What happened to modding?
polycounter lvl 11
I was looking at the thread about greentooths influence on PC and then clicked on the "Way back when" archive and started wondering and thinking about modding, No one really does it anymore, if they do it's an older game or an older engine, now days everyone is always focused on being the next big thing and making their own game.....what happened to just modding and being like "look heres my weapon inside this game!" or "here's my cool new map! play it!" i mean people make stuff for tf2 sure but the majority of modding died out, i remember playing so many games back in the day and checking out awesome new maps and finding cool character skins....lets find a cool old game, and make a simple mod, i guess ill just have to do what Chris Holden does and make old TDM and DM style maps and such. What does everyone else think? want mods back? or am i just completely out of the loop and there's still a huge mod community out there?
Replies
Tf2 monetizes map and asset creation.
There's a big thread for dota2 workshop in p&p.
fpsbanana and similar places still get tons of traffic for weapon models and skins.
There are several active source, ut3, and crysis mods indev.
There are tons of custom maps for games like unreal tournament still getting kicked around.
Arma2 modding, which was always steady, just became explosively popular...
Why let players make their own weapons and maps to distribute for free when you can charge them for it? Obviously there's still studio's(publishers) that encourage modding; Valve, Bethesda (Skyrim) and a few others and they've got a lot of great systems in place to help facilitate things. Modding used to be great for extending a games life after release, but there's a lot of others that just want you to give em your money, play the game, and then give em more money for the next version.
and even if you have pro skills, developing such high quality mod will take unbelievable amount of time compared to a studio making a short game of same quality.
by making mod for older engine you're increasing your chances of ever finishing it.
and finally, lots of people are simply nostalgic aboout old games and would play anything that gives them more of same experience. that's why those mods are still popular.
Thank you.......for being an asshole
There were also less mod-able games at the time, Doom & then Quake afterwords really had no competition until Unreal came out 2 years later. Each moddable game that came split up the modding community even more.
But by all means ignore Josephs post too.
Number of tools released for modding - individual engines have their tools but there are fewer engines nowadays than before.
An Abundance of usable game engines - I think this is the biggest. Back in the Quake 3 era, you didn't have actual game engines available at entry-level prices. Nowadays you can use Unity, Ogre, UDK, and a shit ton more.
PC Gaming - PC Gaming has diversified significantly - the biggest game genres are MMOs (which can't be modded) and casual games (which don't really appeal to modding - the Peggle community isn't going to download custom patch .exes and horseshit around for 30 minutes to play your unauthorized Peggle maps). There are a ton of divergent Indie games which aren't all in the position to put out tools, and don't necessarily amass the critical mass of fans required to spawn a modding community.
And finally: you aren't fucking looking. There are plenty of PC mods out there for a number of games. What you don't see any more is full-fledged Total Conversion type deals, because you could just make those in UDK/Unity straight up and actually be able to publish.
Hardware is probably one of the biggest. You can't just pop your 360 game disc in your PC and browse around. Back when the PC was the dominant hardware and piracy was restricted to making physical copies, developers just left the game bits sitting around out in the open. Now a lot of gamers are console owners don't even have PC's... Or if they do its just a porn box.
The work and skill it takes to make a mod has shot through the roof. Before you could spend a few hours swapping out a few textures and change the games in significant ways.
Now if you're going to have the same level of impact you have to make a high poly sculpt, bake, do complex materials, figure out how to bind the mesh, even for the guys that like to dig in and jump the technical hurdles its going to take a lot more effort than it did in the past, you will probably have an easier time just making something from scratch.
Also there seems to be a lot of people who need tutorials telling them how to wipe their own ass...
Also, indie game successes on Apple's App store and on Steam seem to motivate more people to want to make their own game instead of modding existing ones.
Modding still happens, but you don't hear about it nearly as much.
Just my 2 cents.
On top of that we've got way more powerful toolsets such as UDK and Unity, there simply is no point to modding when you can make your entirely own game.
Yet even with that I will have to point towards games from bethesda or something like minecraft, minecraft modding scene is MASSIVE.
But the upside is SDK's have gotten better, altho fewer. Plus alot of people who started off from the modding scene don't have as much time know they've got jurbs.
Would be cool to have a Polycount Mod Competition or something, even if it was just abunch of DM_scifi_corridor_98974051 lol
I have to agree with eld we just get more new games lol
A lot of developers are doing what DICE said they we're doing: they said they weren't going to make mod tools for their latest Battlefields because it would take so much effort they would rather put into making new instalments and DLC.
All too true. Sad but funny.
