweak of a vanilla one) dungeon mods for Skyrim. Oblivion has a combined total of something over 800. I'd say Skyrim's well on its way to catching up.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Thanks for all your responses, however bleak they may be. I was hoping someone would point to a bright future ahead but I guess there is something comforting about the fact that old games will still be kept alive many years in the future by modders unable to move to bigger, newer engines. It means I don't need to upgrade my computer nearly as often

The bright future is, as always, Valve. Every single Valve game is extremely accessible to modders, and the source engine is one of the easiest engines to use. Not only that but Valve is really dedicated to its vast modding community, and does quite a lot to not only make the modding process as simple as they can, but to actually support modders. Think about all of the new items in TF2 that were created by the community, or the Steam Workshop, which allows people to install mods to their games with just a single click. It's absolutely amazing. Of course it seems that Valve is always ahead of their time regarding their community relations, so sadly this doesn't look like something that many developers will ever implement, but at least Valve seems to be the silver lining in this dark cloud of modding doom.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

Thanks for all your responses, however bleak they may be. I was hoping someone would point to a bright future ahead but I guess there is something comforting about the fact that old games will still be kept alive many years in the future by modders unable to move to bigger, newer engines. It means I don't need to upgrade my computer nearly as often

Where the modding of AAA games has become more restrictive over the years, the number of independent/small scale developers has dramatically increased.

Unfortunately it's something we have to deal with, but it isn't completely bleak. There are still large Modding communities out there, it's just the barrier for entry is higher. This means fewer casual modders will be able to do much beyond texture packs and minor tweaks, but advanced modders are still able to pull out some impressive feats, including complete overhauls.

from the modders ive talked to the skyrim construction kit is a buggy mess which makes quest mods extremely difficult. honestly i wouldnt be suprised if it was one of the last elder scroll games with a modding base

as for the later total war games. when they went to individual mix and match parts for units the difficulty increase exponentially.

As far as I know, every construction kit from Bethesda, from Morrowind to New Vegas (I know it's obsidian, but the construction kit, or GECK, is still bethesdas, just with newer assets), has been released in a buggy state. Despite that the Modding community has been consistently great and one of the biggest selling points of the 2 series on PC.

Also, highly doubt this is the last iteration to incorporate modding, since they went out of their way to create a unique modding platform through steam for convenience of both Modders and Avid Mod fans alike. Though it's been met with lukewarm reactions, the service works and it makes applying simple mods a very simple affair for the uninitiated.

From what I've seen, Bethesda see's the value in their kits and their communities love of mods and promote that as part of the TES package on PC.

 

[Dirzzit]

Bethesda has always been good with this kind of stuff. Skyrim Nexus, Fallout Nexus, they have thousands of innovative and amazing mods with a good community to boot.

 

[Irridium]

A big part of it is that the tech has been getting more and more complex.

Shamus Young has a great article [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/6069-Death-to-Good-Graphics] on this. One thing stands out:

In the original Wolfenstein 3D, the "level editor" was a simple little program that let you draw squares on a grid to create gamespace. You could make a playable room in well under a minute. It was laughably simple and primitive by today's standards, but the game was at least forty hours long because the content was so easy to produce. (It would have almost been possible for someone to make levels as fast as you could play them.) A few years later in the Doom and Duke Nukem 3D era, level design had become slightly more elaborate. It took time to get the textures to line up and make the lighting interesting; that same room of gamespace might take five or ten minutes to produce. With Quake, the bar was raised even higher. Level design was basically 3D modeling, and it might take a whole hour to make the same amount of content.

You can see where this is going. The one hour room gave way to two hours, and eventually led to teams of people working for days to make just a few moments of playable content. Now you have someone designing the level, someone else making unique meshes to decorate the space, a specialized texture artist, and a lot of work being done to set up complex lighting systems, moving machinery, special environmental effects, and all of the other steps needed to take advantage of current-gen graphics engines. That's more than a thousand fold increase in the amount of work required to give players a few seconds of entertainment. This inflation of manhours is obviously unsustainable, and even the amount of work we're putting into games now is probably too much. Taking another step forward is folly.

He was referring towards general development at the end I thing, but it holds true for modding as well.

