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Developers Ever More Encouraging Of Modding
Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for its column discussing game companies' continuing encouragement of 'modders' for content creation purposes. Valve's Doug Lombardi points out the obvious advantages his company received from modding: "In the typical scenario, even if a game is a mega-hit, within eight to 12 months on the store shelves, it's gone. But, in the case of 'Half-Life,' our revenue stream increased year after year for the first three years of the game's life. I attribute a lot of that to three mods -- 'Day Of Defeat,' 'Team Fortress,' and 'Counter-Strike.'" It's also mentioned that modding is starting even before a game hits the shelves, since Vivendi Universal has "even licensed an outside team that is building a mod, 'Starsiege 2845,' using the [as yet publically unreleased] 'Tribes Vengeance' engine."
A cheap way for them to get others to make extra levels for them for free instead of making expansion packs to keep the interest up.
Secondly its free advertisement cause sometimes these mod packs get distributed on game mags/sites etc.
Thirdly it allows everyone to be happy when the game leaves out something that the fan wants. Don't like something? change it. miss something that was in the prequel? add it back! take for instance civ 3. When it first came out there were no engineer units but with a couple of changes to the config files and ripping the pic from civ 2 (or making your own), engineers were back. Microspose eventually put it back in in Gold edition but the ease of mdding the game meant fans didnt have to wait.
you just answered the question yourself, they are end users, otherwise known as the fans of the game. They make it because they like it and play with the end result of their hard work. They arent out to make money. By charging a fee for it, less people would get it and therefore less people would play it which is not what they want.
You tried to make a map? And you gave up in 15 minutes? Oh well. Most of the mapmaking programs are not intuitive, at least they aren't like other programs you've used. You cannot just jump in and whip out a map. There is a steep learning curve, due to the nature of the content you are creating, and you really need to dedicate time to following some tutorials. It's the same with virtually every other 3D modeling program out there...Blender, Lightwave, Maya, etc.
The reason that people CAN make beautiful maps with this software is because the software does not restrict you to a few easy-to-use options. The existence of good fan-built maps should prove that the software is not at fault here.
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becouse its alot easyer to make a mod them make a whole game from scratch
They got paid (prolly) $750,000 by Vivendi for the engine to be used in T:V. :)
And no, Epic doesn't mind licensees encouraging modding too. The more people that get into the Unreal Engine, the bigger the fanbase for Epic and other potential licensees. Its a win-win-win-win-win-win (ad nauseum) situation for them.
ROI is great, but what about mods that have an impact on the social conditions, such as Doom for Columbine and the 9/11 game? These have been examined by the NYT and yet the communities have discouraged the production of such mods, because they are tasteless.
I speak from experience, being the creator of Doom for Columbine; I have been outcast from most modding communities, such as Gamespy and The Mod Database, because of the suspected outcome of DFC, that it could be tasteless or that it *was* tasteless.
This is before the mod was even released, or before development had begun; people either understood what I was going for or they rejected it outright.
Movies about these same topics are considered wonderful, heartwrenching accounts of what occured in both tragedies, but video games are exempt from the same artistic liberty?
I am not sure if Doom for Columbine will see the light of day. We had a development team that was ready to go, but with the press we received, many backed away to save their careers from scrutiny, but I challenge this same scrutiny as being an ignorant attempt to control the use of modding to shed light on tragedy and get a sense of what tragedy must have been like.
We started Doom for Columbine as an anti-violence project, where the main character would attempt to understand violence in media in order to further the story and develop characters, much like a movie would on the same subject.
No matter which angle we planned for, the audience still hated the idea, largely because of the use of the word Columbine, without regard to any possible design account we may have implemented.
Most of the views of the audience were from the standpoint that Doom for Columbine would be a mod based in the reality of the perpetrators of the massacre, and not the story we were going to tell.
After considerable thought, I believe it's necessary to engauge the audience for their lack of understanding, and portray the events from the perspective of Klebold and Harris, because these were disturbed people, and they were disturbed for a good reason; they were living lives that were damaged daily by a lack of understanding from those around them. They were trying to be unique, and in doing so they were set apart from everyone and outcast. This lack of acceptance from peers is what was largely responsible for what happened at Columbine, combined with the easy access to weapons in America and the impatience/emotions of youth.
Therefore, as a game designer and writer, I must engauge my audience and that means I must take the hard road for design, and do so without concern for the consequences -- because that is exactly what a writer does. They write the truth.
How is modding any different? We have all the tools to create stories and examine truth, but many mods are just a ray of light apart from the base game; Counter Strike is not far from Half Life, except for new elements to gameplay. The story is missing; there is no CS story. And how is CS any different from a 9/11 game? It's the same subject matter, yet CS is separate from human history in that these are generic terrorism events, or counter-terrorism events that lead to a different outcome each match. It's the same, but it's missing the story. Is that the only reason CS is so widely accepted?
What if CS was a game about specific terrorist groups and their detailed planning of terrorist attacks? Would that be more or less acceptable? Would it be a better experience? Could that be used by law enforcement to train officers?
Because if Doom for Columbine was a true account of what happened at Columbine, law enforcement could get an understanding of the evil they are up against from youth today, and maybe, just maybe, some kid will decide to just play the fucking game instead of actually hurting anyone.
Oh for the love of pete.
This is another example of the tech-elitist approach to UI design, that you don't "deserve" to make something cool unless you first learn to navigate around our crappy interface and learn to do all these arbitrary things.
It's recognized that most of these programs are not the main selling point of the game they're made for, and that any time put towards sanding the rough edges off of the editor is time taken away from developing the actual game. But that still doesn't mean these editing tools are not lacking.
They probably create Mods because they've seen others succeed. 2 guys make CS, players rejoice! A handfull of guys make TF, players rejoice! Another handful makes Day of Defeat, players rejoice! Someone releases a game built on some open source engine nobody's ever heard of, players are too busy playing HL based mods to even notice.