Yep, mod teams haven't gone away, they're just called "indie teams" now. 10 years ago you would be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars to license a game engine and bring a product to market, so it just wasn't feasible for small groups to make commercial projects, hence the large "mod" scene where people did projects for fun.
With UDK, Unity etc with cheap/royalty based licensing the feasibility of actually releasing a game with a small team/budget is much more realistic. Back in the days most mod teams had delusions of going pro eventually, its just that today most people skip the modding part and jump straight into pretending to be professional developers.
Its the same end result though, 95% of indie/mod teams will never actually release a product/mod.
couldn't say it better myself :P
The biggest triple-a game having the most thriving mod community in years? lies!
Hows that ego holding up there EQ?
Additionally,total conversions are now pretty much obsolete because of the same reason.
Serious Sam 3 BFE is a nice example of such a game. It won't even let you export their stock skeletons for rigging and reference. WTF
Also not all Valve games are proper for modding. Left4Dead 2 for example, has a BROKEN addons menu, broken pure server (client crashes happily instead) and its soundcache system prevents proper replacements of sounds. Hell, it's vpkinstaller tool is broken and doesn't actually install vpks, and that's supposed to make installing addons (process of simply copying vpk to the left4dead2/addons/ folder) easy! Let's not forget the broken faceposer in the SDK that can not even extract phenomes anymore and just crashes, and why do people have to use an outdated mdldecompiler along with hex editors to get reference skeletons?
Don't get me started on the Source thieving community. The only true new creative work I see nowadays are maps and TF2 hats. Gmod's audience pretty much desensitized the stigma of model ripping and led it into some sort of embarrassing acceptance as well as author displacement. Someone even wants me dead for not just handing my model over to him, just so he could put it on the gmod toybox under his name as the author just like he's done to models from the MMD community taken without permission.
The trend of releasing game source code (rather than engine) has died down recently too. You'd think today's generation of games would serve for an excellent time to have another incarnation of Superheroes Quake... but nah, can't happen. because not zombies.
-Current tools released by Dev's are a joke in many cases, with requirements for the community to bring the rest, and sometimes, will send you a D&C letter if you do due to certain restrictions.
-Many of the tools/assets used in the final games most likely will require some sort of 'plugin' which can only be bought from 3rd party developers, and any attempt of 'modifying' it can actually be prosecuted, example is DOW2 with it's Meta Maps, which couldn't be modified without reversing the DLL's and EXE's, which were 3rd party software.
-The entry level of assets has increased ten-fold, while talent hasn't increased by that much or they actually have jobs, long gone are the days where you could model something and plug it into the game, with next to no Specular or Normal Maps, or plain diffuse colors.
-Everyone wants their idea to be created, yet very few will want to learn how to 'import' assets into an engine, and even less people will want to be part of a team, having a team will be the easiest to tackle issues in a community.
-Many games need to go with specialized formats and compressions, to speed up certain things, this can lead issues to many modders and their tools.
-Many modders only prefer working on big name titles, since that's the only way they're going to get noticed, counter this to a game which is smaller in fanbase, but easier to mod. Skyrim vs. Just Cause as example, would come to mind.
-IP's have become stricter, many games don't allow you to mix and match lore, while other times, you need to name your Armor something else other then Halo-Spartan, and if the original IP holders are really aggressive, they will try and shut you down.
-The big wave of content ripping, which for some reason, has become idolized in the past couple of years only makes things worse, why would you want to share something with the community, when someone is going to rip your asset without even notifying you and displaying it somewhere else?
-And a few other things, but these are the major issues at hand.
Now is modding dead? No, but if you have talent, you're not going to waste time on a small game, no matter how mod friendly because, well, your talent won't be shown, and you need to wait for the community to come up with the tools at the same time to do what you want.
I would love for example, to create mods for Skyrim, not any mods mind you, armor and weapons with characters and voice acting, but the chances of that happening are next to zero since everyone in the team will try and slip-slide a finger with what they want from A to Z, or maybe I want to do something crazy with Last Cause, but why bother if almost no one will see it?
Also, old tools which are poorly supported doesn't help.
Yes, I know modding has become more out there in our current generation, but you can't deny it's more or less focused on core titles.
Lastly, about the DLC issue, again, example would be a DOW1 and all of it's releases, no body wanted to buy many of the DLC's 'cept for fan's because you could get alot of the missing races and lore fluff from Mods, which kinda defeated the point of DLC, but with GW being IP draconian in what you could do or not with Mods and the game, Relic didn't have much choice in how to create the DLC.
