Gottesstrafe said:
Agree totally, and let's not forget the modding community of KotOR 2 that have essentially restored or added half of the content that was slashed from the final game and made it a new beast entirely.
The thing with that is they did it without a toolset. It was done with custom tools, hacks and so on.
BioWare gave us toolsets for the Infinity Engine, for the Aurora Engine and for Eclipse. NWN and it's successor both have small active communities, persistent worlds and mods thanks to their toolsets. Bethesda's older games are still played today thanks to continual fan mods, bug fixes, overhauls and expansions that keep them interesting. I've made mods myself for many games, usually for myself, but some I've released.
I like the modding communities which I've been a part of. Unlike most other forums, modding communities are almost always helpful all the time, sharing and helping and rarely are there trolls or flame fests or half the nonsense we get on this site.
But I think apart from a handful of devs, modding and toolsets are dying. With the rise of the console (how they superseded the vastly superior PC platform is beyond me) there is no need for toolsets as the majority of players have no access to their file systems. Further, modding goes against absolutely EVERYTHING corporations like Activision and EA stand for (and IMO is the reason why we'll never see another BioWare game with a toolset again). Dedicated servers, gone. Toolsets, gone. Direct connect to IP address/LAN play, gone. We're even slowly losing the ability to play offline FFS, and most players are accepting it, or worse, paying for the privilege.
Players making their own content can't work in today's Activision/EA model. Now, they wish to create disposable games with a shelf life of no more than 1 year, at which point they re-release the same game again with an incremented number. They will sell bullshit DLCs for extra money. Player content cannot exist in the tightly controlled and regulated Diablo III environment and mustn't compete with their DLCs. In an age where "everything has to have multiplayer" it's further complicated.
I think we'll continue to get toolsets but from only very few developers and the kickstarter/indie scene. The current AAA model is going to fail at some point, hopefully morons will stop buying CoD titles annually (and drooling) and the industry will move on. Or perhaps the singularity is fast approaching, as even the PS4 is built on X86 and eventually the "exclusive" console thing will end. It's still amazing the PC, PS3 and 360 owners of the same game can't play with each other because the corporations said so.