
Games Today Shut the Door to Tomorrow’s Devs - trq_
https://medium.com/@trq__/games-today-shut-the-door-to-tomorrows-devs-53ddf88c86bf
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WorldMaker
This is one of the perennial complaints about games. Every generation of games
development has its version of "back in my day mods were easier to make"
complaint.

Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public
versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft
that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting
all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.

Where most AAA game engines used to make modding easy but licensing to sell
mods hard, there are now entire engines (Unity, Unreal) with fairly simple,
linear (as opposed to exponential or worse) license systems that allow
hobbyists to build with the same tools of AAA developers _and_ license their
work for resale, growing organically with their audience size rather than
being constrained to artificial limits of steep license curves.

It's one of those cases where it's both better than its ever been and worse
than it ever was, and you can write clickbait articles for both sides of that,
but overall, unclouded by nostalgia glasses the answer is probably just that
it's the same as it ever was.

~~~
mbell
> Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public
> versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft
> that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and
> getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.

Minecraft doesn't have any significant modding support from the developer.
Official 'mods' are mostly limited to textures / shaders. The real modding
tools that exist for Minecraft were created by the community and largely exist
because Java is comparatively easy to reverse engineer in addition to some
'off the record' style support of the mod lib authors by the game developers.
The whole mod scene has gone through various phases of questionable legality
and unknown future. The Minecraft mod scene exists largely in spite of the
game developer, not due to it.

~~~
mental1896
I don't think Mojang ever tried to actively stop the mod community like, say,
Rockstar did. I would say Minecraft does have modding support in the sense
that the installation files are an open book, inviting unlimited modding
opportunities for anyone who wants to tinker.

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fenwick67
They never tried to stop it but they never fostered it either. It was just
coincidentally easy to reverse engineer the code and install mods. But the
interfaces were VERY brittle, and mods had very specific version requirements.

Official mod support (with an installer and an API) was on the dev roadmap but
never materialized.

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Animats
The available tools for game development are better than ever and widely
available. The problem is that users expect AAA title quality, and that's a
big job.

If you want to develop inside an existing environment, there are the virtual
worlds - Minecraft, SineSpace, High Fidelity, Sansar, and Second Life. Even
3DXchat, which is supposed to be porno but has enough building tools that
people are using it for other things. SineSpace is very developer friendly
right now. Few users, but nice tools.

~~~
trq_
That's what was so great about editors like Warcraft 3, you get the AAA feel
for free.

~~~
dx87
That also conflicts with people's expectations of games to be constantly
updated and patched. Valve added a built-in custom game creator for Dota 2,
but game designers still run into issues since any breaking changes in Dota 2
can potentially break their games, and Valve doesn't want to maintain two
separate copies of the game to appease custom game creators.

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petermcneeley
You dont want your users creating content IF that is your primary source of
profit as a game studio. If your users can effectively create new items, new
maps, DLC, new missions, new characters etc what do you sell to them after
your initial release? The easier it is to create this new content (aka non
expert) the more likely that the price of this content (even if there was a
market) would basically be free. (discounting network and intellectual
property effects)

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jbob2000
You sell them quality. Mods are shit quality, across the board. They’re full
of broken English, half baked assets, and tons of bugs. Sure, fun can be had,
but when it comes to my wallet, I want quality attached to fun.

~~~
cf498
You have to be sarcastic. Thats just a nonsensical generalization. Far from
all mods are broken shit just as far from all DLCs are polished. You have
stuff like Enderal when it comes to mods and I hopefully dont have explain to
you, how unpolished and simply broken many games are, let alone dlcs. There is
a giant list of games which are only playable after years and years of
community patches, made surprise surprise mainly by the modding community. But
thats if modding is possible. If not you are left with the shitnugget you
preordered.

~~~
jbob2000
Yes, there are good quality mods out there. But they sit on top of mountains
of shit. You can’t point to the top of shit mountain and say “see, look at how
good it is”

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cf498
I can and i will if you say "across the board"

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adamrezich
There was massive internet backlash toward it but I still truly think Valve's
"paid mods" idea is the way forward for this. Back in the day, when
Unity/Unreal/Godot weren't freely available for anyone to use, people would
put a lot of their own personal time into making mods, without any expectation
of pay. Now, even if the mod tools were there for modern games, why would
anyone make a "total conversion" mod instead of just making the game
themselves using free modern tools?