Say what you will, but I honestly believe Modding went through more of a 'change' rather then die.
Also, it's pains me to see so many awesome mods being plucked from games like Skryim and being dumbed in Gmod.
People seem to be as impatient about that as ever.
The modders that do get success and fame are the one who didn't expect or planned for fame, they just made something they enjoyed themselves and then reached sudden massive popularity like day-z.
Or you can be extremely lazy, and put in a meme filled mod, call it a Joke Mod, and have Kotaku run a spotlight on it, with Cakes, Horses and Cores.
DayZ is another breed of it's own I honestly think, the guys just wanted to test out an idea for a mod with a small user-base, as can be seen by the issues with servers, lag and loading and go solo from there, not be an entire revered mod kinda deal, and honestly, I don't even see DayZ as a mod anymore, I see more like another game that uses the Arma Engine, kinda like GamEbryo from a certain POV that is free to play.
However, even then the stories aren't all told. Anyone know of that marvelous Just Cause MP mod, where everyone can pilot planes into one another? Kinda like GTA meets Spiderman kinda deal, yet I haven't seen a single site run an article on it, yet I saw more then 200 articles about the Space Core mod for Skyrim.
True, but you'll never find anything good come out of kotaku, they'll just write about what will give them the most pageviews.
Skyrim is popular because bethesda always made very easy to use tools (although limited) and a aystem that made it possible to plug different mods together, this has been essential to its popularity.
Well technically its a mod, and from a modding perspective you would call it a total conversion, but the core of what makes modding is the fact that many developers are willing to share their tools and the positive impact it has on their sales.
Dungeons of dredmor is doing pretty good because of this, and we're living in a reality where we can have stuff like steam workshop which shows that the demand for making and downloading mods is pretty huge.
Not to mention blizzard enabling the modding of the WOW interface which turned out to be a reall big hit, and their eventual gradual improvement of their tools for their games.
But looking at san andreas MP you'll find that it's still going insanely strong while everyone has largely forgotten about the space core mod, which got written about because of portals popularity and it being a developer-made mod.
Again though, you can never expect fame, just look at the thief and systemshock2 modding community, still going on in some form or another but it was never popular.
check out www.missionimprobable.org as well, we'll be updating with some more media soon. the moddb page is a great place to check out how it came together though.
as for modding i think one of the problems is that indie games can sell, so people either want to get paid for what they do and don't like the idea of giving it away for free as mods, and also that people expect a AAA quality product from a mod because that's what it was like back in the early 2000's. but things were much simpler then, now it takes a team of 50 at least to create a AAA game whereas it used to be 5 - 10.
ao high expectations, a desire to get paid for your work, and generally a lack of experience from overly ambitious modders has impacted the scene quite a lot.
there's still plenty of minimods (new map, new gun,) as people endlessly point out, and there have always been guys trying to go commercial, but the middle ground has almost entirely vanished except for the occasional gem like dayz
Yeah that and a lot of ridiculousness like requiring art tests and NDA's to work on mods, stuff that really just kills any of the fun factor of working on a free project. If I need to sign an NDA and can't even talk about the project there is just no appeal in it what-so-ever. I'll just stick with my day job in that case.
I guess I hit a nerve here for some reason?
I've worked on my fair share of mods with delusions of going commercial/pro, and I've been that delusional modder myself so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it really that outlandish to say that most mods / "indie" devs with high aspirations never really hit their goals? I didn't think this was such an absurd thing to say as much as it was common knowledge.
The "spirit" of modding/doing free projects for fun really gets lost when you try to overtly commercialize it or run it as a "professional" team, really two things that just do not work well together, trying to do a "for fun" project while also imposing more professional work environment constraints.
Not to even mention all of the royalty-based "indie" projects out there. The amount of real independent studios out there that pump out solid games, can afford to pay their staff and have a substainable bussiness model is extremely small compared to the ex-modders who consider themselves "indie" working on the next big thing.
Meanwhile the real developers and hobbyists were lone wolf programmers making art-devoid games.
"Why mod a hard to use engine when you can use any of the modern easy to use frameworks" is the EQUALENT to "Why use someones IP when you can create your own"
I wish I had blazing internets.
Not as important as them opensourcing everything up to doom3. Rage and the giant amount of data required to distribute your environments would in no way be any more useful to hobbyists than id tech 3 or 4.
There was quite a modding community surrounding the battlefield games, but I wouldn't say it's keeping the progress if first person shooter mods behind, there are other versatile engines out there to create similar experiences out of, that wasn't the same back when 1942 came out first.