I doubt it's just the developers going "nya, we'll not release modding tools, so we can sell DLC and they can't do anything about it! NYA!" while twirling their mustaches. Though I'm sure some developers or publishers do that, but I doubt it's the majority. Creating games these days is stupidly complex and expensive. Developers/publishers need to recoup costs, and putting resources into something that won't have any direct monetary return is, well, not exactly a primary focus.

 

[ResonanceSD]

Thanks for all your responses, however bleak they may be. I was hoping someone would point to a bright future ahead but I guess there is something comforting about the fact that old games will still be kept alive many years in the future by modders unable to move to bigger, newer engines. It means I don't need to upgrade my computer nearly as often

The bright future is, as always, Valve. Every single Valve game is extremely accessible to modders, and the source engine is one of the easiest engines to use. Not only that but Valve is really dedicated to its vast modding community, and does quite a lot to not only make the modding process as simple as they can, but to actually support modders. Think about all of the new items in TF2 that were created by the community, or the Steam Workshop, which allows people to install mods to their games with just a single click. It's absolutely amazing. Of course it seems that Valve is always ahead of their time regarding their community relations, so sadly this doesn't look like something that many developers will ever implement, but at least Valve seems to be the silver lining in this dark cloud of modding doom.

Agree with that, Valve is great for this.


Also. you're aware your first badge trumps the next 2, right?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Thanks for all your responses, however bleak they may be. I was hoping someone would point to a bright future ahead but I guess there is something comforting about the fact that old games will still be kept alive many years in the future by modders unable to move to bigger, newer engines. It means I don't need to upgrade my computer nearly as often

The bright future is, as always, Valve. Every single Valve game is extremely accessible to modders, and the source engine is one of the easiest engines to use. Not only that but Valve is really dedicated to its vast modding community, and does quite a lot to not only make the modding process as simple as they can, but to actually support modders. Think about all of the new items in TF2 that were created by the community, or the Steam Workshop, which allows people to install mods to their games with just a single click. It's absolutely amazing. Of course it seems that Valve is always ahead of their time regarding their community relations, so sadly this doesn't look like something that many developers will ever implement, but at least Valve seems to be the silver lining in this dark cloud of modding doom.

Agree with that, Valve is great for this.


Also. you're aware your first badge trumps the next 2, right?

Yes, I'm aware, I just like fire.

captcha: stranger danger

The captcha wants me to be careful around you.

 

[The Madman]

Mod community are still alive and well all over the place, although you're right in stating it's less common in more recent games. Not so much an issue with complexity half the time as just developers not releasing editors or allowing modding of any sort.

The Battlefield series for example used to be extremely big with modders, however the lastest games have not had any support for mods of any sort and indeed discourage it. A cynical person would say it's because publishers figured out that they can release paid DLC and don't want to have to compete with their own fans in that regard, but that's just being cynical.

Regardless there are tons of people out there happily modding away. The biggest and most well known website for this would be MODDB, where you can find all sorts of amazing stuff new and old. Then there are smaller community that revolve around a single game like NWVAULT for the Neverwinter Nights series or Hard Light for the Freespace games. There are dozens if not hundreds of such smaller community around and as active as ever.

So is modding dying or anything like that? Not at all. It's just you've got to look a bit harder for the simple sake many such community continue to revolve around games a couple years old in favour of newer games that discourage this sort of creativity.

 

[daveman247]

Now im not a regular at modding games, or playing PC games for that matter. The recent mods i have tried for a few games have been great (fallout 2, system shock 2.) Especially for system shock 2 ^_^ Easy to apply/ get rid of for simple users like me

 

[Cry Wolf]

Well complexity is some part of it but the bigger issue is engine accessibility, most of them are locked down/obscured for purposes of DLC (people won't buy simple color/model/map packs if someone does it for free).

In ye olden days modding features were part of the sales pitch, now with most games being just console ports that is never needed, hell it turns out far better for DLC sales if people can only get new shit from the dev nipple.

Aldo with any matchmaking multiplayer games mods are right out of the window, and should anyone figure out how to do custom servers they usually get banned.

This, to be honest. Though as a man with limited disposable income, modding is one of the greatest distingushiing features a game can have. I'm sure I'm not the only one either.

In Skyrim, how long until we are able to make new quests and dungeons ourselves?

You already can. Take a look at Moonpath to Elswyr. It's awesome. Though, nowdays modders also have to overcome the voiceacting problem, which means we will get lest quests and the like than we use to.