Creating incentives for game developers to add mod tools to their games by
creating the incentive for potential mod-makers to make _some_ money off their
work seems like a solid strategy for me. (I think I heard a rumor somewhere
that Valve is going to bring back the "paid mods" idea again soon, possibly in
a retooled form.)

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tomc1985
I disagree. As soon as free, small communities get monetized they soon become
overrun by sharks and profiteering. They become hotspots for fraud, and
troublemakers cause a nuisance to existing community-members. Sure there is
some of that already, but not to the kind of scale that monetization
inevitably brings.

Your other major problem is that much of the audience for mods are kids or
teens who don't have a lot of money. Keeping modding free is what keeps
content generation gated to those who intend to truly intend to better the
community.

As an example, I now continually get fraud warnings on my Epic account, which
I keep for UDK access, because Fortnite blew up. It's really annoying :(

~~~
lodi
Ahh, so that's what that is... I was wondering why I was getting so many 2fa
alerts.

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pontifier
I remember making a dota precursor game on Warcraft 3 after playing some tower
defense games... I created waves of enemies spawning in opposite directions,
but you had 2 teams trying to build towers. The problem I had was that once
spawned, building lots of towers messed up the patching. I abandoned the game
after only a couple if tests, but I think it has been original at the time.

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narrowtux
On the top of my head, I can list Minecraft, Elder scrolls, Fallout, Factorio,
Cities Skylines as modern games that have a vibrant modding community.
Minecraft really helped me get a better programmer.

I strongly disagree with the point this article is trying to make, it feels
like some kinds of proxy-gatekeeping (our games were so much better)

~~~
trq_
Bethesda (fallout, elder scrolls) is basically the only AAA studio that makes
an effort.

I'm mostly saying that AAA games not having modding is just a big loss,
especially given how this generation of games (Fortnite, Overwatch, League)
are magnitudes bigger than anything before it.

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lanius
Warcraft 3 modding is what got me interested in programming in the first
place. I made a handful of somewhat popular custom maps, and having a forum
where players could report bugs or suggestions gave me great insight into
understanding the user perspective.

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carlmcqueen
I hear the argument of this article and how important it was (being able to
mod/participate in mods) but computers are also fading for gamers with the
next generation.

The Kids I interact with are on tablets/phones, not the PCs we had that we
could modify and upgrade and tweak as we saw fit.

Currently I feel like we're in a period of very locked in devices that stifle
creativity by default. Even PC games are always online so you can't get all
the content of the game, it has to be server-side unlocked or bought.

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wink
> Blizzard themself have no modding capabilities for World of Warcraft or
> Overwatch. League of Legends, Fortnite and PubG have no mod framework
> whatsoever, despite being originally inspired by a mod.

ugh. I think the key point the author is missing that those are all online-
only studio-server games. I can't remember any of those ever being properly
moddable.

What Doom, Quake, and WarCraft3 had in common that you a) had a singleplayer
mode and b) more importantly could host your own (dedicated or not) server -
so you weren't taking part in a persistent MMO world where you'd for example
ruin the economy with your "unlimited gold" mod, but you were setting the
rules in your game mode.

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AtlasBarfed
Then don't play today's games. They probably are all overly complicated for
the experimentation someone would want to do. Use the older games that have
well-developed tooling and open source engines and assets.

The most popular games aren't cutting edge graphics games anyway. Gameplay is
beating pretty graphics in lots of ways.

And those games that don't provide modding tools? They'll go quicker out the
door and will be less famous.

