Poll: Modding is EXTREMELY important in games. Agreed?

[Soxafloppin]

I think EXTREMELY IMPORTANT is on overstatement but its certainly nice and I can't think of any downsides to it.

Its cool seeing the community beating the "experts" at there own game too!

 

[ThriKreen]

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).

It's actually less that and more to do with the work involved in supporting an end-user toolset vs. hacked together tools which is often the case for regular development. Then having to maintain some semblance of professional quality for said tools (i.e. no expletives in the code comments), and hitting the forums and offering guidance to those making use of it.

As with many moddable games, you get like <10% of the playerbase making use of it, and out of that 10%, like 90% would be crap, 10% decent and 1% outstanding. It's a lot of support work involved to cater for that 0.01% in hopes it would be another Counter-Strike.

Then of course, the whole IP infringement issue - like how someone ripped out the Star Wars: Jedi Knight/Academy content and ported it to NWN on the first release.

While I too, came from a mod background and went pro because of it, and prefer more companies support it, it's understandable why many do not.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

Modding is great if the game is shit, otherwise it's pretty pointless and allows people a way to basically cheat their way past any original challenge created by the developers. Since the only things that keeps me even remotely interested in computer games is the challenge and beating fucktards then modding is most certainly not for me. I've noticed a lot of mods destroy leaderboards so who can tell who is the best?

Nah. Each to their own i guess. I don't mind if you play mods because it's easier to beat you on the unmodded version if you spend your time in mod land *shrugs*

 

[VeneratedWulfen93]

its icing on the cake. A nice touch but not important to the overall plethora of gaming.

I've played 1 mod, Nord Invasion and it was okay. I think mods are cool if you are into them and actively hunt them but people aren't missing out if it isn't their thing.

 

[neppakyo]

http://nexusmods.com/

Best portal for your modding needs, easy to sort through the good from the bad.

 

[Elijin]

Having the ability to be modded, and the opportunity is very important.

Actually being modded, is entirely on the whims of the user.

 

[snekadid]

From what I hear Kotor 2 is actually a coherent and enjoyable experience now, thank god for community patches fixing the devs broken crap. Bitter? No, why do you ask? I guess I'm just tired of consumers being beta testers, and worse, I'm tired of being sold something that is broken and then its never fixed(say what you want, yes bethesda games have a ton of bugs, but atleast they fix most of them eventually.... looking at you obsidian).

You should read up on what exactly went down with KoTOR 2, it's a general shitfest all around. Obsidian was actually forced not to release a huge patch by the publisher, and the only reason it wasn't included in the game proper was because they were forced to release an unfinished game.

Who told them not to patch New Vegas? That game still has more gamebreaking bugs and glitches and runs worse than skyrim which is newer and just got new content that needed which then had to be bug fixed. Everything they release is bug ridden and goes unsupported shortly after release, to the point where I don't care about all these "extenuating" circumstances that they apparently have for every game.

At this point even if the reasons are all from outside sources, it's still their fault for either not learning from mistakes or being ok with putting themselves in the position where bad ideas can be forced on them. It was stated just recently by other devs that you have control about whether you sign the contract or not, if you don't want to be responsible for something horrible happening, then don't sign ones that allow it.

 

[Sandernista]

Who told them not to patch New Vegas? That game still has more gamebreaking bugs and glitches and runs worse than skyrim which is newer and just got new content that needed which then had to be bug fixed. Everything they release is bug ridden and goes unsupported shortly after release, to the point where I don't care about all these "extenuating" circumstances that they apparently have for every game.

At this point even if the reasons are all from outside sources, it's still their fault for either not learning from mistakes or being ok with putting themselves in the position where bad ideas can be forced on them. It was stated just recently by other devs that you have control about whether you sign the contract or not, if you don't want to be responsible for something horrible happening, then don't sign ones that allow it.

I never mentioned New Vegas in my post, I was responding specifically to your comments on KotOR 2.

I don't know what you're talking about in regards to New Vegas either, I've certainly run into less bugs playing that then Skyrim. And, New Vegas is also a superior game, my favorite game of all time in fact.

 

[Pink Gregory]

I think EXTREMELY IMPORTANT is on overstatement but its certainly nice and I can't think of any downsides to it.

Its cool seeing the community beating the "experts" at there own game too!

Well you do have to consider that modders are working in entirely different conditions to the developers.

 

[snekadid]

I was talking about obsidian's habit of releasing broken games and never fixing them, you defended one of their games and then I pointed out one of their worse offenders which you are now defending with subjective and highly fan biased information. It is objectively true that New vegas is highly buggy even now due to the range and quantity of bug requests that don't fall under lacking hardware resources.

Your personal preferences in no way change the very damaged nature of the games Obsidian releases(Alpha protocol being one of the most stable I've played) and their lack of follow through on fixing the problems they created. This is in no way an attack on the games they make, I quite enjoyed Kotor2 on the xbox, bugs and all, until the choppy editing job that was the last 20 minutes, and I enjoyed alpha protocol, the fall out games(with the exception of new vegas which I played to the end but was so frustrated by me/others falling through the world, etc. that I just found I couldn't recommend it to others) and NWN2(which I enjoyed a whole lot more once the fan patches fixed the bugs and replaced the cut content).

 

[StBishop]

I feel it's important for games that are so large that the devs were unable to fix all the problems themselves or make every area of the game perfect (*cough* bethesda *cough*). It's also a lot of fun to mod. I've just installed Skyrim, and I've been spending more time modding it than actually playing.

Here's a couple of screenshots I took yesterday because I'm impressed by how better it looks compared to vanilla skyrim.

Spoiler

I can't tell which is supposed to look better. The top one is all blurry, the bottom one doesn't look great either but it is much sharper.

 

[MiskWisk]

Modding is generally always a good thing. Yes, you have to be careful not to download a virus with it, but for the general consumer, they can massively improve the game. Also, devs who embrace modders probably gain more than those that don't. Minecraft is possibly the biggest example. Imagine if it didn't support modders, instead banning them, I can't imagine the game being anywhere near as popular. There are some games I would get just for the mods, giving money to devs I wouldn't normally (although I don't as I don't have a PC capable of running games well).

 

[ChrisCarTheMarauder]

Not really, a game should be able to stand on it's own without mod support. If I run into an instance of bad game design, "Mods Will Fix That" is a terrible, terrible solution and reflects very poorly on the overall quality of the game.

Too often mediocre games are given far too much credit simply because they have mod support and a dedicated community.