How important are Mods to you?

[Sunrider]

How is wanting to play something done by a professional instead of wanting to play something done by a random person who has no professional experience unjustifiable? Explain that one to me. I didn't say all of them are terrible, but from what I've played most have no value.

Stop putting words in my mouth. Your statement was "99.9% of them are very amateurish to say the least.", which is blatantly false. There are shitloads of crappy mods, granted, but that wasn't what you said, and there are a huge number of amazing mods as well. Crappy mods don't get any attention whatsoever in proper mod communities.
Not to mention how your statement implies that modders are by default unprofessional, which they aren't. They aren't professional by default either, but I hope I don't need to clarify such obvious things.
I never said your stance wasn't unjustified, since that has nothing to do with the issue.
You'd be correct if you said "There are more crappy mods than good mods", but saying that "99.9% are amateurish TO SAY THE LEAST" (with all the implications included in the capitalized part) is very silly and a huge exaggeration.

I read your reply to the other guy who replied, and it's clear that you aren't exactly new to the subject, which makes your initial sweeping statement all the more surprising.

 

[The Lunatic]

Exceedingly important, they're literal game changers.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

Let's put it like this. I'm currently in my senior year at a university studying video game design as my undergraduate degree (with the ambition of getting my master's degree in video game production). One thing you learn right off the bat when you talk to even the most hard-core gamers is that they are unable to even tell you what they might like about a game. They'll just say something to the effect of, "Well, it's just really fun to play." It's like eating a very good slice of pizza. It might be good, but few people are actually able to offer beyond, "It just tastes good".

I wouldn't call those people unfamiliar with game design, I'd say they're unfamiliar with critique in general.

I love the gaming community as much as the next guy, but there is a CLEAR difference of design sensibilities between people who are educated in and have experience designing games and those who don't. Most modders do not have these sensibilities and in my experience it shows. You think the delineation between professional and unprofessional may mean nothing, yet I think that statement couldn't be further from the truth and reeks far more of "ignorance".

The more I've played games the more believe the delineation means nothing, I've seen design choices (by both developers and modders) that are so bad I wonder if anyone had playtested the game/mod before release.

Thus to me, saying you have be educated in game-design to be professional is silly, indie devs practically wouldn't exist then.

This is a conversation about the value of mods as a whole.

Yeah ok. There's a lot of shit, but there's some gold. You can't say it's all shit or all gold. I'm arguing that there's some gold.

Sure there are amazing mods out there like DayZ, or Gary's Mod, but using exceptional cases to "generalize" that modders add compelling content is not wise. You accuse me of generalizing, yet then point to exceptional cases in a sea of lack-luster mods to justify what you are saying. Seems a bit counter-intuitive.

I didn't generalize them as all good, I criticized your generalization. I said in my post that I'm aware of bad mods, I think that blanketing all mods as "unprofessional" is just stupid.

You and I both know that for every good mod, there are thousands of trash mods.

Yes I admitted such. But that's not the argument.

You have to make far more of a brash generalization than I am to say:

A) The difference between "professional" and "unprofessional" design is "arbitrary"
B) Because of a few exceptional mods, then the modding community as a whole is valuable

What are you saying here?

 

[DrBonBon]

I love mods. Because of them we got a working flashlight in Doom 3, original Doom made on the Doom 3 engine and of course for the original Doom:

Spoiler: Brutal Doom

 

[piinyouri]

Depends on how easy/difficult it is to bother with them, and how profound the changes the mod(s) make are/is.

Edit: Oh my, some people are throwing the old 'amateur, unprofessional ect' labels at modders?
Two words:
Tamriel [http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?gallery=1&p=screenshots] Rebuilt [http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?gallery=2&p=screenshots]

 

[Spoonius]

I am a modder, I enjoy it as a hobby.

Same here.

What game(s) have you worked on?

 

[TheGreekGeekPrick]

This is a conversation about the value of mods as a whole. Sure there are amazing mods out there like DayZ, or Gary's Mod, but using exceptional cases to "generalize" that modders add compelling content is not wise.

Are you sure? About the phrasing, at least-- Counter-Strike started as a mod, as did both Team Fortress games (Quake and the Classic remake). Vanilla Elder Scrolls is absolute balls, games like the "Vampire The Masquerade" series or the Falcon 4.0 simulator have been supported by modders long after their companies dissolved, there are more modded "Counter-Strike: Source" mods played today than vanilla and you'll find more examples all around.

You seem to focus on total conversions when referring to mods and I'll grant you many of them range from mediocre to awful, but the term is far too broad to make the statement that modders, in general, don't add compelling content. The ones that do contribute far too much to ignore.

Personally, I'm kind of surprised we're even discussing this. The DLC map and characters that Activision and the rest distribute for ten bucks a piece *are* mods. Many, many excellent custom models and maps back in the day by modders available for free to extend the life-cycle of a game; the same way companies do it now, only for a price-tag. If anyone, console or PC gamer, has ever found value in this type of DLC, modding should matter to them.

 

[DanielBrown]

Not very. Use them sometimes in MMO's when they bring something I feel is lacking to the game, but I'm mainly a console player so there aren't many modding possibilites there.

 

[hawkeye52]

Well one of the worlds most popular and most successful games that changed the gaming world both competatively and casualy in the space of a year or two was originally a mod of warcraft 3. League of legends

 

[Dr Jones]

]Snip

Black Mesa disagrees with you.

 

[Poetic Nova]

I keep games vanilla, unless the mod fixes a bug or something.

Edit: I'm kinda lying, I modded some beta content in Half Life 2 and made a small mod for GTA2 that allowes the multiplayer only traffic to spawn in singleplayer.

 

[Rawne1980]

For games like Fallout 3/NV and Elder Scrolls, incredibly important to me.

If I couldn't mod them I wouldn't buy them.

 

[babinro]

Despite being a PC gamer for well over a decade, mods are almost completely worthless to me.
They are not a selling point in any way.

That said, there have been a couple of useful mods in the years:
- Warcraft 3 Tower Defense mod got me into TD games.
- UI convenience mods are nice. I use one for Dragon Age 2 that toggles items so you don't have to run around holding down the shift key (or whatever it was).

 

[hoboman29]

If a game has a good modding community I'd probably consider getting it more than if it doesn't have a good modding community because when you've played the game 1000 times mods can mix up the experience so that it feels brand new again.

 

[Bad Jim]

I mostly ignore mods due to having an embarrassingly large backlog of games. Recently however, I;ve been playing the Technic/Tekkit mod pack for Minecraft. The difference between Tekkit and vanilla is as big as the difference between vanilla and classic (fyi classic is the first public version and little more than a tech demo). My only complaint is that Equivalent Exchange is a bit overpowered, especially energy collectors.

using exceptional cases to "generalize" that modders add compelling content is not wise.

Why not? Your game is improved if there are good mods, but no worse if there are tons of shitty mods.

 

[omega 616]

I think the only "mod" I used was 3 or 4 skins for DOW1, they're not really mods though.

I'm not really into the whole modding scene, could never figure out where to put the files or whatever.

 

[Macgyvercas]

I won't give a game a miss if I can't mod it, but I will mod whenever I'm capable of doing so. Skyrim has more mods than game files, and I have about 30 or so active.