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ohithereyou
Nitpick: WoW allows add-ons which are user created in Lua.

~~~
trq_
Fair but those are more for display/frontend purposes. They shutdown custom
servers pretty hard.

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joemi
> However, this seems like a particularly shortsighted form of gatekeeping
> because it also cuts off a pipeline for young and inexperienced people to
> get into game design and programming. Riot and Blizzard have hired many of
> the Warcraft3 modders as full-time employees, but where will the next wave
> come from?

Is this even a problem? Are there game developer shortages?

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NeoBasilisk
It really does seem like the early to mid 2000s was the pinnacle of the mod
scene.

~~~
amyjess
I'd recommend checking out any game developed by Paradox. You haven't seen
fantastic mods until you've seen what people can do with Paradox games

For that matter, some games that Paradox only publishes (e.g. _Cities:
Skylines_ ) also have fantastic modding support, though that's hit-and-miss
compared to the games they develop in house.

~~~
jahabrewer
I love Paradox. I happily fork over $10-20 a few times a year for new EU4 and
Stellaris DLC. I feel like (1) the longevity of those games, (2) the ability
for the developer to majorly rework systems far past release (see EU4 Art of
War), and (3) modding ability, are all related.

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Kagerjay
Modding was my first introduction to programming. Specifically, starcraft 1
released in 1998. I was in elementary school at the time

Discovering the world of custom mods was amazing. It was basically the
equivalent of google playstore + having your own mini android tools to build
your own maps. There were so many unique genres birthed from that game. Tower
defense originated as a starcraft 1 mod, and many other things such as temple
runs (based off zergling runs). DoTA was based on the works of Aeon of Strife,
which was considered the first MoBA. If you were to look at many of the indie
games produced today, chances are there was a starcraft1 or warcraft3 map
variant of it. These were the maps that became the most popular, the top 10%.
The rest that didn't make it into mainstream modes are essentially the 90% of
game apps that failed in the google playstore

Modding felt like programming. It was very much an object oriented programming
paradigm. Units had attributes associated with them, to which you could modify
globally. Things like their overall HP, armor, damage rating, etc. You could
set observables, e.g. events, in designated areas in the map. Like if player X
came to position Y, event Z happened.

I learned a lot by compiling my own modded versions of popular apps. I would
install cheats inside of them, things like additional resources and units if
you do a sequence of events (e.g. move unit to a special location). There
wasn't really any validation in checking map authenticity, its very much like
forking a git repo and publishing your own npm package.

Users who came to your map would have to download the latest version. Some
would get skeptical in seeing new changes, wondering what promoted the new
patch. This wouldn't work so well in popular maps, b/c the map publisher put a
changelog on their website. But less popular ones it was much easier to get
away with.

My modded map with the cheat installed would later get redistributed in the
P2P network. People would play it. Sometimes if I promoted it enough by
hosting the lobby, it would be the only seed available. Much like how
torrenting works. Especially if that version added new features that people
enjoyed.

Sometimes maps created get lost forever. Since everything was P2P, if no one
had that map installed on their machine, and no one hosted that map anymore or
played it, it was dead. Much like lost porn. This happened several times in
which I wanted to find a map I played previously, but reinstalled my computer
and could not find anymore lobbies to download the map anymore. Examples
include some Lord of the Rings maps, Battle of Troy, Helms Deep, or things
like Nexus Arenas

These days things are much different. Mirrors for hosting mods, either
official (e.g. steam) or 3rdparty websites are widely available. There wasn't
any youtube tutorials for making maps, you just had to read the help
documents, and breakdown / understand other maps. Much like you do looking at
opensource repos on github.

Modmaking was rewarding in its own right. You used the exact same AAA tools
developers used, and when something finally clicked, you could build even
cooler maps. Sometimes, you could install mods into your editor. Things like
adding text colors to your units is one of many examples. Its kind of like if
you installed a plugin extension with visualstudio code.

I don't know how this compares anymore to kids learning how to make mods in
Roblox, GTA5 mods, minecraft, etc. Its probably not as complicated as it used
to be, since youtube has so many tutorials out there. The real challenge back
then was figuring everything out on your own and/or finding a reputable map
mentor to help you out. IRC was a whole another thing I was introduced to in
starcraft1 / warcraft3 days. The beauty of this back then was that it was the
first of its kind, this custom modmaking scene for RTS based games.

