Modders an excuse for Lazy Developers?

[SonOfVoorhees]

This isn't against modders, i think those guys and girls are very talented and who can work magic on games. The first game i modded was Morrowind, after downloading mods that improved the graphics and draw distance, and adding farm animals, birds, fish and other back ground animals and insects - i was just amazed at how it improved a game i already loved. Making it a more vibrant a real world. Makes me wonder why Elder Scrolls developers don't hire modders a few months before shipping to improve there game.

So do you think some developers have grown lazy on the PC knowing that modders will probably pick up the slack? Now this is not so much with older games that modders work there magic on. But on modern titles. For instance recently modders have took to improving Aliens Colonial Marines. One mod adds DirectX 10 support enabling better lighting, shadows, weapon reflections and muzzle flashes. It also makes the game load faster. An i am sure there will be one soon fixing AI and the dino walking and im sure one genius will find a way to add flame throwers and smart-gun usage on every level.

So what do you think? Are developers lazy or complacent? Or just the fact that there is shorter development time on games, even though with increased tech the development time should be longer? Would you like mods to be able to be available for consoles, even if it was cheap priced DLC?

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Feature creep.

Devs can only work on a game for so long, and they have to lockdown exactly what they want to put into the game.

Modders do some great things with already existing games, but devs just don't have the time and resources to add every little thing they want.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

I don't think any developer thinks when making a game, "Oh, don't worry about this problem, it will just be fixed by modders." Nobody wants to make a bad game, and believe it or not, developers tend not to be lazy.

I think what happens in the cases where there are major visual mods that come out right after release is a combination of developers not being familiar with the PC platform (as was the case in Dark Souls), or having an already strained development cycle where you might not even be able to afford to have somebody take a couple days to make these fixes (as was the case in Colonial Marines). In specific regards to Colonial Marines, they had a bunch of bugs that they left in the game that they didn't fix because they were worried that if they did, it would break something else and they wouldn't have time to fix it. They did not have time to be messing around with DirectX 10.

In regards to not hiring modders at the end of a development cycle, what Daystar said. There comes a certain point in a game's development where they don't have the time to add anything else in. There are a few other factors I would like to mention as well: bringing people in towards the end of a development cycle is hellish, as you're probably in crunch time, and you don't have time to make sure new people won't fuck anything up when you're crunching, developers probably don't want to spend the resources to hire somebody for a few months, and many modders already work in the gaming industry.

 

[Bostur]

In general I don't think modding is used as an excuse. The ability to patch stuff after release is used as an excuse though.

But there are some exceptions. At the release of Skyrim it almost became a marketing line that "Mods will fix it". And that game was bugged beyond belief.

It sometimes frustrates me how much free work is done on volunteer basis in general. Documentation, beta testing and bug fixing is often relied upon as free work. In the case of beta testing people have even started paying for the privilege.

On some of those occasions I really wish customers would start demanding what we are entitled to, a finished product without major flaws. Software can never be completely bug free but the technical quality of games is sometimes atrociuous, even amongst AAA titles.

I think it's fine for developers to cooperate with modders by releasing tools and documentation. But user modifications should not be about polish, it should be about extending the original. The final polished product is the responsibility of the developer.