There was a period of time when a good number of games were releasing some really impressive modding tools. I remember that Unreal Tournament released tools very similar to what the actual developers used to make levels. A friend of mine created a 4-team CTF mod that became super popular for a while.
Nowadays I can’t think of too many games that give that kind of freedom. The Starcraft II tools are pretty robust, but so were the tools for the original Starcraft back in 1998. There are also a lot of mods for Team Fortress, but Team Fortress started out as a mod way back in the day so that’s to be expected.
No I wasn’t dissing it’s textures… wait, I think I’m being wooshed.
In case I’m not, I was calling the game Modern Texture swap, because that’s essentially what they do with every iteration - same game, swap out the textures.
I have a hard time believing you were actually a gamer through the years in question if you take this stance. It’s not a subtle difference. There was a bigger modding community by orders of magntiude in the late 90s early 2000s than there are now.
There were far more total conversion mods available then than there are now. Not all of them were wildly successful, of course, but the fact that there were many meant that more would be worthwhile after floating to the top.
I don’t know how to prove it, other than a lot of busywork trying to add up the mods by searching by year on a mod site or something, but I don’t even know if any mod sites have consistently operated for 10-15 years. I tried to google “number of mods by year” and stuff like that, but I couldn’t find somewhere that anyone else did an analysis.
It’s true that not all games used to be moddable, but it was certainly more common. Depending on how you define “modding”, allowing users to create custom maps was nearly universal.
I don’t see why the 3-5 year things matters. We can see what mods are coming out now based on games that were a few years old, and we can see that the number is consistently drying up. I’m not saying today’s, 2013’s games, are suddenly less modable - I’m saying that the availability the amount of modding games allow you to do and the number of mods and players have mods has been steadily declining for a decade.
Entire classes of games that used to be big in the modding community are dissapearing or becoming unmoddable. Q3 and UT style games simply don’t exist anymore because you can’t play them on a gamepad. The last call of duty that allowed mapmaking or modding was COD4, which had tens of thousands of user made maps and various mods (minimal competition based mods that tweaked game balance to full conversions that turned COD4 into lasers and robots star wars battles). Since then, modding and mapmaking has been deliberately removed from the game because they think they can sell more ridiculously overpriced official map packs if they don’t allow users to create (often superior) free maps. Battlefield 3 disallows any sort of modding, but at least their reason (that their maps are too complex for amateur modding teams) is at least somewhat plausible. All the call of duty games are still based on the quake 3 engine - people could whip up maps for those almost instantly.
In general, there are just fewer people playing these sorts of games on PC than in the past where PC was basically the sole platform for them, so with fewer people they’re concentrated into fewer games, there are fewer people to try out new mods.
Consolization isn’t the only factor - digital distribution has allowed indie developers to make a run at making a paid product rather than a mod, so some content that would’ve probably been a free mod 10 years ago now comes out as a $10-20 indie game.
There are still plenty of great mods available, but it’s nowhere near the golden age. Not even in the same ballpark.
Well, this actually makes she sense, and it actually sounds like I would like it. I can certainly understand how one would enjoy putting together anyone they want from Legos, especially an unlimited supply of them. God knows the hours… The days I spent building forts out of Legos that could withstand the bombardments from my friends and brothers cannonballs (marbles).
With that said, what was I watching then? I see the great big castle someone built, but then I see a bunch of different characters running toward it, and the game player recording it shooting everyone with an arrow. Some people were building a ladder one section at a time to crawl over the outer wall… But that’s as far as anyone got.
So, my question is, is building things out of limitless Lego sets the only thing you do, or is there interactive stuff? For instance, what was the YouTube video teying to demonstrate?
There are two modes to Minecraft: survival and creative.
In survival mode you’re not given anything and there are monsters that spawn in the dark. You use materials gotten by breaking blocks and digging to make better equipment so you can get more materials and build grand things. You can build some impressive stuff in this mode and it’s generally pretty rewarding because it takes some effort to make really grand things.
The other mode is creative, in which there’s no weapons or monsters, but you get infinite blocks (“legos”) and can build to your heart’s content.
However, on multiplayer servers I think admins can give people any blocks they want, and enable things like flying. So you can build huge castles and then use the weapons and stuff to play in them.
Most of the really impressive stuff, though, were built with modelling programs and scripts. For instance, there’s a full scale USS Enterprise someone made, but he didn’t actually build it – rather he used a modelling program to make it and then wrote a script to convert it into a minecraft savefile.
Interactive, if you wish it to be. Any copy of Minecraft can act as a server, so if you set up a world that you really like, you can have some friends come on and see it, or fight each other on, etc.
There are a couple of different “play” modes. Creative, which is the full-on “lego” mode. Survival, which is the default mode where you start with nothing but your are hands and if you want to make a castle out of stone, you have to create tools and dig up all the stone yourself, while avoiding nighttime or underground monster attacks. Adventure, which is mainly a mode for running maps other people have made that has various restrictions–for example if someone creates a map where the player is supposed to be investigating a haunted house, you don’t want them to be able to break down the walls.