Times change though and now we've got more choices of engines.
We don't even need those games to use the toolset anymore, the unreal engine we got with unreal tournament and unreal evolved into UDK, and for the better!
People aren't even required to buy the unreal games to run your mod, you can now distribute it freely to them!
Completely irrelevant to the modding scene when compared to blizzards different toolsets and how an insanely large impact they've made on the gaming world today.
Command and conquer mods left nothing behind, warcraft mods essentially left behind an entire new genre of games and now the most played game on steam, not to forget how large league of legends is in the entire world.
Modding never died, modding shaped the entire games industry and have made bigger studios open up more than ever.
You think? Just as I hit a nerve enough for you to reply. I'm just calling you on it. You can post your opinion all you like, just don't expect everyone to swallow it, or be too afraid to step on someones toes.
You place them together when there is a separation. Indie developers have in most cases an actual business. IE LLC or other. They also make games from scratch. Not take an existing title and rework to a new ip. Are there modders who claim they are indie as you suggest? Yes, but they are the minority and you shouldn't be using a broad stroke across their entire community.
Agreed.
Auh. We come to the crux of it. You now are placing LLC companies who rely on royalty as just ex-modders and thus "unprofessional" developer. Again, using a broad stroke. If those ex-modders do have a business plan, company, and are creating something from scratch. Who cant get the financial backing. What gives you the right to demean them as not professional? The only real game companies are the ones that pay up front? Anything else, you consider hobbyists? Thats a totally self serving an egotistical outlook (in my opinion).
"Hey look at me! I get paid up front, so I am a real professional. The rest of you aren't."
If those same companies to release their game and do sell it. Do they only then suddenly become a real company in your eyes? Or that what they release has to become so popular to be common knowledge? Is that the point then?
Again, your entitled to your opinion, but "homey don't play dat". I'm gonna call you on it.
Mods don't have to include environments. They could be purely code as an example. No giant amount of data to distribute there.
Like what?
Most of the modded titles around now are 5 years old, or even older. With what remains it's largely Source that retains a sizeable community (though Crysis is still dragging its feet). UT3s community largely fizzled out around the same time Epic stopped their support of the game and MSUC came to an end.
When Battlefield 1942 came out, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament (Bf1942 was closely followed UT2k3) and Half-Life were already in full swing. That's the modding mainstay right there. Vice City, Neverwinter Nights, The Sims and Warcraft 3 all also had fairly large modding communities - all of which would have been more sizeable than anything we have at the moment save Source, which in itself is a somewhat unique platform.
That's not modding. UDK is a toolkit for indie games; there's no game there to mod. It's not really 'for the better', since the massive level design community around it has largely diminished. Maps, mutators, custom characters, etc are a part of what that franchise is and they don't really exist in any kind of the same way in UDK terms (sure they technically exist, but it's not the same).
That's just nitpicking that I neglecting to mention Blizzard's games. The point is that the communities surrounding those games were massive. The fact that they 'didn't make an impact' isn't relevant; CnC mods were largely never intended to and were built for the sake and joy of being built.
Really?
For every "royalty pay" type indie game project/mod/etc there are countless horror stores of projects that abuse inexperienced artists with the guise of "we'll pay you when we're rich". At least mods are generally straight up with the fact that you're working on a voluntary basis with no chance of pay for your work, well, most mods atleast. Whether you have an LCC or not has nothing to do with anything.
Sure there are respectable indie studios that can successfully release a project and then afford to pay their staff, and there are mods like CS, Portal, etc that strike it big. The simple fact of the matter is that these are the exception, not the rule.
If you think this has anything to do with my own ego, you're way too emotionally invested to give an objective opinion on the matter. Ego is one thing, self respect is another.
Secondly, and this I think is a huge problem in so many fields, is thinking "why bother if almost no one will see it?". Why bother learning guitar if you'll never get a record deal? Why bother learning to paint if your art will never land in a gallery? Bother doing it because it's something you enjoy doing. Minh Le never thought Counter-Strike would become one of the most popular games ever and John Lennon never thought his high-school band would become the biggest ever. Why should you feel you should only do something that will be widely seen?
Regardless, I think that modding is as well and alive as ever, or at least that's what I get the impression of from being in the Mount & Blade community and visiting ModDB frequently. I do, however, think that the release of things like UDK have perhaps left a negative impression in the sense that a lot of people seem to view modding and making a UDK game as the same thing. They really aren't --- one is simple and can often be done by one man, wheras the other very often requires a huge time-investment by several people.
Anyway, that's my two-cents. Now I'll go back to lurking.