Damien Granz said:
I don't program, so I have to take their word for it if it's "Harder Than It Looks" to do. I figured the main reason there's no modding on consoles is "So people don't unlock 'downloadable' content that's already on the disk" or "Cheat at Battlefield 3 on X-Box".
I only suspect this is an issue they may want to address because every, single, game I've ever seen with spiders has a dozen of these mods and topics requesting them. It's like, the fourth place most requested mod in games other than completion packages (like KotOR 2), cheating programs (like infinite gold or whatever), and nudity/sexual related mods (because it's the internet).
Well, the consoles are closed systems. "Modding" in reference to them is usually simple things like chipping it to use pirated copies or breaking multi-player Battlefield/Call of Duty matches. Modding in reference to what happens on PCs is your second paragraph, basically. Completely new content, overhauling graphics/sounds, re-skinning characters or weapons, adding ambiance to the sky, and nude character models (because it's the internet). I can't really say if the same thing
can be done for consoles, as I'm sure it technically can be, but because most games are still programmed using computers themselves and modders rely on the goodwill of the developers/publishers to provide modding support a lot of the time (Modders can do wonders with actual toolsets. They've done crazy things to Skyim already without the tools, but it's nothing compared to what they've done with Morrowind), it'd be a nightmare for consoles.
Getting community mods to be distributed on the PS3/Xbox 360 would likely require unique toolsets to develop said mods for those specific consoles because they use different APIs than the PC (The Xbox 360 uses DirectX like the PC, but it's utilizing DirectX 9.0c which
hasn't been the primary API for the PC in five years apart from Windows XP eh, scratch that, most games are still built to be playable on Windows XP, and the PS3 provides much more OpenGL support from what I remember) and would require heavy testing to ensure that it would be easy to apply/remove and wouldn't make a huge impact on the performance because there's little you can do on a console to change the graphical settings and improve frame-rate. In addition to that, actually distributing them would require Microsoft and Sony to agree to provide the mods for download because there isn't really any other effective way to quickly and easily get media onto a console (flash drives/external hard drives do work, but it's all about ease of access).
It's a pretty huge pain any way you look at it really. And I'm getting off-topic again.
Ahem. I'm going to go play a heavily modded Morrowind now.