So the map in the video, along with many others people have made, is available for people to download and play–if you and a bunch of friends want to play on it, just load it onto your server. Many popular map types, particularly PvP ones, have servers that are publicly accessible, they just reset the map after each match or whatever.
There are also lots of public creative or survival servers out there, where people all join in and build a town or community or whatever. Such servers usually have some sort of application or trial process, as just letting anyone on with the power to place or remove stuff just leads to griefing issues.
Allow me to draw your attention to Terraria. It’s like Minecraft, only instead of being a 3d world, it’s 2d side-scrolling platformer. There are monsters, and there’s no creative mode without monsters, but the shrubbery doesn’t explode destroying hours of building progress so it has that going for it. It’s about $10 on Steam. They just released a console version too, but I like the m/k better so I can alt-tab to the wiki.
You REALLY need to stop with the whole “I have a hard time believing that you…<insert thing that people have absolutely no reason to lie about here>” thing.
Yes. I have been a “gamer” since like 1982. I have not stopped. I have never really cared about the size of the “modding community” however - if I see a cool mod come up for a game I play, I nab it, but I’m a picky bastard and most mods are absolutely not even worth my time to keep track of, then or now. Believe it or not, just because people were in the same enormous hobby as you during the same time period doesn’t mean that they paid the same amount of attention to the same titles, or even if they have, that they come away feeling the same way about them.
It’s really quite frustrating to be dimissed like this over stupid stuff.
I don’t think you’re lying, I just think you’re wrong. This isn’t something that’s close - the number of mods coming out and the people involved in the modding community and the people using/playing the mods has changed by at least an order of magnitude. It isn’t even close. If it were close, I might buy what you’re saying, but since it isn’t I just have to assume you weren’t involved in the relevant stuff at that time period.
Agreed absolutely that you think the modding community is just as vibrant as it was 10 years ago, or that you dislike me and just want to +1 him?
I really hate having to do busywork to prove the obvious, but what do I have to do here? Go back to some mod site that catalogs mods and compare the number available then and now? Is it enough to prove that most of the popular games now aren’t moddable but almost all back then were? Do I have to prove the average player bases playing total conversion mods then and now? What’s the criteria here?
Neither; You just need to grasp that just because I’m not paying a “enough” attention to the amount of mods that come out now vs 1999, that I wasn’t a “gamer” at some point. It’s absurd and insulting.
Frankly, I will take your WORD for it if you really think there’s that big a difference. I still won’t SEE the difference, but I’m prepared to believe you if you’d stop being a jerk. -_-
To make an analogy, it’s as if I said “there’s more passing in today’s NFL than there was 30 years ago” and you said you didn’t see a difference. My first reaction would be “are you sure you were watching the NFL back then to compare?” - it’s incredulity rather than an attempt to be insulting. It’s one of those things that seems so obvious to me that it seems hard to believe that reasonable people could disagree.
If it makes you feel better, I should’ve said “are you sure you were involved/aware of the modding community back then?” rather than saying “gamer”
I wonder if some of that–and if so, how much–is people who would have put tons of effort into modding games instead making their own games from scratch and putting them out on the internet. It seems like there are a lot more indie game developers now than there were 10 years ago, especially if you account for free online ‘flash’ games.
I do think that’s a factor, and I mentioned that upthread. For example, 2 games I’m playing now: Natural Selection 2 is a $25 indie game, but Natural Selection the original was one of the great half life mods. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is in the same boat - it’s the sequel to a free Age of Chivalry mod.
So digital distribution has allowed more people to turn what would’ve been mod work into commercial products. But on the other hand, these were proven mod teams with proven products putting sequels into commercial production. An unknown first timer really has to build credibility first in the mod scene before taking a chance like that, and the amount of first timers have dried up.
And as I said, it’s a lot more common for games to come without any sort of modding or mapmaking tools. It’s either because they’re lazy (they’re going after the console market and don’t really care about the pc version of their game, so they don’t care if there’s free extra content) or deliberate (could call of duty try to charge you $5 a map if there were hundreds of free good-quality maps out there?).
There are also just fewer people playing games on PC, so fewer people to become interested in modding, and fewer people to play them.
I’m not sure how much each factor plays a role, but it’s pretty clear to me that user created content has been on a huge decline, so I objected to the previous poster’s characterization that game designers are coming to realize that user created content is good. On the contrary, they’ve been trying to stamp it out if anything.
Dude, calm down. I like you fine. I just think you get insulting when people disagree with you, and it’s unnecessary.
As for what you have to do–sure, some cite would be nice. Decide exactly what you’re claiming, and then provide evidence for the claim. I’ve been playing computer games since I had to program them myself into my Vic-20 and record the programs on cassette tapes, FWIW.
I think you guys are reading me to be much more insulting than I’m actually intending. It may be spillover from the other thread, in which I actually was insulting and apologized, but I don’t feel as if I’ve been insulting in this thread at all.